“When people try to bury you, remind yourself you are a seed.”

- Matshona Dhliwayo

One of the joys of Cullen’s Foods is when business activities coincide with personal interests. So it happens at this time of year, when seed sourcing for Cullen’s growers happens as the catalogues arrive from our favourite garden seed suppliers. There is always something exciting and new to try in the garden, as is the case in the field.

As we enter our sixth growing season on this near-vertical learning curve, seemingly simple questions are revealing more complex answers. In our first year, Cullen’s had one grower named Chad who planted a few acres of “bin run” seed. Bin run works with crops where the product is itself a seed – like beans – and farmers simply hold back some of last year’s inventory to plant the following spring.

Seed companies hate the practice for obvious reasons, but there are other reasons why it is not always a great idea. In relatively humid southern Ontario, it is easy for disease pathogens to build up which can multiply the risk of things like anthracnose or fusarium wilt year after year. “Certified seed” is grown on arid plains of the western US, is germination tested and inspected to be “guaranteed pathogen free”. While Chad got lucky in that first year, you can see that buying good seed is cheap insurance.

If it were always that easy! 

The differences between certified organic and conventional crops start at planting. Conventional growers have an array of seed treatments available to them to further minimize their risk, while the organic standard forbids most conventional seed treatments which therefore requires organic growers to source “untreated seed”.

Seed treatment is a coating of fungicide or insecticide which makes good sense for conventional growers, and because the majority of acres are conventional most of the seed supply is automatically treated. If only we had thought of that early enough! For two years we got seed by scrounging for leftovers, and options were few. 

It was year five before we were finally able to get exactly the seed we wanted, by starting early and putting all the Cullen’s growers seed orders together for a seed dealer in Ontario. There is nothing more annoying for a large seed dealer than a bunch of relatively little untreated seed orders coming in from organic growers that need to be handled separately. We don’t blame them. With this relationship in place, we now have the luxury of selecting for the varieties we want. 

There is a lot of confusion about varieties and genetics in commercial food crops. For many crops, including edible beans (the ones Cullen’s sells), there are no “GMO” varieties available organically or conventionally. Whatever varieties exist have been produced by traditional breeding methods.

The GMO question mostly applies to herbicide-resistant varieties of soybeans and corn, and those would be prohibited under the organic standard. Variety selection has various implications including canning quality, yield potential, and crucially for organic growers: disease resistance.

Farmers naturally want the highest yielding crop, and those varieties tend to dominate the conventional market. However, now that Cullen’s growers can select from a catalogue much like a home gardener, we are finding that some older, “lower yielding” varieties perform better under organic conditions where insect, weed, and disease pressures are higher. Theories abound, and recently Ben had the opportunity to meet with renowned bean breeder and researcher Dr. Peter Pauls at the University of Guelph to express his current thinking.

Peter challenged Ben on the notion that “older is tougher”, adding that high yielding varieties have higher yields in large part because they are also tougher. Hard to argue with the Doctor on that point. We do wonder if other factors are at play, such as response to synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. Despite the ability of beans to fix their own nitrogen out of the atmosphere, it has become common practice for conventional growers to supplement with synthetic fertilizer to further boost yields, whereas synthetic nitrogen is not permitted for organic growers.