The San Juan Islands are an archipelago in Washington State composed of 172 named islands and reefs known for their temperate maritime climate, amazing wildlife and mellow pace of life. On a Monday morning in July, I left Port Townsend and embarked on my journey via two ferry crossings to the largest of these beautiful islands – San Juan.
My destination was Ferry Boat Seeds. One of the more unusual seed companies on my travels, Ferry Boat Seeds offer contract organic seed production in a business-to-business model, rather than curating their own catalogue. Ferry Boat was founded by fellow Brit, Louisa Brouwer in 2018 and is now jointly run by her and husband Brook. I was put in contact with Louisa by another Churchill Fellow, and she and Brook kindly welcomed me into their life for the week to get a behind the scenes look at their business.
Both PhDs in Plant Breeding from Washington State University, Louisa and Brook are passionate about keeping diversity in the food system while also supporting the work of independent plant breeders. They currently have 6 acres in production at their main site, and lease several other sites across the island. They work with over 10 seed companies and research organisations across the US to steward stock seed, aid with variety development and increase parent lines. Ferry Boat Seed’s focus is on field scale production of mainly dry seeded crops, their core competence being spinach, chard, beets and brassicas. The scale of Ferry Boat’s crops was something I hadn’t much encountered before, each crop often spanning up to an acre – their fields full of rows and rows of spinach, brassica and beets heaving with abundance, their beautiful seed heads drying down perfectly in the July sunshine.
Fixed on quality at every stage of production, Louisa has an incredible eye for detail and is committed to producing the highest quality seed. There has been a dramatic loss in quality and genetic diversity in organic seed in recent years due to lack of investment– with attention often given to breeding varieties suitable for conventional chemical-based systems. Ferry Boat Seeds are determined to change that by raising the standards in the organic sector and producing the highest possible quality seed for farmers.
Louisa - ‘Keeping diversity in the food system and promoting the free exchange of plant genetic resources while also supporting the work of independent plant breeders, which means plant breeders are compensated for the kind of work that they do is important. The ways that we try and do that with our business is through working with small independent seed companies, supporting the variety development process of plant breeders employed by those companies. We love to help steward stock seed lines and help do growing and selection work that’s going to bring a new variety to the market. We feel we can leverage our plant breeding backgrounds to help with that. That’s a really big driver for us.’
Analytical and methodical in their production methods, Louisa and Brook have embedded careful plant health procedures into their management practice, and closely observe their crops at all stages of their life cycle: they are meticulous stewards. They mostly grow open pollinated varieties and populations, but they have no philosophical grievance against F1s, understanding them to provide reliability and useful breeding opportunities. It comes down the system, and how these genetic resources are respectfully shared. Along with vegetables, they also steward many flower seed crops and work with the island’s Salish Seed Project bulking up native seed stock for restoration projects. Through their work, Ferry Boat support many facets of plant breeding. There were isolation cages out in the field housing inbred vegetable lines destined for hybrid production, alongside perennial sunflower trials and beets bred specifically for culinary value.
Louisa - ‘Diversity suffers is there isn’t widely dispersed access to plant genetic resources, because just by the nature of communities being varied, and local ecosystems being varied, if there aren’t initiatives in plant breeding and plant selection taking place by different people in all different places diversity will be less. Diversity should be a goal in itself because it’s part of resilience. But it’s also part of joy, and it’s beautiful. We suffer as a species if access to plant genetic resources is too firmly restricted. There has to be balance. And diversity suffers if everything is totally open, if you enforce open access to plant genetic resources and therefore it’s not possible to ever make money, proper money from breeding. Because renumerated plant breeding is also part of generating diversity. We have to find a balance in that somewhere. There’s a place for most things, and its kind of hubristic for anyone to say they know the ‘one way’ to do things, anything.’
