My best-case scenario future involves living somewhere, anywhere I can grow and cultivate plants. I hope someday to be able to turn back the tide of Monsanto-controlled genetic domination.
Gene diversity is what will get us through a food crisis. You can't store and re-sow Monsanto seeds; you have to buy them again and they may not survive well where you live.
Saving and re-sowing seeds is the key to developing food crops that are best adapted to the area they're grown in. A species of corn well suited for the central US is not one well suited for Africa. Potatoes and beans grown native in Ireland wouldn't survive in Mexico.
I have personal experience with this - I once worked under a woman who, with others, developed a subspecies of wheat that was best suited for the rocky, limestone-rich glacial soil of Washington Island, Wisconsin. Ninety-nine percent of that wheat species throughout the world is located on that one island - and it's being used to sustain the local economy through edible grain and alcohol production, as well as home goods and personal accessories derived from the wheat itself.
My goal is to help people learn how to work with the environment they live in, learn to best grow and harvest from it rather than giving themselves more work and struggle by fighting it and trying to grow crops that won't thrive.
There are, however, consumer-developed seed networks that operate on a postal system - you pack up some seeds and send them off with a request, and if someone has the crop you want, they send it back. The following is a blog post related to the subject:
You need to be a member of Urgent Evoke to add comments!
Join Urgent Evoke