Scott Williams

Down to Earth Seeds

Scott has always been associated with agriculture. He began as a diesel technician working on farm tractors and heavy equipment. He and his family have an organic farm that produces all their meat, dairy, and vegetables. He promotes communities working together and local sales of farm products. He raises grass fed beef and poultry and uses intensive grazing with his herd of belted galloway cattle. He has been watching the food system for 35 years and sees the decline in quality and nutrition in commercial food production. His family has produced vegetables for the farmers’ market for 10 years, and puts up most of their own food each year.

Presentation

What Happened to Our Food System? (if you really want to know)

Scott began his most recent trip in understanding what is going on, in 1998. A friend had gotten into the business of supplying food for people concerned with Y2K. He encouraged Scott to put together a kit of non-hybrid heirloom vegetable seeds. Scott did a lot of research and ended up learning from the Seed Storage Lab in Colorado. He learned that seed has three causes of losing germination. The first is heat. The second is moisture and the third is air that will transfer moisture. So he learned how to dry down the seeds, test them so that they were at the optimum moisture content according to the Seed Storage Lab, and package them so they would last 50 years with good germination. His company is the only one (as far as he knows) that produces a seed kit to last for 50 years.

Then began the search for a supply of good quality open-pollinated seed. He soon learned that most seed companies did not grow their own seed. They bought wholesale and repackaged the seed. The more research he did, the more he realized that our whole food system is in the hands of a very few large corporations. In the past 14 years, he has watched as some of these corporations were bought out by the others, leaving even fewer in control. He recognized that these same corporations that produced most of the seed, patented GMO’s and non-hybrid seeds. They also dealt in fertilizers, as well as much of the food production, from the growing of the crop to the packaging and wholesaling to the grocery store.