As well as supporting vital plant breeding work, Ferry Boat Seeds also offer custom seed cleaning services. Proactive from the offset and seeing a need in the sector, Louisa invested in quality seed cleaning infrastructure in the early days of the business. They clean seed throughout winter months, offering this service on anything from very small lots to 1500lbs: providing another income stream for the company and an important resource for smaller seed growers or those looking to start out on their seed journey on the islands. As well as the obligatory Winnow Wizard, they have a gravity table, de-bearder, airscreen and belt cleaners, along with endless screens, sieves and winnowing devices. This was exciting stuff for someone who is used to cleaning seed with a humble zig zag cleaner! It made me reflect on the importance of access to this equipment within the seed growing community back home, and the barriers that prevent many people investing in this equipment. Throughout my stay, we had several conversations hinged around the difficulties of the ‘mid-scale’, those farmers not growing on hundreds of acres, but more than just a few. Machinery, equipment and labour seem to be a challenge in this area, and there is a risk that as scale of production increases, the values driving the business can be forgotten. Ferry Boat Seeds seem ambitious to scale up, and very conscious of maintaining their connection with the land, continuing to steward their crops at a human scale to maintain that vital relationship to the plants.
Brook – ‘Having diversity of scales within the organic seed industry is really important, if the current system is really big, or really small, how do we build out some of those middle parts of that seed production system so we’re not stuck in any sort of spectrum of seed production, that’s important. So that we can produce volumes and lots and lots of high quality organic seed for lots and lots of farms.’
Louisa – (as a mid scale grower) ‘you have agility and the ability to supply smaller quantities and the big suppliers don’t have that flexibility. But you also have efficiency that smaller operators don’t have and the ability to invest in equipment.’
Having been travelling in the US for over two months, it was a surprisingly grounding experience to spend time with another British person. Even though we share the same language, US and UK culture can be very different, and there was something restful about spending time with Louisa and her family. It was also an opportunity to share news of the seed world back home, and hear her thoughts on the current state of affairs. One of the driving forces behind my Churchill Fellowship has been to fully grasp the impact the UK’s strict rules around homogeneity and variety registration might be having on our seed industry. Immersing myself in a seed community with very different legislation and observing the innovation and diversity that emerges from more freedom has been revelatory.
In the UK, for a new variety to be marketed, it must first be added to the national plant varieties list. For it to be registered, it must pass strict DUS testing, and depending on the crop this can take between 1-3 years. This process is not cheap, and significant amounts of plant material are often required. Most vegetable and grain varieties fall under this legislation. These rules can be important, and help protect farmers from crop loss and poor seed quality, but they were created within a conservative mindset for industrial scale agriculture and do not consider the nuances within our farming sector. The rules present a significant barrier for some independent plant breeders and for the dynamic management and evolution of organic varieties on farms by farmers who might want to take the next step in sharing these seeds with the wider market. A business like Ferry Boat Seeds working with a broad range of organisations and plant breeders would quite likely struggle to exist within the constraints of the current legal framework back home.
Louisa - ‘I’m shocked because it seems like there is a serious downward trend in the quality of plant genetic resources that will be available to UK growers, and that could be difficult to reverse. Having access to a wide selection is a really critical part of success for growers.’
Louisa reflected that for organic farmers this, combined with Brexit restrictions on importing seed stock, is bad news. What occurs to me as being needed in these times of instability is resilience, and diversity is an important source of this. And it’s not just about genetic diversity. It’s about diversity of scale, diversity of people doing this work, diversity of relationships with these plants. In Louisa’s own words, what keeps her doing this work is the ‘elemental joy’ that comes from that relationship.
Brook - ‘There is a fundamental connection to managing the plants in the landscape and that relationship, it’s stupidly humbling in terms of having to figure out how to grow these crops. Seed specifically, and the diversity that can come out in breeding projects, it’s about possibility. New combinations that are fun and different. Plant breeding is to some degree about making decisions quickly, having that experience of walking through a field and you have thousands of things to choose from and you need to get it down to hundreds or tens or ones, there’s something about that process of trying to be in touch enough with the plants and what’s going on and understand a little bit about the biology of pathogens, and about the environment you’re growing in, it becomes an intuitive decision.’
I had a wonderful week at Ferry Boat Seeds. Louisa and Brook bring sharp minds and deep care to their seed stewardship, committed to learning and continuously improving their work, their business demonstrates that diversity both in our relationship with plants and in our approach to seed work is just as valuable as that which is held within the crops themselves.