GMO Seeds & How to Avoid Them

Hey pioneers. Welcome to episode number 419. Today's episode we are going to be talking about GMO seeds for the backyard gardener and the recent changes that you need to be aware of. So prior to now, backyard gardening seeds were not something that you could go and purchase genetically modified seeds for the backyard gardener. You could go if you were a large agriculture and you would actually get a certificate and you would buy in large amounts. Genetically modified seeds, soy, corn are some of our typical larger crops that are grown, genetically modified and where you would find those seeds. Now, I have an entire article that walks you through the difference of those. We will talk about them a little bit in today, but we'll also be linking to other videos either beneath this. If you're watching this on YouTube in the video description or if you're listening to this the old-fashioned way of podcasts, you can go to Melissaknorris.com/419 because this is episode number 419 and we'll have lots of resources and links to their articles and different things like that for you in the blog post that accompanies today's episode.

But in recent news, there has been a brand new genetically modified tomato seeds, specifically that has been released to the general public. In the article where we have seen this rollout happen, you've probably seen it shared, I've seen it come up on my feed on social media multiple times, and the new tomato variety contains purple antioxidants called anthocyanins, the healthy nutrients in blueberries, blackberries and eggplants. This is thanks to bioengineering approach that combines tomatoes with two genes from an edible flower, specifically the snapdragon and Norfolk's tomatoes are the only varieties that have purple antioxidants in the flesh and the skin. Now, there are lots of purple varieties of tomatoes in the heirloom and open pollinated seed market that we already have access to. So the argument here is that the purple antioxidants in non-genetically modified tomato strains don't have that all throughout the flesh and the skin like this new one does.

So it is more prolific in it. There's also in the article that the company did a survey. Now how large was the survey? What was the population that they were doing this survey to? I don't know any of those answers. I didn't see that listed in here. But it says that 80% of American consumers are interested to eat, purchase, and grow the purple tomato, knowing that it is bio-engineered, often referred to as GMO or genetically modified organism and only 5% of consumers were not interested. Now, I found that very fascinating. Perhaps it's because I hang out with a lot of homesteaders and seed savers and backyard gardeners. I don't know if that statistic is true or not, but we do need to clear up some terminology because I've seen a lot of people discussing what does open pollinated, what does heirloom mean? What does hybrid mean?

What does GMO or bioengineer seeds mean? There's actually a lot of confusion and misinformation. That could be an entire nother podcast, quite honestly, because if you've just Googled something, the way that Google polls its different search results that you see is when I did this on what open pollinated means, I was very curious to see what Google said. You basically see the same little snippet of what it thinks open pollinated means repeated among all of the top search results. Now, it's not necessarily wrong because what it says, open pollinated is, is true for all plants. So it's not wrong on the open pollinated definition, but that is not actually what makes a plant open pollinated. So you have to take... When you're learning about something, just doing a Google search does not necessarily mean that you're getting the in-depth full picture. So we see a lot of people are curious and they're looking it up and because the way that Google displays, there's science behind it basically and algorithms and they're constantly changing.

Google constantly is updating their search criteria on what ranks and what doesn't. So it's constantly changing, going through evolutions, but they have to, there's millions of websites out there, and if there wasn't some type of criteria when you went to search for something, you wouldn't be able to find anything. Now, do they always get it right? No. Some updates are a little more horrendous on the results that you get versus others. But I guess what I'm trying to say is really know the source that you are learning and gathering information from. Multiple sources is best, and really with the rise of AI and even books now is looking at who wrote it, how long have they been doing the thing that they're talking about? What is their actual level of expertise?

Is it from a published book that wasn't self-published? Sometimes that can be a little bit harder to find or not, because just because a book is listed on Amazon, anybody can write a book and put it on Amazon. On one hand, that's great, right? Because there's not really this gateway. But on the other hand, you have to then do your own due diligence on what the sources that you're getting this, especially now even with AI, so not to be doom and gloom, but people are getting a lot of misinformation and you see it a lot on social media comments on what terminology actually means. So let's dive into that right now. What is a hybrid plant? A hybrid plant is not a genetically modified or a GMO plant. There's a lot of people that think that those mean the same thing, and they do not mean the same thing in any way, shape or form.

