Today, February 27, is an Occupy Our Food Supply day of action. The following essay is just one of several related posts that will be appearing online to mark the day.

The biggest corporate takeover on the planet is the hijacking of the food system, the cost of which has had huge and irreversible consequences for the Earth and people everywhere.

From the seed to the farm to the store to your table, corporations are seeking total control over biodiversity, land, and water. They are seeking control over how food is grown, processed, and distributed. And in seeking this total control, they are destroying the Earth’s ecological processes, our farmers, our health, and our freedoms.

It starts with seeds. Monsanto and a few other gene giants are trying to control and own the world’s seeds through genetic engineering and patents. Monsanto wrote the World Trade Organization treaty on Intellectual Property, which forces countries to patent seeds. As a Monsanto representative once said: “In drafting these agreements, we were the patient, diagnostician [and] physician all in one.”

They defined a problem, and for these corporate profiteers the problem was that farmers save seeds, making it difficult for them to continue wringing profits out of those farmers. So they offered a solution, and their solution was that seeds should be redefined as intellectual property, hence seed saving becomes theft and seed sharing is criminalized. I believe that saving seeds and protecting biodiversity is our ecological and ethical duty. That is why I started Navdanya 25 years ago.

Navdanya is a movement to occupy the seed. We have created 66 community seed banks, saved 3000 rice varieties, stopped laws that would prevent us from seed saving, and fought against biopiracy.

Corporations like Monsanto have created a seed emergency. This is the reason I am starting a global citizen’s campaign on seed sovereignty. I hope you will all join. The lawsuit that 84 organizations, including Navdanya, have filed against Monsanto in New York through the Public Patent Foundation is an important step in reclaiming seed sovereignty.

The next step in the corporate control of the food supply chain is on our farms. Contrary to the claims of corporations, the chemical-based “green” revolution and genetic engineering do not produce more food. Navdanya’s report on GMOs, Health per Acre, shows that the GMO emperor has no clothes. Biodiverse organic farming protects nature while increasing nutrition per acre. We have the solutions to hunger, but it’s not profitable for major industrial agriculture companies like Monsanto and Cargill to implement those solutions.

Cargill, the world’s biggest grain giant, wrote the WTO’s agriculture agreement, which has destroyed local production and local markets everywhere, uprooted small farmers, devastated the Amazon, and speculated on food commodities, pushing millions to hunger. A global corporate-controlled food system robs farmers of their incomes by pushing down farm prices, and robs the poor of their right to food by pushing up food prices. If a billion people are hungry today, it is because of greed-driven, capital-intensive, unsustainable, corporate-controlled globalized industrial agriculture. While creating hunger worldwide, agribusiness giants collect our tax money as subsidies in the name of removing hunger.

This system has pushed another 2 billion to food-related diseases like obesity and diabetes. Replacing healthy, local food culture with junk and processed food is achieved through food safety laws, which I call pseudo-hygiene laws. At the global level these include the Sanitary and Phyto-sanitary agreement of the WTO. At the national level they include new corporate-written food safety laws in Europe and India, and the Food Safety Modernization Act in the U.S.

The final link in the corporate hijacking of the food system is retail giants like Wal-Mart. We have been resisting the entry of Wal-Mart in India because Big Retail means Big Ag, and together the corporate giants destroy small shops and small farms that provide livelihoods to millions.

We must Occupy Our Food Supply because corporations are destroying our seed and soil, our water and land, our climate, and biodiversity. Forty percent of the greenhouse gases that are destabilizing the climate right now come from corporate industrial agriculture. Seventy percent of water is wasted for industrial agriculture. Seventy-five percent of biodiversity has been lost due to industrial monocultures.

We have alternatives that protect the Earth, protect our farmers, and protect our health and nutrition. To occupy the food system means simultaneously resisting corporate control and building sustainable and just alternatives, from the seed to the table. One seed at a time, one farm at a time, one meal at a time–we must break out of corporate food dictatorship and create a vibrant and robust food democracy.

Learn more about the Occupy Our Food Supply day of action, sponsored by Rainforest Action Network. Find an event near you or follow the action all day on Twitter.

