The misunderstood magic of hybrid seeds

(and why you still should not buy them)

Some cuties out of my bean collection, gathered over several years from Austria seed savers exchange via mail, the Dutch farm museum, my mother’s garden, a British friend and an urban garden in Berlin. One of these is a F1 hybrid (read to the end to find out which one!)

Recurring incidence: you talk to people about seed saving, maybe at a plant swap or in a random eco green event and sooner or later somebody mentions that „big mafia seed companies designed seeds that cannot replicate in order to make you dependent on them“.

At this utterance my face usually contorts (at least in my inner world). Why? I am all for seed saving, food sovereignty and seeds true to seed. The importance of these is grossly underrated in our world. And absolutely yes, there is a monopolistic seed market out there that works hard on destroying all of these goals and values and we should cultivate resistance against it. But there is a very common confusion between the ecological intricacies of hybrid F1 seeds and the legal ban on replicating patented plant genomics through seed saving and replanting (a narrative that became widely known around the cases of US American farmers who were sued when replicating seeds with a tolerance to glyphosate, the RoundUp Ready corn and soy bean varieties).

If you happen to garden or farm in Europe, there is very little (as a farmer) to no chance (as a gardener) that genetically modified seeds will ever cross your way as they are, under very few exceptions, not allowed to be used or traded on the European market. What many people in Europe mean when they ramble about seeds that cannot be replicated are actually F1 hybrid seeds. They make up the vast majority of the European seeds both in farming and gardening. If you ever saved and replanted seed from a supermarket tomato, you might have experienced what the disappointing issue with them is: the tomatoes of that offspring look and taste nothing like the one you got from the supermarket.

What many people seem to think is that this is due to a greedy design method of seed companies. And though there is surely an element of greed in how these seed types enable profit by forcing people to rebuy such seeds instead of recultivating them, the genetic make up of hybrid seeds is simply part of the magic of genetic reproduction. Hybridization is is happening between to (somewhat different) parent plants making love and that is something that happened well before any proto-human ever walked the Earth. Due to evolutionary law (who of you had their eyes and ears peeled enough in school to remember Mendelian law of inheritance?), the offspring of this cross (the hybrid or the F1 (filial hybrid) which is something you often read on a conventional but sometimes also organic seed package) often has many desired effects due to the so-called Heterosis effect (I tried to write this down in short words but it’s too complex to press into this text, so see the full story (featuring mules, fruitflies and psychoactive plants) on Wikipedia.

This is why F1 hybrids are very often found in the plant production world as they tend to have desired traits, such as large fruit, certain resistances or vigor. And this is why seed companies like to sell seed which have these traits, also in the organic seed market. The narrative that this mechanism was invented by seed companies is a myth and I do not find this myth helpful in navigating the complex intertwinings of humans, seeds and capitalism.

All of that being said, the widespread use of F1 hybrid seeds for food production does produce many problematic issues, such as that breeding commercial F1s is a costly, black-box technology that is difficult to reproduce. It also actively threatens seed sovereignty by undermining the knowledge and practice of preserving cultural heritage and adapted land races which in turn could be crucial to breed forward from in times of climate crisis.

So I personally prefer to use seed true to seed in my garden so I can enjoy the beauty of carrying their genetic heritage forward by taking their seed and sharing them. I do not sneer at F1s either though if they cross my path such as in the case of the brown bean in the opening photo which was given to me by a British friend, a bush bean that produces purple pods and was pretty cool to look at.

Hopefully my nerdy excursion could shine a light on the magic, rather than corporate intention, that is behind the existence of the heterosis effect and hybrid seeds.

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