Fullerton, North Dakota

In our fast-paced world of supermarkets and convenience stores, we often take the vital role of seeds for granted. David Podoll, however, does not, nor does his mother Irene, nor do his brother and PSsister-in-law, Dan and Theresa. The genetic and cultural heritage of seeds lies at the heart of the Podoll family enterprise of maintaining, enhancing, and marketing traditional varieties of vegetables and grains. Their efforts preserve unique plant varieties with traits that would otherwise be lost in the modern system of plant breeding and seed production—a system that favors yield, uniformity, transportability, and shelf-life over other considerations.

The Podolls manage a small, diversified 480-acre organic farm near Fullerton in southeast North Dakota, and their family seed business literally grew out of their farmyard gardens. “We grew things for our own use,” David explains. “In the process of gardening, we routinely did our own breeding and selection work.”

The family fascination with seeds began decades ago when David’s father planted and saved seed from favored varieties of fruits and vegetables. “Taste and beauty were our main criteria for what we grew,” David observes. “As garden catalogs dropped certain seeds, we kept them and maintained them.” One example is the Crimson Sprinter tomato that they have spent over twenty years conserving and selecting for improved characteristics. Despite the Crimson Sprinter’s remarkable taste and disease resistance, David notes that this tomato and many other vegetable varieties do not lend themselves to the demands of the conventional marketplace, and they risk disappearing altogether over time.

The Podoll family’s passion for conserving treasured vegetable varieties took a commercial turn when a friend put David in touch with Garden City Seeds of Montana in 1995. The Podolls then began to raise and harvest seed commercially, while continuing to operate their organic farm. The family now ?produces seed on contract through Seeds of Change, a New Mexico-based company that specializes in organic and traditional, or “heirloom,” varieties of seed. Their current contracts include beets, black-kernel popcorn, flint corn (noted for its small, hard grains), tomatoes, watermelon, and pumpkin.

While David takes the business of seeds seriously, he first introduces farm visitors to the non-?commercial foundations of the farm. “We grow our own food first,” David begins. “Economic enterprises and opportunities arise from that experience of growing our own food.” Indeed, most of the experimentation that sustains the Podolls’ seed business takes place in two large gardens just a few yards outside David’s front door.

A walk through the Podolls’ gardens and seed production plots reveals that for David, breeding and selecting plants for seed combines hobby, livelihood, and vocation all in one. “Evolution is happening all the time. I see it in my garden. It’s a marvelous spiritual process to be a part of,” he says.

Inspecting a garden row of several small grains, David identifies kamut, a rich, nutty tasting grain from Egypt that produces a yellow flour, and einkorn, the probable ancestor of all other cultivated wheats, as well as other cultivars from mainland Greece and Crete. He points with surprising satisfaction to the diseased state of the plants. “The close quarters of the garden creates disease-prone conditions. That’s what I want,” he maintains. When the plants mature, David will only harvest seed from individual specimens least affected by disease. “That’s evidence of natural resistance,” he states, explaining that repetitive selection of seeds from the hardiest individual plants, generation after generation, develops varieties well adapted to disease and climatic conditions.

Even after they have worked with a particular plant variety for years and feel confident marketing the seed, their rigorous selection work does not stop. In contrast to conventional commercial seed production, where producers use heavy machinery to harvest seed on a large scale, the Podolls hand-harvest seed selectively, choosing ears of corn, for example, from plants with desired traits, but ignoring ears from poorer specimens.

David points out that mass harvesting of seed indiscriminately is, in fact, also a form of selection, but one that can have negative and unexpected consequences. “My dad raised a variety of wheat that could take rain after harvest without sprouting. Modern wheat has lost its dormancy in the industrialization process,” he explains, referring to the way modern wheat sometimes sprouts prematurely, contributing to lower yield and poor quality. “All this happened unknowingly, and it is a great loss.”

The Podolls’ evident patience, dedication, and care have begun to pay dividends. David stresses that the production and marketing of seed alone, without income from their traditional organic farming, would not yet sustain their family farm operation. “However, we have high hopes,” he says, enthusing about the market potential of seed varieties that they produce for Seeds of Change.

Perhaps the most interesting of those varieties is Wachichu flint corn. Wachichu, meaning “white man,” is a common term used by northern plains Native Americans for European settlers. According to David, the roots of this particular corn, which as recently as the 1950s was used as a silage and grazing corn, date back to the fifteenth century. The name was chosen with assistance from University of North Dakota anthropologists to honor the corn’s Native American origins and also the wisdom of later European farmers who saved this variety for present and future generations. “Harvesting and selecting seed stock from Wachichu flint is a new experience with the shucking of every ear. One never knows what new color combinations await,” beams David as he describes the corn’s beauty and richness.

Not all of the Podolls’ seeds retain such a clear heirloom lineage. Instead, they bear a stamp of innovation. In one promising example, the Podolls crossed an early-maturing and tasty watermelon variety with plants grown from the seeds of an especially large melon of another strain. A new variety resulted from the cross that produces a larger, superior-tasting and early-maturing melon. Seeds of Change has eagerly accepted the watermelon as a new variety to sell. “It’s thrilling to have one of your own creations reach the marketplace,” admits David.

While the Podolls’ approach to plant breeding and seed selection may seem unusual, even pioneering, David is quick to emphasize that they tread the well-worn path of humans’ history with plants, a history that precedes formal agriculture as we know it. “We’ve divorced the breeding process from the farm,” he observes. “Our ancestors had a much more intimate relationship with plants, and we have the benefit of thousands of generations of selection,” says David, humbly acknowledging a debt he feels to those who came before him.

The unheralded labors of the Podolls and others like them worldwide have become ever more urgent amidst the accelerating loss of countless strains of grains, vegetables, and fruits acquired through millennia of agricultural innovation and adaptation. “We are trying to maintain skills that are important for the long term, for humanity,” David states. Reflecting on the unpredictability of the organic and heirloom seed marketplace and long-term uncertainties for their business, David comments that he would like to see society place a greater economic value on the preservation of our agricultural inheritance. Still, he remains optimistic and committed. “We are keepers of the seed ?regardless of whether the market pays for it,” he concludes.