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Adam Taggart: Hello, and welcome to the Resilient Life Podcast. Resilient Life is part of PeakProsperity.com. It is where we focus on practical and actionable knowledge for building a better future. I am your host, Adam Taggart. And today’s guest is Jere Gettle.

Along with his wife Emily, Jere owns and operates Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and its website rareseeds.com. Jere’s goal is to save heritage plant varietals from being lost to genetically modified mega-plants and to wave the banner for way of life he sees rapidly disappearing.

Jere and Emily also work extensively to supply free seeds to many of the world’s poorest countries as well as here at home in school gardens and other educational projects. It is their goal to educate everyone about a better, safer food supply and fight gene-altered Frankenfood and the companies that support it.

I have invited Jere here on the program to discuss the importance of maintaining heirloom-variety foodstocks and how the backyard gardener can contribute to the effort. Jere, thank you so much for making the time to join us today.

Jere Gettle: Oh, sure. I really appreciate being on this show.

Adam Taggart: Great. I was hoping we could start at the beginning. Could you explain what motivated you to become a champion of heirloom plants and to found Baker Creek?

Jere Gettle: I guess what really gave me the interest originally in plants was my parents and grandparents and my aunts and uncles. As a small child in the Boise Valley growing up in the early 1980s, I would walk around in their gardens and see what was growing. And when I was about three years old, I started planting my own little garden with their help.

And it just amazed me to see a tiny little seed turn into so much produce or flowers or whatever it might be, and the genetic diversity of scalloped squash, and yellow pear tomatoes. All of these varieties were bright colors and interesting shapes, but also had history. It might be that we might have been planting something that came from Japan or planting a variety of watermelon that came from Texas. All of them told a story.

And even as a small child, I was very interested in not only the fruit, but also the stories behind the varieties, as my parents would read me seed catalogs. And as I got older, I started requesting seed catalogs on my own.

When we moved to Missouri in my teen years, by then I definitely knew that I wanted to somehow work in the seed industry. I always knew that I wanted to be somehow a part of the seed industry. But in my teen years, I really became more and more solid that I wanted to do something to save vegetable seeds. Because I noticed a lot of the seed catalogs at the time, in the early 1990s, were dropping the “different seeds” – unique and different, unusual, and heirloom seeds – from their catalog. And that inspired me to try to save some of them.

In 1998 is when I started sending our first – actually, it was like a 12-page – price list with about 70 different varieties. And we sent them out to about 550 people. And from there it has grown every year since then. And it has been a lot of fun and a lot of work, but there are definitely a lot of varieties out there still that we are collecting every year.

Adam Taggart: That is really fascinating. And we will get into the stories behind the plants in just a little bit. But before we do, let us start really helping people understand what the word heirloom really means. I think the novice gardener may have heard that before; maybe you hear people talk about it when you go to the Farmer’s Market. What exactly does “heirloom” mean?

Jere Gettle: Fifty years ago, basically all produce, almost all produce was heirloom that was in the market, 50, 60, 70 years ago. And that has kind of changed. Basically, the word means just something that has been passed down from generation to generation, similar to the word antique or vintage. It is basically a word that does not have a lot of meaning other than it is a traditional variety. And that is what the most important thing is. These are varieties we saved and passed down to future generations. They are not patented or genetically engineered or in any way controlled by corporations.

So if you want to save this radish and pass it to your children and save seeds on it year after year, you are welcome to do that. And as far as the meaning of the word, it is different for different people. Some people say it is 50 or 100 years old. But I think the dictionary definition is not quite so strict. It kind of depends on the person. Because to some people, an antique or an heirloom is something hundreds of years old, and other people is something maybe 30-40 years old. So it kind of depends on the person and also the age of that person, depending on what they think is old.

Adam Taggart: Okay. But it is basically meant in the context of seeds here, to separate it from those seeds that have been either altered in some way artificially or controlled in some way from a rights perspective by a corporation.

Jere Gettle: Correct.

Adam Taggart: Would that be accurate?

Jere Gettle: These are seeds that are like public domain software. They are seeds that are of the people. There is no control over them.

Adam Taggart: Okay. They are an open-sourced seed stock, if you will.

Jere Gettle: Correct.

Adam Taggart: I think it is probably very hard to have the discussion about heirloom varieties then without also having a discussion about genetically modified foods, frequently referred to as GMOs. I am sure you have got a lot of opinions on that debate. You certainly would read about both sides of it a lot in the papers these days. In your opinion, what are the facts that the curious citizen should know in this debate about GMOs versus heirloom seeds?

