The Plowboy Interview Kent Whealy

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That's how our botanical diversity really began to develop, and—for a long time—it was augmented by government breeding experiments in the state agricultural stations. In combination, those factors created the most fantastic array of vegetable crops that any continent has ever known . . . and that's why it's so sad that—primarily as a result of today's adverse economic conditions—many of those varieties are deliberately being allowed to die out!

PLOWBOY: It's a frightening trend. Just how is such a thing happening?

WHEALY: Each year, hundreds of vegetables are dropped from seed catalogs . . . not because they're obsolete or hard to grow, but because they may not be as profitable as are the company's more popular varieties. Most seed houses these days simply can't afford to offer any vegetable that sells fewer than 500 packets a year, so the "small-time" cultivars are simply discontinued.

You'd be amazed at the number of vegetable varieties that were available at the turn of this century. I've seen lists in which the names of beans alone covered six standard-sized sheets of paper with singlespaced typing . . . peas required four similar pages . . . and onions took up two and a half! It's estimated that less than 20% of those 1900-vintage vegetables have survived to make it into today's seed catalogs. And whenever a variety is dropped from commercial availability—unless an individual or seed bank decides to make a concerted effort to keep that one alive—it is on the road to extinction!

PLOWBOY: Quite a few seed companies have—of late—been purchased by multinational corporations. How does that trend affect the size of our overall seed stock?

WHEALY: The recent, and ongoing, consolidation of the seed industry is a major problem. In many instances large agrichemical concerns are buying out small family-owned seed companies . . . and the diversified conglomerates consider seeds as just one more moneymaking division. Once a multinational takes over a seed house, it usually drops the locally adapted varieties in the inventory and replaces them with all-purpose hybrid vegetables or the new patented varieties. Now those particular cultivars will have a wider appeal (or so it's believed), because they're adapted to a number of different growing conditions and can be sold all across the country. You can see the impact of such developments most clearly in some of the big wholesale catalogs, whose inventories are now often 95% hybrids and 5% patented varieties. And with that sort of thing happening at the top of the seed supply pyramid, you can see why smaller retail mail order houses—those that haven't been bought out, that is—find it difficult to offer anything to their customers but hybrids and patented seeds.

PLOWBOY: Let me play devil's advocate here. Aren't most of the discontinued varieties really inferior? The newer cultivars, after all, are the result of intense research and experimentation . . . and you yourself said that they're adapted to many different climatic conditions.

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