Originally published on Grist

Photo: Lettuce by Shutterstock

Advocates of GMOs claim that biotechnology increases yields, reduces chemical usage, controls crop pests and weeds, and delivers “climate ready” traits such as drought-tolerance. However, the on-the-ground experience in many countries discloses that this technology has failed on all fronts.

For example, GMO proponents often hail the success of GM cotton in South Africa’s Makhatini Flats. But after initial, highly visible headlines of success, this report reveals a different story. Instead of thriving crops and increased farmer incomes, after five years, the majority of farmers growing GM cotton are in debt due to the high costs of seed, chemical, and other farm inputs. Concurrently, the volatility of the cotton market means that farmers cannot rely on predictable, steady incomes. The essays contained in this Global Citizens Report confirm that such experiences are repeated in many countries and regions. The story of Indian farmer indebtedness and over 250,000 suicides further emphasizes the tragic costs of this failed GM technology. (The essay from India thoroughly reviews this tragedy.)

Super Weeds, Super Problems

Farmers and agronomists throughout the world are alarmed by the growing epidemic of weeds developing a resistance to the herbicide, glyphosate, used on GM crops. These “superweeds” have evolved resistance to glyphosate as a result of the intensive use of this herbicide. From November 2007 to January 2011, infested acreage in the U.S. has more than quintupled, from 2.4 to 12.6 million acres. In Brazil, researchers have reported that nine species have developed tolerance to glyphosate.

And now super pests are also becoming a major hazard. Rootworms are developing a resistance to GM corn in Iowa and Illinois. And, Monsanto, the undisputed leader in GM seed and crop technology and ownership, has, after several years, finally acknowledged that a bollworm pest has developed resistance to its Bt cotton in India.

Another common story detailed in this Global Citizens Report describes how GM technology is pushed by intensive lobbying and marketing efforts, “revolving door” influences, and funding of research and educational institutes. As noted in the report from the U.S., the leading proponent of GM crops—top food and agricultural biotechnology firms spent more than $547 million lobbying Congress between 1999 and 2009. The report from Argentina documents that representatives from biotechnology corporations—Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, Dow, and Pioneer—sit on a prominent national panel that directly advises the government agency that approves field trials and commercialization of GM crops.

Finally, the report documents increasing scientific evidence and warnings from scientists that GMOs may be harmful to human health, ecosystems and also have failed to increase food production. It highlights that, in contrast to GM seeds and crops, agroecological farming systems are proving to be the real answer to food insecurity. A recent study by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food reported that agroecological systems doubled crop yields over a period of three to 10 years in field tests conducted in 20 African countries. The report also cites numerous other studies confirming high yields and reduced chemical use in other regions of the world due to agroecological farming methods.

Owning at least 90 percent of GM seeds and crops, Monsanto is viewed as the leader in promoting this technology and thus its role is particularly highlighted in these voices from the planet reports.

The report will be launched around the world during 2011 and 2012, and began with a launch in San Francisco on October 13.

The report was published by Navdanya (India), Navdanya International, the International Commission on the Future of Food,  with the participation of the Center for Food Safety. The report consists of contributions from groups around the world.

Originally published by the Center for Food Safety

Very few people in Iowa have had a greater impact on the movement to protect real food than Diane Ott Whealy. Co-founder of Decorah’s Seed Savers Exchange, she is the author of a new memoir detailing a life obsessed with seeds and soil, farm and family.

In Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver, Ott Whealy takes the reader gently by the hand and retraces a journey that began when her great-grandparents emigrated from Deuschendorf, Germany, and settled outside the tiny immigrant enclave of St. Lucas, in northeast Iowa.  Two seeds that they carried with them on that journey became the motivation for a life’s work in preserving and protecting heirloom seed varieties.  They were what became known as the German Pink Tomato, and Grandpa Ott’s Morning Glories.