A hybrid plant in botany is the offspring of two plants of different varieties. So same plant family. So you could have two different types of beans, right? Those, you'd have one variety here and one variety here, and you mix those together and you get a new variety, that is a hybrid plant. We see this within tomatoes, for example. You might have one tomato over here that is really prolific but tends to crack, and you could have another tomato variety over here that doesn't tend to crack, but maybe it's not as prolific. So you would breed those two plants together to try to get the desirable traits from each plant into this one new variety. But we are talking about same species.

They have to be really closely related in order to interbreed. When you are talking about hybrid, you cannot take a raspberry, for example, and naturally cross-breed that with a pepper plant. It doesn't work. They're not the same species. So hybridization can be done in a lab and we're going to talk about that, but hybridization can also be done at home. You can create your own hybrid varieties by allowing them to breed together. Oftentimes when people don't actually understand botany and seed saving, they do that by accident. A lot of the varieties of plants that we have now are hybrids that have been stabilized and they are now cultivators and varieties that we all know and love, and it's been over sometimes centuries, right? Or even 20 years, 50 years, et cetera. So hybrids in and of themselves are not a bad thing at all.

You have natural hybrid however, and then you have the hybrid, F1 hybrid plant specifically that most people are buying from seed companies. So hybrid one plants are the first generation of crossing or mixing two varieties together. So if you have, in my example of the tomatoes where you're trying to get a specific thing from this tomato versus this tomato, or it could be whatever characteristic you're looking for and you're trying to breed those together, the first time that you breed those and you get that mixed tomato variety, that's an F1 hybrid plant. So what that means is that has not been stabilized. So with most of the varieties that you buy from seed packets that are hybrids that we're getting from seed companies, grocery stores, wherever it is, you may purchase them, most of those are F1s. So that means in a very controlled environment, can be in a lab, et cetera.

They are crossing these two together, whatever their crosses are, and that's what's going out. However, if you then try to seed save from that F1 hybrid, it's not been stabilized yet. So most likely whatever you seed save and grow from that is going to revert back to one of the parent plants. Sometimes there's sterility, there can be germination rate issues and oftentimes it reverts back to one of the parent plants in an undesirable way. I had this happen before, I truly, this was 22 years ago before I really understood cross-pollination and all of the different breeding and how that works and what F1 hybrids were. So I had a zucchini plant and it sprouted and grew in the garden from what we had grown the year... From a F1 hybrid seed from the store. It was a beautiful zucchini plant. It produced gorgeous, black, really nice zucchini.

However, because it was an F1 hybrid, it reverted back and even though they looked pretty, they were the most bitter inedible zucchini, we ended up pulling the plant. You couldn't pretty it up in a cake. I don't care how much sugar and chocolate you put on that thing or whatever you did with it, it was... They were inedible. That is a very common thing with your F1 hybrids. Now you can take an F1 hybrid and if you have enough F1 hybrids and you grow them and then you seed save from them the next year and what it's produced, you get something that's desirable, then you have to keep seed saving from a large enough pool and replanting and only seed saving and replanting from the desirable traits, and you can grow them out over time until it becomes stabilized as to what you want in a predictable manner.

So every time you have seed saved from it and then you've grown it out, you keep getting the exact same thing. That you can do. That's how we get basically new varieties. But when you take an F1 hybrid and try to do that, you have to have a large enough scale and the patients to do that over and over and over again throughout the generations until it stabilizes. So with an F1 hybrid that you may have purchased this from garden seed store, it's very hard to actually get that. So that is what we're talking about when we talk about hybrids and then the difference between F1 hybrids and then so on and so forth. Now, F1 hybrid plants can be great to grow because you can just go to the seed companies, wherever you're purchasing your garden seed, you can get them, you can grow them.

