Why Can’t All Farmers Replant Their Own Seeds?

The smallness of seeds can make it easy to miss all the ways they are sprinkled into our lives each day. Think of seeds and you may imagine their tiny texture — a crunchy coating on a poppy seed bagel, a creamy chia seed pudding, or a sandy handful to be scattered in the garden, but they are the centerpiece of our daily diets. Seeds — in the forms of corn, rice, and wheat — account for nearly half of all calories consumed across the globe.

Many of the world’s farmers today are engaged in growing these three crops, which were among the first to ever be farmed around 12,000 years ago. While seeds remain fundamental for our nutritional intake, the types of seeds and the ways we handle them have changed considerably as agriculture has evolved, especially with regards to seed saving.

Only within the last century did this age-old practice of seed saving has transformed to the point of generating the complicated question: Why can’t farmers replant their own seeds? To answer this and better understand the foundation of our food system, we must consider the legal, economic, and practical factors that influence farmers’ decisions about the seeds they plant in the soils they steward.

Seed Saving: A Short History

For the vast majority of human history, seeds were saved year over year — planted, collected, stored, and planted again by the same hands. Sometimes, they shared seeds with those nearby. Indigenous communities maintained close relationships with the seeds that sustained them. In many cultures, seeds were passed down through generations, along with the knowledge of how to care for them.

This tradition gave us the term “heirloom seed,” which is believed to have been popularized by Professor J.R. Hepler at the University of New Hampshire in the 1940s. This terminology is reflective of a significant shift in our agricultural systems. Advances in seed breeding led to differing beliefs about the right to save seeds, which had not previously been regulated. To understand this transitional period, it’s helpful to know a little about the differences between heirloom and hybrid seeds.

Heirloom Seeds vs. Hybrid Seeds

Heirloom seeds have been with us for generations. Slowly, steadily, season by season, farmers have selected them for their positive traits, such as high yield or good flavor. Heirloom seeds are time travelers, linking the past, present, and future in infinite, abundant cycles. When saved carefully, they can thrive again and again.

Hybrid seeds, on the other hand, are relatively new additions to our farm fields, and each one leads a short, productive life. The first hybrid seed, a type of corn, was commercialized in the 1930s. Over the past century, farmers have applied this method of cross-pollinating two varieties of plants to hybridize many crops. In this way, farmers can quickly address some of the numerous challenges that they face, such as improving resiliency to certain pests or weather conditions. This allows for higher yields and profit margins. Hybrid seeds, however, are a single-use tool for farmers — they cannot be kept and replanted from one season to the next with consistent results.

Reliance on hybrids is one reason why farmers can’t save seeds, but there are legal factors, too.

Why Can't Farmers Legally Save Some Seeds?

When the U.S. Department of Agriculture was founded in 1862, it distributed free seeds to farmers. At the time, seeds were viewed as a public resource, and their widespread distribution was meant to encourage crop diversity and support the financial success of agricultural workers. As the modern seed industry began to grow around the turn of the 20th century, seed companies lobbied the government to end this practice. It eventually did in 1924, signaling a new era for seeds that moved toward privatization.

In the history of saving seeds law, 1930 is a critical turning point. It was in this year that Congress passed the Plant Patent Act. This was the first law that allowed inventors or discoverers, under a specific set of circumstances, to patent plants. Seeds began to be viewed not simply as a natural resource to be shared, but rather, as intellectual property to be protected.

How Seed Patents Restrict Seed Saving

The next major marker in the history of seed saving occurred with the passage of the Plant Variety Protection Act in 1970, which provides plant breeders exclusive rights to control the sale and reproduction of protected varieties, subject to exemptions. Unless there is an identified exemption, this restricts unauthorized sales and commercial reproduction of protected seed varieties. Civil and financial penalties for saving patented seeds can be detrimental for farmers.

More than 2,000 plant variety protection certificates have been issued since the law was enacted, many of which are held by the nation’s largest seed breeding corporations. Today, just four firms — BASF, Bayer, Corteva, and Sinochem — control more than half of the global seed market.

Seed Saving on Small and Organic Farms

Besides the one-growing-season limit on hybrid seeds and the confusion many farmers face around the intellectual property of seeds, there are other reasons farmers choose not to save seeds. For small farms in particular, this decision may be due to a lack of resources.

Saving seeds means investing in labor costs to collect them, the machinery to clean them, and the space to properly store them. Purchasing hybrid seeds annually may prove to be the more sensible choice for farmers facing these economic and practical barriers.

Organic farms have additional factors to consider in their approach to seed use. While organic farmers may save heirloom seeds each year or buy hybrid seeds every season, the seeds they plant must be certified organic and cannot be genetically modified.

Why Are Some Seeds Dyed Bright Colors?

Most seeds naturally appear in muted tones ranging from black to brown to beige, but farmers purchasing seed from major seed companies may receive bags full of tiny orbs in bright hues like pink or purple.

These dyes are used as identification tools, indicating that the seeds have been treated. Seed treatments may include synthetic chemicals, pesticides, and fungicides. For this reason, they are not approved for use in organic agriculture under the National Organic Program. Seeds used in organic agriculture cannot be genetically engineered or treated with prohibited substances. However, if a grower can provide documented proof that organic varieties are commercially unavailable, conventional seeds may be used only as a last resort.

The Environmental Impact of Treated Seeds

The specific color of treated seeds may indicate that the seeds should be handled with special equipment for safety purposes due to the presence of substances that can be harmful to human skin upon contact or lethal if consumed.

Of the chemicals used as coating on treated seeds, neonicotinoids (a type of insecticide) are frequently present and can have widespread adverse effects on ecosystems, where they linger in the soil and water. Some of these treated seeds may be toxic to those inhabiting the surrounding environments, including pollinators, such as wild bees that consume the neonicotinoids when foraging for pollen near farm fields.

If a farmer acquires treated seeds and later chooses not to plant them, there may be state laws governing how these seeds are to be disposed of, with careful rules about planting them at a safe distance from shared water sources and far enough below ground to avoid consumption by local wildlife.

Our Modern Seed System

Our seed system today is highly complex — in certain ways, it limits farmers’ choices and, in others, it expands their opportunities. Some may find a sense of freedom in choosing to work with nature by saving seeds and carrying on with this cornerstone practice of our food system.

Ultimately, every farmer must consider the advantages and disadvantages of saving seed within the context of their own business and according to their own land ethic.