Those morning glories are grown every year along the south face of the historic, well-preserved post-and-beam barn that is the center of Heritage Farm; the 890-acre spread a few miles north of Decorah that Seed Savers Exchange now calls home.  They are not alone there though, for on that spread they now grow out 10 percent of their massive seed inventory each year to protect and replenish the stock of many thousands of heirloom varieties.  The farm is also home to the historic orchard of over 700 apple varieties and 100 grapes, as well as a small-but-growing herd of endangered Ancient White Park cattle.

Ott Whealy’s pride and joy there, though, is the Preservation Garden for which Grandpa Ott’s Morning Glories are the backdrop.  Her “little slice of heaven” displays many of the organization’s most popular varieties of herbs, vegetables and flowers, but more importantly it stands as a testament to her lifelong commitment to a cause.

That cause is important, as Monsanto and other global conglomerates work feverishly to patent various forms of seeds, not with “plant patents” as has been done for centuries, but with “utility patents,” the same kind used, for example, for Microsoft Windows.  This gives them ownership not just of the seed but of all its progeny, thus making the ancient art/science of seed saving illegal.  To the degree that they accomplish this, we all become serfs in a land baron’s fiefdom.

Gathering introduces us to how Seed Savers started as a dream on a small farm in Missouri, shows us how it went from there back to the author’s ancestral home in the driftless region of Iowa, and how it has spread across the world through a contributing membership that numbers in the thousands.

There is a lot of talk these days about the need for more new entrants willing to fill in when older farmers retire (the average age of farmers in this country is 57 years old). But there has not been much discussion about rebuilding the support system, from infrastructure to community, that will keep those young farmers on the land.

The Hudson Valley Seed Library is an example of an effort that does both of these things–building community by supporting member-growers, employing local artists who design their seed packages, and holding events–like an art opening for this year’s “Art Pack” designs taking place at the Horticultural Society of New York this Thursday evening (more info below)–as well as providing a service to local growers: regionally adapted seeds. I spoke to Ken Greene this week about their work.

Could you tell me a bit about the Hudson Valley Seed Library? What does a seed library do?

One of the great things about seed libraries is that they are diverse as seeds. Every seed library does things differently. The Hudson Valley Seed Library is one of the few farm-based seed libraries. We grow many of the seeds in our catalog on our farm. Members can join, check out, and return saved seeds online. We also have a full catalog of heirloom and open-pollinated varieties that anyone can order seeds from.

Why are regionally adapted seeds so important?

As the seed industry has been heavily consolidated by large (mostly biotech) corporations, seed growing has moved to narrow areas, mostly California and Oregon. Seed growing is seed breeding. Seeds grown in California become more adapted to the specific conditions of where they are grown. This means that we lose much of the diversity, including resistance to certain climate related diseases and regional pests. Regional seeds are better adapted to the area where they will be grown and retain both the genetic, and cultural characteristics that make them unique.

What grew especially well this year? Are their seeds you are offering in your new catalog that are particularly exciting to you?

This was our best seed growing season to date! We grew over 60 varieties on two acres. Everything from the increasingly familiar heirloom tomatoes, to the unusual, like sesame and cotton. Our new fave for the January catalog is Doe Hill peppers–hearty, prolific, delicious, and damn adorable peppers that look like miniature pumpkins.

What advice do you have for food system entrepreneurs and other young farmers?

Be brave and be smart. It’s a bold and brave move to choose to become a farmer. There is risk involved. It’s hard work and it’s tough to make a living. You need to be brave enough to make the leap. At the same time there are ways to set yourself up for success. Don’t go it alone. Reach out to other farmers and farm organizations. If you don’t have land, get creative. If you’re working someone else’s land, get it in writing. Get to know your local resources. (The Greenhorns are a great place to start.) Work on a business plan and learn basic business strategies.

How we made it happen: we pooled our resources with a group of friends in order to buy land. We own the land cooperatively. Not everyone here farms, but everyone cares for and enjoys the property in their own way. We started the business by working with a local organization called the Hudson Valley Agribusiness Development Corporation. They hired a consultant to help us write a professional business plan. With that plan in place we were able to get a Beginning Farmer Loan from Farm Start. It’s been more work than we ever imagined, but there is nothing else we can imagine doing!