Jere Gettle: Well, there are so many different things. With hybridization, it is basically controlling the seeds through hybridizing them and selling them, and that was one thing. But we now we have genetically engineered seeds that is – basically now it is not just a cross between two tomatoes. Now we actually have genes coming in from a fish, or genes coming in from bacteria or insect or even human genes being inserted into plants. So we have a lot of new possible risk.

And then we also have chemical companies being able to sell huge amounts of their chemicals because they are developing these plants to resist the very chemicals that would normally kill any plant out there. Now they can resist these really strong chemicals, like Round Up and other chemicals as well.

So basically what is happening is the chemical companies are making more money off of it, plus the seeds themselves, which are often owned by the chemical companies, are also – the prices went up about five times in the last ten years. Basically now, we are talking $200-300 bags of corn seed. Whereas in the 1990s, farmers were still buying a lot of the corn for $50 a bag. So the price of the corn has skyrocketed. And the amount of chemicals that we are putting on the land has almost doubled in the last, about, well, 10-12 years.

All these different things going into the question of, is this really good for us long-term? Even if gene-altered foods prove harmless, all the chemicals on the other side are already proving harmful. And also, many studies are also questioning whether the genetic engineering itself could be harmful.

Adam Taggart: Interesting; okay. So you have talked about the fact that obviously modern farming requires a lot of chemicals, pesticides, fertilizers, etc. And you are saying that in breeding plants that are tolerant to these chemicals, it obviously allows greater use of these chemicals, which has also taken on effects that perhaps we do not fully understand enough yet.

There is a question about health issues, which is just, are genetically modified foods different in some way for our bodies? And I think there is also a third issue out there, and you probably know more about this than I, but it is crop resilience. Meaning, you have certainly read that it seems that the number of strains of different vegetables and whatnot that we grow today are much fewer than they were in the past. And therefore, if all of the sudden there were to be a blight of some sort that targeted one of these strains, we could lose a large percentage of our food crop quite quickly. Whereas, if we had a lot more diversity genetically amongst the food crop, we would be much better insulated against a shock like that. Is that true?

Jere Gettle: Correct. It is definitely true. And there are several different elements on that side, as well. For one example, and even without genetic engineering, even just patenting, but with patenting and genetic engineering between the two, most of our seed supply is wrapped up in the hands of a few corporations which they – for example, one corporation controls, say, 55 percent of all lettuce produced globally for seed. If that company itself, even if they do not have a crop failure, but if that company, say, just goes bankrupt, all of the sudden our global lettuce supply is minus 55%.

Man-made or natural causes can cause the problems. And then, personally, our biggest issue, we are already feeling the effects of it because every year we have been growing corn. And for about the last 10 or 12 years, we have been testing our corn, because genetic engineering had become a problem by then. And as we started testing our corn from different farmers over the last ten years, we found almost 50 percent of the seed that has been grown for us by the different farmers to come back contaminated. Which affects the farmer, because they are not able to sell the seed, we are not able to sell the seed, and in some cases, we are in it if it is a rare strain.

Say one example is Arkansas Red and White Corn. It was lost. We were not able to find any clean seeds. So that variety disappeared. And that is one of the causes for varieties to disappear, especially in corn. Corn is the main crop right now. We are actually losing all varieties due to the contamination.

Adam Taggart: That is interesting. So you are actually sort of having a species extinction, if you will, in these different varieties, due to the contamination from the predominant GMO strains.

Jere Gettle: Correct. And in the last ten years, between our company and our growers, it has cost us several hundred thousand dollars, which is kind of compared to the national damage, when you can multiply that out with all the farmers in the country that suffered losses. And now, for example, the wheat situation up in Washington and Oregon and the Northwest, when they found the contaminated wheat. So many countries are questioning whether they want to buy it now.

And that is the same as what happens with the corn crops as well. Organic farmers, if they get a little bit of contamination, they are not able to sell their crops. There are also some companies that are not buying their crops and taking them to Europe. So there are a lot of issues out there that are affecting us nationally, financially, especially the small farmers. Unfortunately, that is who it is really affecting. The large corporate farmers, it does not affect them. Actually, in cases, it favors them.

Adam Taggart: Interesting. And what defenses, if any, are there against this type of contamination?

Jere Gettle: Well we are working on different things. One project we are working on this year, but it is very time intensive, is actually pollen bags and hand-pollinating the ears of corn. That is something that we are doing on a trial basis. Other things that we do is, of course, plant the most isolated farms we can find. And unfortunately, since corn is wind-pollinated, even if a farm is say eight or ten miles away from a farm that is planting a gene-altered crop, there is still a chance of contamination, unfortunately.

