This is the best of our knowledge, a presentation of national productions.
Remember the story of Johnny Appleseed, the man who legend says,
roamed the country planting his seeds wherever he went?
Well, Janice Ray isn't roaming the country planting seeds.
She's touring colleges and universities talking about the importance of
saving different varieties of seeds before they're lost forever.
94% of the varieties available in 1901 were not available in 2004.
A 94% decline.
Today on the best of our knowledge we'll hear from Janice about the seed underground.
We'll also hear about a group of students that call themselves the hacker scouts
who are learning a lot about making things with their own hands
and will spend an academic minute in the world of farms and beads.
I'm Bob Barrett and this is the best of our knowledge.
Think about the amount of information contained in a seed,
the entire genetic makeup and building block of that plant is all right there,
that tiny little nub.
However, according to Janice Ray, whole volumes of that information are being lost.
She says the explosion of industrial farms and genetically modified seeds
is homogenizing what was once a universe of diversity in the plant world.
Janice Ray is an author, naturalist and activist.
She's on the faculty of Chaddham universities, low residency MFA program.
And in 2007 was awarded an honorary doctorate from Unity College in Maine.
Her latest book is called The Seed Underground, a growing revolution to save food.
We spoke recently and asked her how a poet and a teacher got involved with seeds.
Oh gosh, what a hard question, Bob.
I have been interested in growing things for a long, long time.
And now I know the answer. The answer is life.
All of those things have to do with the essence of life itself.
I first got interested in seeds when I was a child.
I've gardened from the time I was 11 or 12 or so.
And my grandmother gave me some very strange bean seeds.
It's about an inch long, very beautiful white beans with dark eyes.
She called them jack beans.
And I planted them. They grew very big.
The pods were a foot long and these fat seeds throughout.
And it sort of fired me up. I got fired up very young for plants and growing things.
I think that we have written in our DNA an ancient history with plants.
Humans for at least 12,000 years and as much as 70,000 scientists argue have been
domesticating, diversifying, adapting plants.
So I think it's a pretty common feeling, this connection to the plant world.
In your book, you actually mourn the loss of so many varieties of different seeds.
Just how much have we lost?
In 1901 and 1902, a kind of a comprehensive catalog of seed varieties available at that time was published.
In 2004, two scientists at the University of Georgia decided to look at those varieties available a century ago,
compared to the ones available now.
94% of the varieties available.
In 1901, we're not available in 2004. A 94% decline.
Now these are place adapted, vintage, heirloom, locally adapted seeds.
The statistics are even more startling when you think, let's break it down.
So, cabbages, 95% of vintage cabbages are gone. 96% of field corns.
It means what happened is an industrialization of agriculture, so that people like my grandfather who farmed a small diversified farm here in southern Georgia,
and grew all kinds of food crops for his family to sell extra.
He began to use chemical fertilizer. He began when hybrid corn came out to use hybrid corn seed.
We saw the rise and fall of old time diversified organic agriculture.
And then the rise again in the last 50 or 60 years.
And even sooner, a renaissance of agriculture that speaks to nutrition to help with the soil to environmental health.
Those seeds are no longer being offered in catalogs. Now, are they gone for good or are they just not being sold anymore?
Say the more productive ones are being sold.
Seeds have inherently a viability. You can deep-free seeds and save them for 10, 15 years if you're lucky, 50, in some cases longer.
But they're gone. The short answer Bob is they're gone. They're gone for good.
Now, when the seed savers exchange began in 1975, a lot of seed folklorists will call them, stop the country looking for heirloom varieties.
And so many varieties thought lost have been reintroduced into the marketplace.
But in general, it is a true decline. We go into a grocery store now and we can buy grainy smith apple and red delicious apple.
But a hundred years ago, there were 7,000 varieties of apples in this country, many, many, many.
And 86% of them just gone. Now here and there, you'll find orchards that are heirloom orchards that are keeping these varieties alive.
But in general, the industrialization of ag has led us to monocultures, to standardization.
