Just Disgusted

On the stupid news front, Seed Savers Exchange was founded, it appears, by yet another over-zealous hippie of the sort whose work causes me to fall in love and whose politics eventually break my heart. He was chucked out of the organization a few years back, and recently made a speech in which he accused Seed Savers of playing into the hands of Monsanto-type companies by giving seeds to the Svalvard Global Seed Vault. You have got to be kidding me. Read about the soap opera over at Garden Rant, and then read Squash's humorous comments, in which she doesn't actually use a cucumber euphemism.

Call me a radical moderate, but it seems to me that the best path for agriculture would be for the hippie save-the-earth crowd to play nice with big agribusiness, especially now that the Justice Department has said that genes can't be patented! The Scientist Gardener is a great blog to read if you are interested in middle-of-the-road options. His recent post on rice demonstrates how even the most perfected strains of crop varieties need to be continually bred in order to stay productive. Seed Savers-type organizations should be helping with this, not taking their toys and hiding them away where they do most of the world no good.