You can be growing in greenhouses. But all these different issues all require extensive [measures], beyond the means for most farmers to do. So that is the biggest problem. A lot of farmers do not have the luxury of having ten miles, if that is even enough.

Adam Taggart: Right, right. We also hear stories too of the farmer who finds he has got some GMO crops growing in his fields because of contamination. And then you have these big corporations come in and basically sue the small farmer because he is technically growing their product without their permission.

Jere Gettle: Correct.

Adam Taggart: Is that still a factor there, too?

Jere Gettle: It is kind of, the farmer is already possibly losing his livelihood. And then in some cases, it appears that losing the livelihood is not enough when they lose their crop. And then there is also a chance that if they try to sell it, then there is also a chance of getting sued on top of it. So it is basically taking the farmers’ rights away from their crops, and in some cases basically their land, because in many cases, farmers cannot go on year after year without a crop. One year, in many cases, will sink a farmer who already has lots of debt and other issues. So it is basically taking their right away, their right to sell, save, and pass down both their crop and their farm.

Adam Taggart: I assume that if that happens to a farmer, they probably do not have too many other options besides just to sort of tear up everything they have and then try to buy seeds from someone like yourself to try to reintroduce pure stock. Is that true?

Jere Gettle: There are different options, but the biggest thing is to be diversified. That is the biggest thing farmers need to do. Because the biggest problem is, if you are just growing corn, especially in this day and age, you are taking a chance, especially if you are trying to grow organic corn. If you are falling into the system and buying gene-altered corn and going along with everything they tell you to do, then you are probably okay, as long as the markets keep buying the crop.

But on the other hand, if you want to do everything naturally – the way things have always been done until recently – and grow crops and save your own seeds, you really need to diversify into not just one crop. The farmers, small farmers that are really making it, if you are going to stay small; you have got to be producing something for your market as much as you can, greens and tomatoes, corn, and potatoes. As many different crops as you can produce in your area well instead of just producing a monocrop. You also reduce your disease problems that way as well.

Adam Taggart: Okay. Well let us say you are not even a small farmer, but a backyard gardener. And you actually like to help the effort here in terms of trying to preserve diversity and trying to bring back some of these rare heirloom strains. What are some of the things that a person could do?

Jere Gettle: Well, one thing they could do is, of course, either get seeds from their neighbor, buy seeds, and find seeds somewhere. There are a lot of seeds around that still can be collected, even in most neighborhoods. If you live in the city or in the country, you can talk around to your neighbors and find a local heirloom that you can help save and pass on.

Another thing you can do which needs to be done is plant a diversity in your own garden, a lot of diversity. And save seeds from some crops each year if you can. But then also plant varieties of things that do well for butterflies and bees. Because the population of bees are also dwindling, not in every place, but nationally overall the populations are going down. So plant milkweed and bee balm and different things for the pollinators. We have been doing that here, and it is amazing how many more insects you get to your farm, which not only helps your farm or garden, but it also helps the populations of these insects. Which, now due to the spraying of RoundUp, they do not have a whole lot of pollination sources left on a lot of farms.

So those are the two simple steps, as you know. Find a right ear, too, and also plant things to keep the pollinators alive so we can keep these old varieties pollinating.

Adam Taggart: You mentioned something earlier that I just want to ask you to give a little bit of clarity on: the practice of seed saving. I think a lot of us have heard the term, and I think we can sort of imagine what it means. But what exactly does it mean? If you have got a garden and it is your first time growing it and you have planted from either seeds or starts, but you want to actually do some seed saving, what do you need to look out for? What do you need to do?

Jere Gettle: It is different for every different species of plant. But to start out with, it is best to start with something if you do not feel adventurous. And it is okay if you mess up, especially at first. I mean, it is good to buy some common varieties before you try to start with maybe your grandma’s rare bean. Start with something that is common and make sure that you know what you are doing for a year and then try to move on. But basically it is a different process for a different crop. Some crops, like tomatoes, for example, are generally self-pollinated, which means they do not actually require insects to pollinate them. And they usually pollinate actually before they open. So they are great crops to start with, because unlike, say, squash, if you plant two different squashes in your garden or if you have a neighbor growing squash, it is very easy in most cases for the squash to cross-pollinate with your neighbor’s zucchini if you have zucchini.