Agriculture is cultural. We’ve lost more than local food with the mass transition from small diversified farms to industrial monocrop food systems. We have lost a sense of food culture. Part of the idea of the Seed Library is to help build strong local food systems that are sustainable because all the pieces, from seed to seed, come from our community. This means including not just farmers, but everyone who helps make it happen.

Artists play a vital role in the creation of community. We chose artwork over photographs for our seed packs because we feel that the artwork communicates what is important about seeds–that they come with stories. Saving seeds is about celebrating both the genetic and cultural diversity of the plants that keep us alive.

Please join the Hudson Valley Seed Library for Contemporary Heirlooms at the Horticultural Society of New York (148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor) for a preview party tomorrow night at 5:30pm (tickets can be purchased online here, or call (212) 757-0915). The preview includes local fare catering by Great Performances and drinks provided by Tuthilltown Spirits, an early chance to purchase limited edition fine art prints of the original artworks, gift baskets, and art packs, as well as a guided tour with Ken Greene. The general opening, which is free, will start at 6:30.

If you can’t make the event, you can still support these young farmer-entrepreneurs by purchasing holiday gifts from their catalog.

Photos: From the top, seeds in storage; Doug Muller and Ken Greene of the Hudson Valley Seed Library; the 2011 seed packs.

I have committed theft…and am proud of every minute of it. It all started on my 30th birthday a couple of years ago in a rented Alfa Romeo on a road trip across the Tuscan hillside. The victim was a sweet, juicy yet firm pear at the peak of its season. Desperately wanting to capture the fabulous adventure I was having and in an effort to perhaps hold onto the inescapable ticking of time, I gently spit out the last pear seed into a small pocket of paper and tucked it into my backpack. A week later, after an extended stay on a working cheese farm and vineyard, I duped customs officials in Milan by declaring nothing, inwardly flushing with trepidation that they would discover the two blocks of aged pecorino, vacuum-packed sleeve of boar salami from Terre Madre or gasp! my precious stolen seed. I slipped through without a bit of confrontation and began the process of dream vacation come down.

A year and a half later I am gazing at a wondrous miracle. The seed – a symbol of my own aging, a marking of past to present, a tactile image of how it felt to seize a special once-in-a-lifetime travel opportunity – has sprouted! Upon my return and after unloading all my goodies and gifts, I gently handed over the packet of seed specimens to the only one I could trust. My boyfriend, a botany enthusiast and tender of our small farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains, surely felt the weight of this responsibility. If the icy claws of that first winter had grasped its life away, my disappointment would have been hard to conceal. And when an accidental tippage of the ceramic pot my seed now nestled in occurred, his displaced outburst was definitely that of not wanting to let me down.

But regardless of the outside influences of climate or human intervention, what are the chances that this single speck of future life would grow? It makes me ponder the genetic ancestry of the pear varietal, or the work of that first farmer who planted it. Where did it actually come from and when? Did the first seed travel a great distance, across oceans and mountains like mine did? Did past orchard owners smile in anticipation like I do every time I peer at my baby tree, perhaps wondering who might enjoy the fruit in the future?

I have since figured out that the pear I ate that day was most likely a Pera Abate, know as Abbe Fetel outside of Italy. It was named after a 15th century French monk and is now grown extensively in Italy, mostly in the Emilia Romagna region. It is elongated with golden yellow or russet skin and fragrant white pulp. Coming down to earth a bit after the initial excitement of success, I also realize that pears, like apples, are cross pollinators and need to be grafted to produce edible fruit. My little seed most likely won’t create the same kind of pear that I ate on my birthday…and whatever fruit it might grow won’t appear for a looooong time, if at all. Perhaps 15 or 20 years down the road. I could try to use my sprout as a cutting, grafting a sample of it onto another, more viable and established rootstock or tree. The good news is that pears are known to be pretty easy in the grafting department. But by no means am I an expert in this domain, and any task such as this would be left to said green-thumb boyfriend.