And that means more and more farmers planting, decreasing numbers, decreasing diversity of seeds.
Tell us about the seed saver exchange and who they are and what they do.
The seed savers exchange is an organization headquartered in Decora, Iowa. They have hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of members.
It began in 1975. A couple, they were married at the time, named Diane and Kent Whaley.
Started this organization, they were taking care of Diane's grandfather, Baptist John Ott.
He had immigrated to this country from Eastern Europe and had brought with him a few garden plants. One was a morning glory.
They realized that when he died and he did die, that they were the only people left to steward these seeds. These seeds would die out.
So they named the morning glory, Grandpa Ott's morning glory. There was a German pink tomato as well.
And it was that incident that engendered in them, the realization that all over this country, people are dying and we're losing seeds.
First, few of us are farming. In 1904, 41% of Americans farm. Now it's less than 2%.
Of we who farm, the number of acres we farm is smaller and smaller. These acres, more of these acres are planted in annuals and lessened perennials.
And the diversity of what we plant is constricting.
So what seed savers exchange did really was awakened in May and awakened in many, many people across the country.
This realization, the knowledge that we needed to do something.
I think too, Bob, we should speak about famine. Any time that we shrink diversity, in this case agro diversity, we become more at risk of some kind of collapse.
The Lomper Potato was the variety of potato mostly being grown in Ireland in the mid-1800s.
It developed a late blight which affected it not so much in the garden, not so much the leaf, but in the root in storage.
So basically, people's potatoes were rotten in storage. Now this was an entirely prolific potato.
A family could plant an acre and have enough to last a year.
When the potatoes begin to rot, that initiated what we all know of as the potato famines, the Irish, and it initiated a diaspora of an entire people.
So we know what is possible if we shrink our genetic base too much.
I will say, as an addendum, that in many ways a famine is already occurring in this country.
You know as well as I do, we can walk through the grocery stores and we save packages and boxes and bags and incredible diversity of products like the cereal out.
But if we read the ingredients, a few crops are providing the building blocks for all of food, probably three or four crops, corn, wheat, soybeans, rice.
In many ways a wheat blight for example has already descended. More and more people have gluten intolerance, celiacs disease.
Celiacs, I believe that a lot of food allergens can be tied to our vegetable breeding.
That we are breeding for production, not for nutrition. And we are in many cases altering the proteins found in wheat for example.
So some serious consequences of our shrinking genetic base.
Well look ahead if you can, what do you see? Do you see getting better, worse or worse before it gets better?
What I see is tremendous hope and that's one of the reasons that I wrote this book. I travel, I'm lucky enough to be able to travel to universities and speak with young people.
In these deeply transformative conversations with young people I would feel such a hopelessness.
So they saw what we see that we are in a period of incredible climate variability, that they are being handed this cocktail of problems, you know, toxicification of the earth, climate change, the first decrease in longevity, on and on.
And then what I saw was that the ones who had turned to food, who had decided that they wanted to make a difference.
They wanted to actually be involved in the production of food and they wanted to return themselves to lives that made sense.
They wanted to put nutritious food in their bodies. They began lobbying their cafeterias to buy locally, to buy organically.
They began starting little gardens on campus, on and on and on. As an environmentalist I saw that the most active young people were the ones who were tackling food.
And that was indicative of our culture, people are flooding to farmers markets, to food, natural food cooperatives, starting buying clubs, starting community gardens, gardening in their backyard.
And that gave me tremendous hope, I return again to Sylvia Davott. I may not be able to make much of a difference in the big world, who knows.
But I feel that in my own garden I'm this radical peasant here doing something every day, I have my little hammer out and I'm building something in this garden.
And honestly Bob, I can't think of anything more hopeful than that.
And the name of Janice Ray's book is The Seed Underground, a growing revolution to save food. You can learn more at JaniceRay.com.
Still to come there are kids making seed balls in Brooklyn. Okay they're doing a lot more than that but it makes a great tie into our talk with Janice.