But the best thing to do is start with tomatoes. Lettuce is another good one. Find some crops that are self-pollinating, and you can look them up online and figure out which ones are self-pollinated. But start out with those. And then get a good book. There is Seed to Seed. You can get it from a library. There are other seed-saving books out there. And go through that and figure out which crops you would like to try. The best thing is to start out is do it with just a few crops and then move on. Within a few years, I know some people that went from saving just one or two varieties to 30, 40, 50, or even a couple hundred varieties every year that are real passionate about it.

Adam Taggart: Let us talk for a moment about exactly what seed saving means. And let us say that I did get a tomato. I grew a regular, common-variety tomato. Do I pluck the tomato and then when I cut it open, I actually remove some of the seeds and dry them and preserve them for next spring? Is that pretty much the system?

Jere Gettle: Yeah, there are various different ways. Often times, actually, on tomatoes, if you have a cherry tomato and you do not – even if you do till, but especially if you do not till the patch where the tomatoes were, most likely you are going to have tomato seedlings the following the year. That is the simplest. One way some gardeners do it is just let a lot of things in their garden to volunteer.

But if you really want to save an amount of seed and know that you have like a half of a pound or an ounce or whatever, the best way to do it on tomatoes is just take the tomato, the whole tomato. What we do is put them in a bucket. We grind them up, actually, in a grinder, but you can smash them up with a baseball bat or with some kitchen utensils. Basically, chop the tomatoes up. Put them in a bucket of water with just a little bit of water, just enough to cover the tomato slurry that you crush up and let it sit for about three days.

After three days, everything that is pulp actually floats to the top and the seeds sink to the bottom. You pour it all off and rinse it a couple of times. As long as you pour it slowly, the seeds will stay on the bottom, as long as you let it stay more than about three or four days. And then you just pour the seeds out after you have poured all the water off. Pour them out on a screen or a newspaper and often times near a fan or where there is air circulation and it is not too hot and they will dry in a matter of about a week or so.

Adam Taggart: Well, thank you for walking through that. That actually is really pretty fascinating, how you do that with tomatoes.

Jere Gettle: Every crop is a little different in general, so it is really a – it is not technical. And often times, nature does it for you. Especially when you are starting out, if you just let things fall here and there, and then next spring watch for them and remember what the plants look like, often times, you will find them coming up again in your garden anyway.

But if you want to make sure that you have a supply, you need to really kind of learn about each different one. And there are also seed-saving classes in a lot of different areas if you watch for them.

Adam Taggart: Okay, great. And you mentioned a book there, Seed to Seed.

Jere Gettle: Seed to Seed is a great seed-saving book. But it is just one. There are also courses and videos online you can watch. And also just learn from – often times, you can find a seed saver in your area if you talk to your extension service or your garden club. They will help you out as well.

Adam Taggart: Great. Now, we have got a number of people listening to this podcast who are experienced gardeners. But I believe we also probably have a healthy amount of people who have not done much gardening, or if they have, have mostly gone out and purchased starts at the market versus growing from seed. Are there any kind of best practices to know for somebody who is growing a plant from seed for the first time?

Jere Gettle: Well there is generally not a lot to it. It is really not that much different than setting out plants, other than you are maybe a little behind if you are planting direct. If you are starting in the house, it becomes a little bit more difficult. The main thing that most people have a hard time with – well there are two things. One is getting soil that actually – if you are starting inside and you are starting your little tomato plants or peppers or anything else, you really need to get a soil that actually does not have soil in it. You need something based out of peat moss or coconut hull or anything that does not carry the viruses that soil has in it. Soil is also heavy, and in a little container it gets like a brick. So you want to avoid soil, starting out the first time. You want to go with a potting mix. You can find a lot of good organic potting mixes that do not actually have soil. Or you can make your own if you look online.

The second thing is really a lot of seeds do better if you actually plant them directly in the garden. For example, this year we started tomatoes. But unfortunately, we lost some of our varieties that we started. We actually had 200 varieties that we were starting for trial. And out of the 200, at least probably six or so of them, we either spilled the plants or they broke off or something ate some of the plants. So we ended up going and putting seed back in the ground, just directly in the ground, at the same time we put the transplants out. And the seed caught up now and we are harvesting tomatoes. And we cannot tell the difference between where we planted seeds and where we put out transplants.

So, if you have a decent growing season, if you are in a very short northern climate or you want really early tomatoes, you are going to need to start with plants. But otherwise, many of these crops can be directly seeded into your garden once it warms up outside.

Adam Taggart: Okay. That is great to know. And earlier you mentioned people exchanging seeds with people in their local community. I take it then you are a pretty big fan of seed exchanging amongst interesting gardeners.