A lot of them have been bred to be disease resistant, to be prolific, to ship well, lots of different things that... Properties that have been chosen to be bred into these specific varieties, but you cannot sustainably seed save from those and expect a harvest and a growth like you can from heirloom and open pollinated seeds. We're going to talk about the difference between heirloom and open pollinated seeds in a minute because that's where I have seen a lot of descriptions lately that aren't quite accurate on what that means. However, genetically modified seeds, those are now available to home gardens. The first one is this genetically modified tomato seed. Previously to this, it was only for commercial growers. So hybrid plants originate from breeding techniques that have long been used by humans where GMOs are a modern innervation that they're created in a lab by inserting non-related specific genes into the genetic material of a plant.

So for example, with this tomato, they are taking snapdragon, which is a flower, and they're putting those genes into this tomato plant that could never cross normally in nature. With other types of GMO seeds, we've seen with corn where they actually have altered the DNA so that it is round up resistance, meaning you can spray the corn fields with Roundup to kill all the weeds, but it won't actually kill the corn. It just absorbs it. It's in part of its DNA where you would never have Roundup, which is not a natural occurring thing that would ever be in the DNA of a plant unless it was done in a lab. So sometimes GMO seeds are done for... Be able to use herbicides, excuse me, herbicides not pesticides is what I meant to say, that it won't kill it. Other times it is even putting in the DNA of animals that can be put into a plant, there was a genetically modified apples that got approved so that they don't turn brown when you cut them.

There's been genetically modified, actually salmon, but that fortunately hasn't shown much interest. So the company has kind of slowed down and I believe has decided to pull the plug on that program. So my point with though that genetically modified seeds can never occur in nature, it's not something that we have been doing in consuming as a species for hundreds and thousands of years like we have with hybrid seeds. So what are some of the concerns about genetically modified seeds and some genetically modified crops? Well, one is we don't actually have long-term studies on consuming genetically modified things to know what it does and what long-term implications there are. Honestly, we have become the experiment because they allowed them into the food system without long-term studies. Whether or not you think it's good or bad, that is the truth. So some of the main concerns is allergies because if you don't know exactly what things were spliced into their DNA and a lot of people have a lot of different allergies, could you then be allergic to it and not even know because you didn't know it was GMO or not?

Because in the United States, we don't have labeling laws that make them put if it's bio-engineered or even what it's been spliced with on the labels. So GMO contain foreign genes, right? So this could promote or prompt, I should say, allergic reactions. Now, according to the FDA, the researchers who develop GMO foods run tests. Again, here we have the researchers who are developing it can run their own tests, I'm sure they wouldn't skew them at all, to ensure that allergens aren't transferred from one food to another. Research suggests that GMO foods are no likely to trigger allergies in their non GMO counterparts, but there are multiple tests and we will link to this in the blog post that accompanies this episode to these sources. If you want to go and check them out yourself, which you should, we have data that shows the opposite. For example, bean plants that were genetically modified to increase cysteine and methionine content were discarded after the discovery that the expressed protein of the transgene was highly allergenic.

This is from Butler and Ricart 1999 study. We'll link to that. Cancer, because cancers are caused by DNA mutations. Some people fear that eating foods with added genes could affect your DNA. The American Cancer Society has stated there is no evidence to link GMO food intake to an increased or decreased risk of cancer, and there is no evidence that eating GMOs will change your DNA. Again, though we don't have long-term human research on this, I am not someone who blindly trusts that it's not likely or there's no evidence linking it to it. I don't want to be an experiment and a Guinea pig, I'll just be quite honest. So I have avoided GMOs for over a decade. I have noticed an increase in my health when I cut them out. Now, herbicide use, as I said, most GMO crops, a lot of them have been bred not all specifically to be resistant to herbicides such as Roundup.

Roundup and its active ingredient glyphosate are subject to controversy because animals and test tube studies have linked them to various diseases. There's new evidence that glyphosate exposure can increase the relative risk of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma by 41%. So all just things that we need to keep in mind. However, one of the things that I actually find very concerning about GMO seeds, especially when it comes to backyard home gardeners, is you guys, genetically modified seeds are patented. We saw this with Monsanto and small farms because the way that plants cross pollinate when it is cross-pollinating varieties.