The reality of my seed saving daydreaming is that those ancient pear farmers transported whole cuttings, not seeds. Just like prized wine grape varietals that get smuggled across continents. It’s not like I could go stealthily pick a grape from some legendary Burgundian vineyard and expect it to grow back home, even if I didn’t get shot in the process. And so it is with my little pear project, I’ve learned. However, I don’t regret acting on my naivety in the least. I remain astounded that one tiny saliva coated seed is now a bright, shining sprout. I will continue to dwell in ideas of shared human consciousness, of unity through farm culture, of ancestral Italian heritage reawakening in my own garden.

Many gardeners are currently pulling up plants and preparing beds for fall. They are laying parts of their garden to rest while their squash lay about, curing in the sun. Some gardeners are already turning their backs on their plots and projecting their green minds through winter and into next spring. But fall is not the time for complacency in the garden. It’s a great time to sneak in some late plantings of lettuce and greens—and it’s the ripest time of year to save some seeds.

Saving seeds sustains us. It is a cultural activity, one that connects us to 12,000 years of the most essential human tradition. Saving seeds also connects us to our familiar food plants in new ways, teaching us to appreciate each plant’s full life cycle from seed to seed. Now, more than ever, saving seeds is also a political act—a good garden practice that doubles as agricultural activism.

While many eaters have begun to connect with local farmers, seek out foods grown with no chemicals, and grow a garden of their own, the farmers who grow seed are an often overlooked part of the concept of sustainable agriculture. Just as the plants we eat have full-circle life cycles, the sustainability concept is most complete when viewed as a full circle. If we leave out one piece, such as the source of our seeds, it’s not truly sustainable. The next step for creating local food systems involves reaching beyond the farmer-consumer connection and exploring all of the people and industries that contribute to food production.

Saving seeds is a simple and enjoyable art that resists corporate monopolies, the dominance of hybrids and GMOs, the destructive power of industrial agriculture, and the patenting of life. So how do you save seeds and the world?

Choose your seed sources carefully. Start by planting open-pollinated varieties as opposed to hybrids or GMOs. You can’t save seeds from a hybrid, plant them, and expect to grow the same variety. This means that growers become entirely dependent on the company that created the hybrid and must purchase their seeds from this company every year. In terms of sustainability, hybrids create a dependence on financially and environmentally costly industrial agriculture systems—which are behind nearly all hybrid seeds. As for GMOs, which are the most hi-tech of all seeds, expensive technology and high chemical inputs are required for their creation and cultivation. It’s entirely illegal to save seeds from GMO plants and unlawful to attempt to reproduce hybrid varieties with proprietary licenses. Not all garden seed catalogs will say which of their varieties are hybrids (F1) or where and how they were grown. Make sure you are getting your original seeds from responsible sources by choosing seed companies that are upfront about offering open-pollinated or heirloom varieties.

Exercise self-control. Although harvesting food, for many plants, interrupts their life-cycle, seed saving and eating go hand in hand. It’s not an either/or choice. So harvest some for your taste buds and leave some of your plants to do their thing. It’s hard to resist picking a full bunch of Prizehead lettuce in its prime, but rein in your appetite and let several plants bolt and flower. Don’t worry— you won’t miss out on your Rose de Berne Tomato sandwich.

Be brave in your garden. Learning a new skill can be intimidating, but the rewards of becoming a seed saver are many. Don’t worry about doing everything by the books. The most successful seed savers start with an attitude of curiosity and experimentation. By carefully observing your plants through their entire life-cycle, you will learn a lot about how they create seeds. Each season try something new and repeat your successful practices from the year before. Bravery in the garden leads to a deeper understanding of our favorite plants and reveals moments of seedy beauty and bounty many gardeners have never experienced.

Cross-pollinate. Although you have lots of vegetative company in your garden, it can sometimes be an isolating experience. You are not alone. There are great gardening resources close at hand. Community gardens, neighbors, relatives, and farmer’s markets are all teaming with growing knowledge. For seed saving, books like Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth and Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties by Carole Deppe are excellent resources. Scout around and take a local seed saving workshop or visit an open house at a seed grower’s farm. The internet is another resource for learning more, and a few seed companies are now posting seed saving info on their websites. In the long run, connecting in real time with other gardeners and farmers creates community and fosters an interdependence that strengthens local food networks.