Jere Gettle: Yeah, the more the better. The more we can get seeds back into the local communities like they always were. Seeds were always something that was traded over the garden fence with the neighbor, and you got them from your grandmother, and you passed them on to your kids. You passed them to your uncle and he sent you something else. Thomas Jefferson was doing this. George Washington was doing this. All of our forefathers, basically, who were interested in gardening at all traded seeds back and forth. And that was part of our culture, with passing on the seeds and also the story. I got this from your grandmother. Please keep it alive. It is a great tomato. Or we brought this over from Germany when we came. This was our local variety there or whatever.

With farming becoming more and more corporate and gardening becoming less and less through the 50s and 60s and 70s, unfortunately, a lot of these stories and varieties were disappearing. But thankfully, in the last ten years, that trend has kind of slowed and almost stopped. Now we are getting so many new gardeners who are looking for varieties and stories and things they can pass on to their kids. It is just getting the knowledge and the time. People are so busy now getting the knowledge and time to actually put it into practice and save the seed.

Adam Taggart: Yeah. Well, two things on there. The first is, I just want to make sure those listening to this podcast are aware of the launch of a seed exchange group on PeakProsperity.com. So we have actually created a group where people can exchange seeds so with anyone across the country. If you have got extra amounts of one variety or if you are looking for a particular variety, you can put that there on the exchange, too, and let people know you are in the market for those seeds. For all the reasons that Jere just mentioned, we are very excited about it. We think it is a great idea.

Secondly, Jere, I completely can relate to what you are talking about in terms of just sort of the fun and the enthusiasm that comes from learning the stories behind these plants. I live not too far from one of your seed bank stores that you offer, the one that is in Petaluma, California. And it is such a fun experience walking into that store. First, because it is in an old bank building, so it is really funny to see a seed bank inside a tall ceiling, very ornately carved marble bank environment. It is just a perfect setting for it, a much better use for the bank building in my opinion than its original reason for its creation.

But you go in there and there is just really endless rows of different varieties of all sorts of different vegetables. And on each of your packets, you give a little bit of background in terms of how old that particular variety is, where it started. And it is just sort of like taking a step back in time and becoming part of history. And then to take that seed that you know somebody planted – in my case, tomatoes that looked just like the ones that are now growing in my garden, they were first planted by Spanish immigrants to America back in the late 1700s. It is pretty amazing.

Jere Gettle: Yeah, it is. The other night I was looking through an old Japanese seed catalog, actually, from the 1940’s. It was a wholesale catalog they shipped to the United States. And we had a white-fleshed – it is actually cream-fleshed – Japanese Watermelon in our catalog. We have had it – somebody sent it to me about 12 years ago and he since passed on. And I always wondered where this watermelon came from and who originated it. But looking through the catalog, I was looking in there, and it was 1940. I looked down and saw that variety. It is the same name and the description there. And it said “new that year.”

So it is always fun to go in and verify. Because I did not even know for sure if that variety was actually Japanese. I did not know if somebody just put the name on it or where it came from. But now, looking through the catalog, now I know when it was introduced and a little bit more about. So now when I grow that variety, I will actually know that it comes from 1940. So it is always fun to get those little bits and pieces, especially about a unique variety that you do not really know anything about and somebody sent it to you in the mail. And now you know kind of the rest of the story on it.

Adam Taggart: Yeah, and to your point to the variety, I am still a relatively new gardener. This is my third year. And my first two years were doing just very small, not even raised beds. I mean, they were too small to really be called beds. But this year, I put in a garden that is about 21 feet by 17 feet or so, which is a decent size for one person to handle. But it really is just four main raised beds and then a few other things I am doing. So in preparation for this podcast, I just sort of went and did a quick catalog of what is growing in there. And it is well over two dozen different varieties of plants.

Jere Gettle: All right.

Adam Taggart: And I surprised myself. Had you asked me before I did the count, I would have said maybe nine. But it is just amazing how much diversity you can get into even a plot of land that small.

Jere Gettle: Yeah. I was watching, in our flower garden, for example, it is flowers and herbs and fruits. It is probably about 60’x60’, but we have around 250 different varieties growing in there. And it is all herbs and flowers and things like strawberries and small rhubarb. We have it really crammed in there. But it is amazing walking through and thinking people with even a 6’x6’ bed can get a tomato and a pepper and a cucumber. And they can get quite a few. In the middle of summer, when these things are really producing, they can get quite a bit of their daily diet out of even a 6’x6’ bed.

Adam Taggart: Yeah, I definitely got a couple beds where I would say there is maybe six to eight different plants coexisting in there. And they all kind of learn how to find or fig