So that's where you need to know if a plant is self pollinating versus cross-pollinating. So self pollinating plants in a backyard gardening context, most of the time this is going to be tomatoes and legume, so beans, peas and that family. So what that means, whenever we're talking about a vegetable or fruit and you have a blossom, you have the pistol and the stamin, which is the male and the female part, and those two have to connect the pollen from one right... Has to connect together in order to pollinate for that blossom to actually form into the fruit and or vegetable that we're going to be consuming.

Now, it doesn't matter if that is a GMO seed, a heirloom seed, an open pollinated seed or hybrid seed, they all have to get pollinated. However, self pollinating plants, both the stamina and the pistol are inside the blossom. So they actually will pollinate before the blossom even opens. That's why it's easy to seed save at home. You can still sometimes have one where it doesn't actually pollinate before the blossom opens. It will accept pollen from an outside source. That's where you can get some genetic drift. So when you are seed saving those self pollinating plants, there is still some precautions that you take. But overall they're very easy, provided that you actually used open pollinated and or heirloom seeds to begin with, to seed save from. My family has been seed saving our own bean strains, two of them for over a hundred years.

So those are the easiest to keep pure strains and to do seed saving. I did tell you we were going to get back to the difference between heirloom and open pollinated and we will. However, then you've got cross pollinating and that means that you have a plant that it will produce a male and a female blossom, but not in the same blossom. This is where you can get its seed purity. If you want to seed save, you actually have to be aware of this and take measures to make sure that it's not pollinating with different varieties in creating a hybrid one that isn't stabilized yet and that you're keeping your varieties pure because that is important to a lot of people. It is to me. I don't want my varieties crossing. So however, so with things like corn, all of your winter squash, your summer squash, those types of things, those will cross pollinate.

So the problem is that we saw with corn, for example, it's a large genetically modified crop, is that corn would crosspollinate with farms that did not plant GMO corn, which is why almost all sweet corn in the US has traces of GMO in it. It's really infiltrated anything because of cross pollination. But the second problem is Monsanto would actually go and test. If you had corn growing as a farmer in your field and it tested that it was a GMO or had GMO, that DNA in your corn crop and you didn't provide a certificate that you bought that seed from them because it's patented, they sued farmers and it was cross pollination. They weren't illegally or like black market getting this seed and not buying it from the appropriate channels. It had cross pollinated. That's what happens when you put DNA out in the world, in gardens. You cannot contain it. It's going to spread. That's just the way pollination works.

So knowing that it's patented, that means that they can control that. Now, are they going to go after home gardeners? I don't know. I don't have a crystal ball. Legally, could they? Yes. I don't like where our seeds are patented and a food supply like that is under a patent legal system where they can tell you, I own the patent on that. You don't have the right to have this. I'm going to come after you type thing, with garden seed. Why would anybody want to introduce that into their backyard garden? Not me. So when it comes to have our backup just a little bit, to open pollinated and heirloom seeds, what is the different? So open pollinated, what that means is that it is basically like the open source of the genetics, right?

It has not been hybridized at an F1 level. So if it's open pollinated, then you can seed save from that and it's going to come back provided you didn't accidentally have it cross-pollinate in your seed saving efforts with something else. But as long as you have kept that purity, then it will come back true to its parent, what you seed saved it from. So open pollinated is what you need when it comes to seed saving. All heirlooms are open pollinated. However, not all open pollinated seeds are heirlooms. So to be classified as an heirloom, it has to be open pollinated. But some classification say it has to be 50 years or older, whereas it's been that stabilized variety, some say a hundred years. So I generally just go, if it's 50 years or older, then it's considered an heirloom variety. So has to be open pollinated for you to successfully seed save from that. That means it's stabilized.

If you want heirloom because it's an older variety, which I happen to love. The heirloom is also open pollinated. So if you are looking to make sure that it is not genetically modified, that you can seed save it, provided you know how to seed save from that to keep strains pure for your seed saving, then you definitely have to have open pollinated or heirloom is what you're going to be after. So that's why in my garden, that is all we have grown is open heirloom and open pollinated for over 15 years. A lot of it was that beforehand, but I did used to do hybrid squash and different things like that. I have to be honest, I have not noticed personally when we made the transition to all heirloom, open pollinate over 15 years ago, I have not noticed any difference in pest pressure, disease issues, et cetera, because that's an argument I often will see people say.