Make your politics practical. Food politics is not just about reading articles and sharing them on Twitter or having inspired rants with friends- although these discursive acts help raise awareness. Food politics is a practice. Knowing how your food was grown and who grew it is the first big step. Being aware of the who, where, and how of the seeds behind the veggies is the next step. More than ever, making the transition from being a consumer to producing food—and seed— for yourself and your community is a political act.

Here’s how we save tomato seeds for the Hudson Valley Seed Library catalog.

This post is part of a series called Roof Garden Rookies, which explores my attempt, as an amateur gardener, to grow a garden on the rooftop of my building in lower Manhattan. My roof garden was recently featured in the New York Times.

Last week I wrote about the process of building raised beds for my rooftop garden. The next step was clear: ready the soil and onto planting.

First thing was first, we started with 1000 pound of soil from the Lower East Side Ecology Center, a potting soil mix that includes vermicompost, coconut-based coir (a sustainable replacement for peat), perlite, green sand and black rock phosphate.  Once we got each of the 20-pound bags up the stairs, we began to fill the beds and quickly realized that we’d need another 500 pounds.

Eight of the beds were prepared with Garden Tone, an organic soil preparation for vegetables, as well as mushroom compost, a byproduct of mushroom growing that is full of minerals, as well as seabird guano for slow release fertilization.

Then, the fun part: making a planting plan, gathering the seedlings, and getting dirty!

Many of the seedlings I planted were either from Silver Heights Farm at the Greenmarket, which carries a large variety of heirloom seedlings, or they were grown from seed by me or by Kerry Trueman of Retrovore.com. Many of my seeds came from the Hudson Valley Seed Library, a local seed library that works with heirloom plants that grow well in our area.

Some of the seedlings I planted out included: Tollies sweet pepers, habenero peppers, three types of eggplants, eight types of tomatoes, bush and climbing beans, strawberries and blueberries, an heirloom melon called the Delice de la Table, two types of cucumbers, two types of zucchini, a Musque de Provence, green and white pattypan, butternut, and blue hubbard squashes, beets, carrots, turnips, lettuces, piracicaba broccoli, a variety of flowers and a bed full of herbs.

For each plant, I consulted my book (Tanya Denckla’s The Gardener’s A-Z Guide to Growing Organic, among others) to make sure I was planting companions and not foes, then I laid out my plants, leaving room for marigolds and other flowers in the beds, dug a hole for each, adding mycorrhizal fungi to help prevent transplant loss and a moisture crystal to keep moisture at the roots, and then tucked in my new green friends.

The acidic bed required Holly Tone, a preparation for evergreens — lovers of acidic soil. In addition, I supplemented garden sulpher around the base of the blueberries and euonymous vines I planted there.

With the addition of a composter for kitchen and garden scraps, and a few more flower plantings, the garden is off to a great start. After two weeks, I am happy to report a few tasty salads and strawberries, along with some developing zucchinis, tomatoes and beans! I can’t wait for the day when I harvest a whole dinner. Now, all we need up there is a table, and I’ll be outside all summer.

Photos: Yann Mabille, close look at the beds, one planted side, and me, exhausted after a day of planting

Our plan includes a roof garden made up of fruit, vegetables and native flowers that can serve as an oasis in the city for me and my neighbors. I started my seedlings under the kitchen table in my apartment a few weeks ago in order to give my plants a head start on the growing season. For my indoor growing, I used the system the team of seasoned growers at retrovore.com put together (shown in the video below, hosted by Retrovore’s Kerry Trueman) to start my squash, swiss chard, sunflowers, tomatoes, broccoli and Brussel sprouts. (Check out their site for a lot of other great books and help for people new to gardening.)

The system is simple: aluminum trays, capillary matting for sustaining moisture, potting soil, cowpots (a great alternative to peat), a container for water, and then the lighting set up, which gets only slightly more elaborate, but it is still easy and inexpensive to get everything you need at Home Depot or Lowe’s (or even a local hardware store that carries pipe and industrial lights). Check out the video, and you will be growing in no time:

My style is more Birkenstock than Birkin bag, so Fashion Week doesn’t do much for me. You know the Shopocalypse has arrived when designers go dumpster diving for shoulder pads in the Dynasty/Dallas dustbin. Padded assets in this Grapes of Graft depression? Dust Bowl duds, à la the Waltons, would be more fitting for the hard times ahead.