That's next on the best of our knowledge.
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This is the best of our knowledge. I'm Bob Barrett. In recent years the maker movement, which includes do it yourselfers and high tech hackers, have been introducing an even younger generation to the joys of making things with your own hands.
And you will make her fairs with draw crowds in New York, California and other places around the country. Now include large exhibits geared towards children.
And slowly adult hackers spaces have been reaching out to young people. Once more last year saw the rise of youth groups called hackerscouts and DIY clubs.
John Kaelish tells us about this grassroots movement that is teaching kids science, technology, engineering and math, hands on outside the classroom.
A small group of kids and parents are gathered in a community garden in the Bedford, Styvacen section of Brooklyn. This monthly meeting of the DIY club is happening thanks to a children's website called diwy.org.
Today the kids are making seed bombs, little balls of compost soil and clay with seeds inside them.
Little Trixi rap, who also makes her own animated films and fake poop from cardboard. She is 10 years old after all.
Is full of scientific observations about the garden she's helping to grow.
I think the slug is actually a pest because it nibbles on all of the plants that you plant, I guess. We keep finding baby slugs and they just look like a dot of jello.
Photos and videos of Trixi's projects are displayed on several pages of the diwy.org website where she goes by the name Kookie Cat. Her audience is huge. For a fifth grader, 75,000 kids are registered with diwy.org, which is headquartered in San Francisco.
The Bay Area is a hotbed of diwy culture.
No surprise then that a new organization called Hacker Scouts started here. Hacker Scouts is geared towards children between the ages of eight and 14.
And like the diwy club in Brooklyn, it's coed. About a dozen kids sit at a large work table using glue guns to make little cars out of popsicle sticks, plastic straws and other materials.
The passengers in these tiny vehicles are hard boiled eggs, which sometimes survive a trip down to steep incline.
And sometimes not.
There's no right or wrong way to do it. Lance Akiyama runs an after school program called the workshop for young engineers.
Experientially, they're learning things like momentum and crashworthiness, resilience, those sorts of things.
We're filling a hole. This kind of education was missing.
Samantha Cook is a mother of three in the executive director of Hacker Scouts.
We can give kids a really grounded education in steam, so science, technology, engineering, art and math. And we can highly individualize it.
So we have these concepts and skills that we're presenting, but every single time they come to us, there is a way to individualize it to make it personal, to make it relevant to their own life.
Here in Oakland, the 11-year-old Gigi Mancusa Jackson is demonstrating a little robot that resembles a mouse. She soldered it together from a kit.
Her mom Rebecca says Gigi loves to make things with her hand.
Most recently, she made a bed.
And PVC pipe. PVC pipe and a turp. And then you just put an air mattress on top.
She makes everything by herself since she was four.
So this is ideal for her, because she has people here who can help her with these things that I can't help her with.
People like Shashana Abrass, who's a member of the Hacker Space, where the Hacker Scouts meet.
She makes her own jewelry when she's not working as a site reliability engineer at Google.
What I'm doing now was not even thought of in school when I was their age. It was not even taught in college. It's still not taught in college really.
That's the environment. These kids are going to be growing up into. They're going to be doing things that we can't even imagine now, with technologies that haven't been invented.
So that's what they have to learn. That sense of fearlessness. To touch technology, to export for themselves.
In addition to the unknowable mentors at Hacker Scouts, kids have access to expensive computer-controlled fabrication gear.
Tools that are key in 21st century manufacturing.
11-year-old Annabelle Castello waits to have some cardboard cut on a $9,000 laser cutter.
Since I'm making a desk, I don't want to waste a whole bunch of wood if I mess up. So I need to do a prototype with cardboard that's half size.
And I just built all the pieces on my computer.
When Annabelle says she built the pieces of the desk on her computer, she really means she created the digital blueprints for them with computer-aided design or CAD software.
In Hacker Scouts, an 11-year-old is taught how to use CAD. When it's time to cut her desk parts out of plywood, a grown-up will do it, operating a $15,000 computer-controlled router.
