From: Geoff Smith (geoffs@unixg.ubc.ca)
Date: Mon Jun 08 1998 - 12:06:49 MDT
There will always be a market for viable-seed plants from home gardeners.
Reseeding plants can save a lot of time, and they also tend to do much
better than the first year's crop (especially with flowers such as
poppies) I assume this is because only the plants that are suited to one's
environmental conditions will go to seed, making the following year's crop
more consisently healthy.
If TT seeds companies ever start using their market share for the "powers
of evil", the companies that cater to home gardeners can enter the farming
business and make a killing.
If anyone is worried that even home gardeners will all switch to TT,
someone should make a "seed-bank" with frozen seeds for all the major
species of plants. In the event that viable-seed plants for certain
species are completely eliminated by disuse, someone can unfreeze some
seeds and enter the market.
I have a feeling this is done for endangered plants, except that instead
of freezing the plants are grown in a large endangered-plant farm. I
think this is an important initiative: just compare the number of types of
apple (probably around 100), to the number of types that exist at your
local grocery (probably no more than 4). The other apples are not getting
used since they don't keep as well-- if they were not grown they would
disappear forever, which would be a very silly mistake. How hard do you
think it would be to sell a bunch of health-conscious, enviro-friendly,
trendy yuppies some short-keeping specialty apples? It would be tragic to
miss a business opportunity like that because no one though to freeze a
few seeds.
Geoff.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:49:10 MST