But the John Patrick Organic fashion show managed to bypass both eighties excess and seventies scarcity and find fertile ground in “Green Acres,” the sixties spoof starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor as neophyte homesteaders. I knew this wouldn’t be a run-of-the-mill runway show because (a) it featured a “young farmer bake sale,” and (b) the invite came from Greenhorns director Severine Von Tscharner Fleming.

Von Tscharner Fleming–oh, heck, let’s just call her Severine, life’s too short–is the pastoral pied piper who’s luring America’s youth back to the land with her Serve Your Country Food campaign and the Greenhorns Guide For Beginning Farmers. The guide, available as a free download, is a marvelous mash-up of “permaculture, Ben Franklin, your farming grandparents, Van Jones, Robert Rodale, Wendell Berry, Chip Planck, Gandhi, Will Allen and the Nearings,” as the Rodale Institute raved, “re-mixed as an agro-ecological cultural renaissance wrapped in a cool buzz.”

Severine organized the bake sale to whet the stylish set’s appetite for tasty local food. Patrick’s goal is to be the “Johnny Appleseed” of the fashion industry, spreading the seedlings of sustainable style by using materials such as organic cotton, recycled textiles and vegan leather in his clothing lines for men and women. So Patrick generously agreed to share the spotlight with a few enterprising young agrarians that Severine enlisted in her campaign to swell the ranks of treehugging trendsetters.

Models posed center stage in Patrick’s refreshingly simple, elegant designs; off to the side, folks sampled fresh-from-the farm goodies made from free range eggs and grass-fed dairy while chatting with the people who made them. Now that those Skinny Bitches have raised awareness in the fashion biz about the horrors of our industrialized food chain, it’s the perfect time for Severine and her crew to drum up the demand for locally grown foods that we need to breed if small scale farming is going to be seen as a viable vocation by the millions of young people it will take to remake our food chain.

Admittedly, the cookies and cheeses on offer didn’t include any vegan options, so there was no instant gratification for the Skinny Bitch contingent. But for devotees of a plant-based diet, there was something far more thrilling on display: locally grown heirloom vegetable seeds from The Hudson Valley Seed Library, a “homestead- based farm and business in upstate New York” whose goal is to offer urban, suburban, and rural home gardeners “high-quality seeds of heirloom and open-pollinated varieties rooted in the history and soils of the Northeast.”

To appreciate how truly rare and wonderful a find the Seed Library is, it helps to know a bit about the seed business, which–like pretty much every other sector in the U.S.–has been largely hijacked by a few corporations who’ve gobbled up the smaller seed companies and now control a frightening percentage of the seeds we need to feed us. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate how scary this is, because they’re not just shoving their genetically modified seeds down the world’s collective throat, they’re actively working to stop small family farmers from engaging in the centuries-old practice of saving seeds from one season to the next to preserve rare, non-hybridized varieties–in case you wanted to have the choice to just say “bleech!” to bio-tech foods.

Ken Greene and Doug Muller, the (bio)dynamic duo who founded the Seed Library, are creating an invaluable resource for those of us in the northeast who are game to start growing even just a little of our own food. Their long-term goal is to provide “an accessible and affordable source of locally-adapted seeds that is maintained by a community of caring gardeners.” They’ve been hard at work for several years laying the foundation for this brilliant enterprise, which began as a seed-lending project at an upstate library. When you become a member, your $20 fee gets you ten packs of seeds–a real bargain for these rare, hand-picked varieties–and starts you on your way to actively helping to revitalize our local food chain. As the handout at the fashion show explained:

Anyone can buy seeds from our catalog, which is available on our website. However, those who chose to become members of the Hudson Valley Seed Library receive a great deal–and become involved in a community of regional seed-savers…Under the current program, members can select ten packs of seeds from the catalog (and additional packs at discounted rates), grow them in their home gardens, enjoy the flowers and eat some veggies, and, if they so choose, save seed from the plants to return to the library. For each variety successfully saved and returned, members receive credit toward their next year’s membership. This cooperative process creates a source of seeds grown in and adapted to our region.