It's there because the Oakland chapter of Hacker Scouts meets at Ace Monster Toys, which despite its name is an adult Hacker Space.
The original Hacker Scouts chapter in Oakland has a waiting list of 60 kids who want to join. In addition to the Oakland chapter, there are close to two dozen affiliates around the country that are either up and running or starting in the fall.
Over at the Children's website, diy.org in San Francisco, about half of the 80-plus skills kids are encouraged to master involve STEM.
Zach Klein, a former Eagle Scout who went on to co-found Vimeo, is diy.org's CEO.
It seems to be a whole new era of what it's possible for kids to be learning, and schools aren't bridging that gap, and it's just creating demand for organizations like ours to give kids the tools and communities they need to make progress on their own.
Close to 100 DIY clubs, including a new one in Portland, Oregon, are affiliated with the website.
Once kids master a skill, they get a virtual merit badge posted on their webpage. They'll be able to get embroidered versions of these colorful hexagonal patches in the mail later this summer.
Back at the DIY club in Brooklyn, 10-year-old Trixi Raps says she's looking forward to the patches she's earned, which include Gardiner Animator and Prangster for making that fake poop.
I'm just gonna put them all on my hoodie and backpack and stuff.
Some people say the DIY movement is a throwback to a time when people made more things themselves, but as diy.org Zach Klein suggested, it may well be the future.
Do it yourself learning bridging the gap between formal education and the desire to be creative outside of school. I'm John Kalish.
This production is part of the STEM Story Project with support from the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.
You can have the best seeds and advanced techniques in agriculture at your disposal, but to grow a large chunk of the world's food, you're still gunn and eat bees.
That's the topic of today's Academic Minute.
Welcome to the Academic Minute. I'm Lynn Pascarella, President of Mount Holyoke College.
As honeybee populations continue their mysterious decline, scientists are racing to find the cause.
Reinhardt Stuger, Associate Professor in Epigenetics at the University of Nottingham, explains how pesticides can alter the behavior of a hive for generations.
Over the last years, there has been concern that forging honeybees may expose entire hives to pesticides by importing pollen and nectar gathered from pesticide treated plants.
Thus the health of the queen, drones, young workers, and developing brood could all be affected.
Is there any basis for such concerns? We took a closer look at a neonecotid insecticide.
Globally, neonecotinoids are one of the most used insecticides to protect crops including canola, soybeans, and maize against pests such as aphids, whiteflies, and weevils.
And this was our experiment. To three bee hives, we provided syrup containing two parts per billion insecticide, as a control we supplied three hives with untainted syrup.
After two weeks of feeding syrup, we collected bee larvae from all hives and analyzed the activity of their genes.
What we found is that around 300 genes behave somewhat differently in larvae from insecticide exposed hives.
Remarkably, many of these genes play a role in metabolism regulating the way cells process and use energy.
We conclude that low levels of insecticide, if imported into hives, could indeed influence metabolism and development of honeybee larvae.
Naturally, new questions now emerge. Do these insecticides also alter the energy metabolism of adult forging bees or, indeed, other pollinating insects?
If so, how persistent are these effects? Future experiments will tell.
That was Reinhart Stugar of the University of Nottingham. You can find this, other segments, and more information about the professors at academicminute.org.
Production support for the Academic Minute comes from Newman's own foundation in partnership with Mount Holyoke College.
That's all the time we have for this week's program. If you'd like to listen again, join us online at our flagship stations website.
Go to www.wamc.org and click on the programs link. And if you have any questions or comments about the program, send them in.
Our email address is knowledge at www.wamc.org. I'm Bob Barrett. Be sure to join us next time for another edition of The Best of Our Knowledge.
Bob Barrett is producer of The Best of Our Knowledge. Dr. Alan Shartock is executive producer. The Best of Our Knowledge is a production of WAMC Radio's National Productions, which is solely responsible for its content.
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