I have not found that to be true. I have not found that by growing heirloom that I've had a decrease in production or that all of a sudden I have this much higher pest pressure or a lot more disease, et cetera. I have personally have not found that to be true at all in my garden with what we grow here. So I think that this is an important topic for people to know about, just to know what's out there when you are looking at buying garden seed to plant your garden. Also, just to be informed. So prior to a few weeks ago, we just needed to be on guard against the foods that we purchased in the grocery store. When it came, comes I should say, to genetically modified organisms or plants, being a label reader is important. Avoiding foods listed as genetically modified or bio-engineered was something that I always did.

Knowing which fruits and vegetables when you're buying them in a grocery store or a setting where it would be grown commercially and then harvested, knowing which fruits and vegetables are typically high GMO crops, for example, as I said, sweet corn is one of them, soy is one of them, sugar beets could be one of them. However, now it's only going to be a matter of time before more GMO seeds are being sold. So now that's another thing that we need to consider. If you're interested in seed saving and learning more about that, I've got a lot of articles on that. I've got videos on that. I also have actually a full seed saving course if you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of step-by-step. Lots of resources for you there and I recommend everybody learn at least the basics of seed saving.

Now today's sponsor is Azure Standard, and with this one major change in GMO Seeds, I think it's more important than ever to trust your seed source. I have a list of resources of companies that have taken a safe seed pledge or heirloom seed companies. They are out there. You can find them. If you are looking for a great seed source, I've got a post and we'll make sure that we've linked to that. But you can also count on Azure Standard as well. Now, a lot of people know Azure and love them for stocking your pantry and getting your groceries from them, but they also have a gardening section. They have both seeds as well as starts in the spring. So definitely depends on your ordering. But in the spring they have vegetable and flour and some herbs, [inaudible 00:26:59], plants that you can get as well and order from them as well as their garden seeds.

If you have not ordered from them before and it's your first time customer to Azure Standard, make sure to use coupon code Melissa 10 and you get 10% off your first order of $50 or more. As I said, they have Ellie's Eden plants that are usually sold in early March through the first part, kind of the mid-summer. Keep an eye on it because it's definitely as supplies last, but great price and the quality has been incredible. I've gotten vegetables starts from them on things that I was a little bit late, maybe seed starting myself. I actually got a lot of my medicinal perennial plants and a few herbs as well. They have come back year after year. Some of them I'm on the second year. So I've been very happy with the quality of them. Again, you can get that from Azure Standard.

Okay, now on to our verse of the week. This goes back to our conversation about GMOs and really the whole conversation and the thought process on just because we can do something or figured out how to do something doesn't actually mean we should. So for me, this is a little bit more of a conviction as to why I choose not to grow GMO seeds and do my very best to avoid GMO products. So we're going to go back to Genesis. We're in Genesis one chapter, excuse me, chapter one, verse 11 and 12, and this is the amplified translation. God said, let the earth put forth tender vegetation, plants yielding seed and fruit trees yielding fruit, whose seed is in itself, each according to its kind upon the earth and it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds and trees bearing fruit in which there was their seed, each according to its kind.

God saw that it was good, suitable, admirable, and he approved it. So from my faith, if God thought that we needed the extra things throughout the skin and the flesh of the tomato, he would've put it in there. I don't think that we need to be matching DNA in things that he never intended it to be there. I think even with good intentions, we actually can't see the consequence and know what that consequence could be much further down the road. It could be something that shows up soon. It could be something that shows up further down the road. I personally don't think that we need to be messing with things.

If God thought that it needed to be in there and in that DNA, he would've done so when he created it. So that is just my very honest thought on doing DNA manipulation and genetically modified foods and why I choose to not have them in our pantry and I don't want them in my garden. So of course, each person gets to choose for themselves. But I hope that this has given you some food for thought, some things to think about and to do some further investigating on your own. Thank you so much for joining me, and I look forward to being back here with you next week. Blessings and Mason jars for now, my friends.