Muller adds:

“Growing these seeds in your home garden and learning how to save seeds is a way for all of us to participate in the ceaseless renewal of life–and to practice frugality, develop regional food security, and enjoy being active and outside more often.”

Kudos to Severine and John Patrick for bringing a bit of Green Acres to Gotham. As Muller blogged on the Seed Library website the day after the show, “With all the pouty-lipped models and international paparazzi, it was definitely not our usual scene. But it was great to be there.”

So much of the fashion industry seems geared towards soul-deadening conformity to an unhealthy norm–not to mention planet-polluting consumption. No wonder the New York Post found John Patrick and Severine’s organic fashion show/young farmer bake sale “a much-needed breath of fresh, eco-friendly air.”

Patrick gets brownie points, too, for donating remnants of the organic cotton left over from his clothing production to the worthy non-profit Made With Love, which was also present at the fashion show displaying the stuffed animals made from that cotton. Sales of the toys raise funds for NGOs dedicated to helping women and children in need in Africa, Brazil and Haiti.

Fashion may seem frivolous, but we all need to wear something, just as we all need to eat. And it’s official now–there’s a Slow Clothing movement, à la Slow Food, which celebrates things that some of us have been doing for decades: everything from foraging for second-hand finds at thrift shops and flea markets to making your own clothes from scratch or repurposing items. The movement also includes high-end, sustainably produced textiles and fashions from artisans and designers like John Patrick.

My favorite piece of fashion advice comes from Mrs. No Impact Man, aka Michelle Conlin, the former fashionista-turned-frugalista who offered me this gem: “Go shopping in your own closet.” How many of us haven’t got tons of stuff we never even wear or have forgotten about entirely? Will I ever have an occasion to wear that pair of Chanel overalls I impulsively bought on sale at Filene’s just because I couldn’t resist the absurdity?

I used to watch Sex and the City because it was funny, well-written, and–unlike so many supposedly NYC-based shows–actually filmed here. But I could never relate to the passion for fashion that infused the whole show. The closest I could come was to imagine that Carrie Bradshaw and her glamorous girlfriends got the same thrill from shopping for shoes and handbags that I get from trolling the Greenmarket seeking out rare fruits and veggies.

I may be the only woman in the West Village who’s more excited by burdock roots than Blahnik boots, but, thanks to Severine and her growing horde of horticultural hipsters, there’s hope that someday I’ll have plenty of company. Can’t wait to wear my Chanel overalls to the premiere of The Greenhorns, or No Impact Man–or both.

The last couple sunny days have gotten me itching to buy seeds.  The skilled gardeners I know (of which I am decidedly not, having barely grown an herb garden that now looks like brittle sticks in dirt) have told me to get started with my highlighter and my catalogs – order before it gets to late and the best seeds are gone.  So I became a member of the Hudson Valley Seed Library ($20) and got ten complimentary packets of their heirlooms, most of which come from this area.

With Monsanto and their ilk gobbling up all the seed companies in the last decade, its important to remember to support the little guys – like another small company in Missouri, Baker Creek Seed Company.

From The People Who Feed Us:

At sixteen years of age, Jere Gettle joined Seed Savers Exchange and never
looked back. With his interest in gardening (and collecting) as the catalyst, he
started Baker Creek Seed Company And he still looking for ways to get the
word out about the value of heirloom seeds.

Now his operation distributes nearly 100,000 catalogs yearly, hosts a gardening
forum-I Dig My Garden, and has put together what is generally acknowledged as
one of the best seed collections around.

Jere gives a good explanation here of why heirlooms matter. The diversity of
plants is a strength that Baker Creek promotes mightily. As host to several events
at his southwestern Missouri location every year, Jere is a outspoken advocate
for real food through old-school seeds. He loves this stuff.

Check out the engaging documentary they made of Jere Gettle (and the many other wonderful documentaries on their site, www.thepeoplewhofeedus.com)