This is Seed Sunday, five stories from the past week about seeds, soil and the people fighting over both. Every item links to the original reporting, and after each one I say what I think. The facts belong to the reporters and the opinions are mine.
1. USDA puts $180 million into the national seed bank and calls it "seed sovereignty"
USDA · Oct. 6 · Brownfield Ag News · Oct. 7 · Civil Eats · Oct. 9
At a farm near Prairie City, Iowa, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced $180 million for the National Plant Germplasm System, the public collection of roughly 600,000 seed and plant samples from 16,000 species. Much of the money goes to sequencing the DNA of the major crop collections. Civil Eats reports that the system normally gets about $38 million a year, that a 2023 USDA plan said it needed $150 million more, and that the research agency that runs it lost more than 30 percent of its staff in 2025. A USDA under secretary said the genetic material would be licensed non-exclusively to U.S. companies. Four companies already sell about 70 percent of the country's soybean seed and 80 percent of its corn seed.
My take: I'll take the good news first. The germplasm system is one of the best things the federal government owns, it has been starved for years, and any seed saver who has requested samples from it knows what it's worth. So yes, fund it. What bothers me is the name. Aaron Johnson of RAFI told Civil Eats the real question is who benefits, and he objected to USDA borrowing the phrase "seed sovereignty." I'm with him. To me those words mean a farmer's right to save, replant and share seed. Here they mean keeping American collections ahead of foreign competitors, and then licensing what's found to companies. Public seed, sequenced with public money, ought to stay public. I've written before that seeds work a lot like software, and this is the open-source library. The Fair Seeds for Farmers Act, which Civil Eats says would limit seed patents, is the bill I'd watch alongside it.
2. An Idaho judge says a Roundup lawsuit can go forward without the label claim
Capital Press · Oct. 7
Former NFL player Merril Hoge of Pocatello sued Monsanto in 2019, saying years of spraying Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. After the Supreme Court ruled in June that federal pesticide law blocks state claims over missing cancer warnings, Monsanto asked the federal court in Idaho to throw the whole case out. Judge David Nye declined. He dropped the failure-to-warn claim but let the negligence and design-defect claims continue, and said the disputed facts about the product's formulation are for a jury. He wrote that the Supreme Court ruling "threw a wrench" into the case without ending it.
My take: Last week I wrote about the St. Louis trial that's asking the same leftover question in state court. Now a federal judge has answered part of it, at least for one case. He's saying the June ruling was about the label and nothing more. Whether the formula itself was safe to sell is a separate argument, and a jury gets to hear it. That's a tougher path than plaintiffs had a year ago. One district judge in Idaho doesn't bind anybody else, and Monsanto, which Bayer owns, argued here that federal law covers every claim. Still, the company asked for a clean exit and didn't get one. For the thousands of people with cases pending, that matters more than any headline about the settlement.
3. Gene-edited strawberries clear a first hurdle in England, and USDA weighs a gene-edited plum
Global Agriculture · Oct. 10 · Global Agriculture · Oct. 7
Britain's environment department has confirmed eight strawberry lines from J.R. Simplot, the Idaho food company, as "precision bred organisms." Simplot used CRISPR to switch off copies of a gene called Tfl1 that acts as a brake on flowering, so the plants keep flowering and fruiting through the season. The report says no foreign DNA is left in the final plants. Field trials and taste tests in England come next, and the Food Standards Agency still has to review the fruit before it can be sold. In the U.S., USDA is taking public comments until Oct. 13 on two gene-edited plum lines from its own research station in West Virginia. Those trees are edited to bloom early and nearly year-round so breeders can develop new varieties faster.
My take: Two weeks, two English fruit decisions. Last Sunday it was a banana that doesn't brown, and now it's a strawberry that doesn't stop. I find this one harder to get worked up about, because gardeners have been growing everbearing strawberries for a long time and breeders got there without CRISPR. Which makes me wonder what the edit adds, apart from a variety that's easier to protect legally. My question from last week hasn't changed, and the article doesn't answer it this time either: will the punnet say anything? The plum is a different sort of case. It comes from a public lab, and it's a tool for speeding up breeding. I'd still want to know whether the edit stays in the varieties that reach orchards.
4. A study says sorghum could stand in for a lot of Europe's corn as the climate heats up
Earth.com · Oct. 7
Sorghum covers about 0.1 percent of Europe's cropland. Researchers led by Mohsen Davoudkhani at Université Paris-Saclay, writing in the journal Earth's Future, modeled its yields under 20 climate scenarios and found that the share of European cropland suited to it could rise from about 22 percent today to as much as 34 percent by the end of the century. Yields would likely fall in Spain, southern France and Italy and rise farther north. In France, about 5 percent of sorghum is irrigated compared with 30 percent of maize, and sorghum gets roughly 111 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare against 199 for maize. The model looks only at climate. It leaves out soil and farming practices.
My take: Sorghum is thousands of years old, and people in dry places never stopped growing it. So I smiled at "overlooked." Overlooked by whom? Still, the numbers are worth sitting with. A grain that needs a fraction of the irrigation and a little over half the nitrogen is a grain that needs less of what the input companies sell, and that may explain some of the overlooking. My caution is about what the study has it replacing. In the scenario, sorghum takes over maize one year in three, mostly to feed livestock. That's an improvement, though it's still a continent arranging its fields around animal feed. I wrote years ago about the Lumper potato and what happens when a country leans on one variety. Adding a second crop helps. A dozen would help more.
5. A regenerative organic group says its food tests as more nutritious
AgFunderNews · Oct. 8
The Regenerative Organic Alliance, which runs the Regenerative Organic Certified label, and the food-testing company Edacious released first-year results from a four-year project. Seventeen brands had products tested and 13 agreed to publish, covering 46 products. Compared with USDA reference values, the ground beef had 124 to 388 percent more omega-3 fats, and all 10 legumes tested had more phosphorus, from 16 to 584 percent more. The project's methods include testing for heavy metals and glyphosate, but AgFunderNews reports no results for those. The goal is more than 200 products by the end.
My take: For decades the argument for healthy soil has run on common sense and a handful of small studies. If the numbers hold up with 200 products and proper comparisons, that's a big deal. And please publish the glyphosate and heavy metal results, whatever they show. Last week I asked USDA to show its numbers on regenerative farming. Same request here.
Also worth a look
- The National Organic Standards Board will take up why so many organic crops are still grown from non-organic seed, with public comment webinars Oct. 20 and 22 and the meeting Oct. 27 to 29 (Organic Seed Alliance, Sept. 7, still developing)
- The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opens Tuesday, Oct. 13, for its next deposit from genebanks around the world (Crop Trust event listing)
- EPA and the health department have agreed to coordinate research on glyphosate's health risks, and public comments on the studies EPA will use are open through Nov. 23 (No-Till Farmer roundup, Oct. 6, citing Iowa Capital Dispatch)
What did I miss? If you read something this week that belongs here, leave the link in the comments and I'll look at it for next Sunday. The longer version of why I care about all this is in the film, Open Sesame: The Story of Seeds.
Seed Sunday summarizes reporting from the linked sources. Commentary reflects the author's personal opinions.