I. Seed -Where Information Hits the Ground, the Highway, or the Light
A.Genetics
B.Environment
C.Economy and Roadkill

II. Whole Farm Ecology
A.Cycles of Energy and Matter
B.Seres, Edges, and Emergent Qualities of Ecosystems
C.Being Plants, Pests, Predators, and Pathogens-It's Just a Job
D.Diversity and Stability

III. Impact of Seed Growing On the Farmscape Ecology
A.The Soil Seed Bank, An Engrained Memory of Landscape
B.Crop Architecture and Period; Canopy and Biomass
C.Power of Flowers-Nectar and Pollen as a Resource
D.Complex Carbon-Lignin, Humus, and Mulch Spider Digs
E.The New Soil Seed Bank-Habits, Help, and Hazards of Volunteers
F.The New Farmscape Ecology

IV.Integrating Seed Growing With Vegetable Production
A.Own Use or Commercial Scale?
B.The Trouble and Rewards of Double Cropping
C.Insectary Borders, Hedges, and Leys
D.Intercropping Seed With Vegetable Production
E.Seed Guilds

V.Making Money From the Seed-Truly the Hard Part
A.By Not Purchasing Seed You Make Money (?)
B.By Selling to Seed Companies...(?)
C.By Selling Direct to Consumers...(?)
VI. Conclusion: Growing Seed Will Mix Up Your Farm, Generally for Good

I. Seed- Where Plant Information Hits the Ground, the Highway, or the Light

Seed is the embodiment of a plant population's evolutionary and adaptive history, right up to the the moment of ripening. A ripe seed is a message across generations-This worked! It is also an ark, bearing all the essentials to begin settlement in a new time and place-conveyance, anchor, geosensitive and hydrophilic probe, water and selective ion pumps, self-assembling photosynthetic array, with stored energy and nutrients sufficient for a one month boot-up period...and a very dense library. A seed is an elegant piece of bioengineering any way you analogize it. Seed is also great food, both for it's concentrated nutritive content and its storage ability. Seed feeds ecosystem consumers through periods when photosynthesis is largely shut down, and gradually returns high quality plant nutrients to the soil surface as it is digested, decomposes, or germinates into futile circumstances. As food above or below the soil, seed meal is hard to equal.

A.Genetics
The complete genetic make-up of the plant, its genome, is a set of DNA instructions for the production of proteins, including enzymes, that underpin all the metabolic processes of the entire life cycle. The genomes of plants in an ecosystem are in some sense the species' collective impression of the landscape and its visiting inhabitants. Every genome still putting seeds into the world is offering an impression of the latest key to success. It is also an archive of genetic "ideas" that were useful at some time in the past, but have since been muted("turned off"), by environmental influences. Recent studies demonstrate that environmental stress from heat, drought, pests or pestilence can induce protein-mediated genetic switching that result in novel traits that persist across generations, even when the stress is removed. This hidden genetic diversity helps explain the remarkable adaptive plasticity of plant species. It also explains the recent surprising find that flowering plants contain nearly as many genes as humans despite a plant's comparative simplicity. Plant are not showing all their potential abilities at once. This has come as a revelation to evolutionary theorists and to plant breeders, who have assumed that the expression of new traits always requires new genes, derived either by crossing with other populations that contain new genes, or by random mutation of existing genes.

B.Environment
The plant's environment, the outside world that every genome remembers (more or less), also sets limits on the lifeforms every aspect-size, shape, pigmentation pattern, family number, range, and tastes. Additionally, the environment will change the genome over time by repeated insistence that only certain patterns of protein expression will be able to reproduce, and that some will reproduce better than others. The environment includes the climate and geology (swirling cycles of energy and material), and the living (everything compelled to eat, claim territory, and repeat). The natural environment is a complex blend of challenge and opportunity, patterned by daily and seasonal cycles of entrained energy flows and conditions that alternately encourage one species community after another. The progressive nature of ecology implies that change is the norm and that one community is just prep work for the next. Farmers and gardeners face this fact regularly and expend considerable time, energy, and materials trying to keep their ecological youth. The nurturing environment that gardeners and fortunate farmers can create mutes the challenging, degradative, and opportunistic tendencies of the environment toward our food crops. Better genetics will never supplant great soil and good gardening in providing the best yields of quality food. It is equally true that no amount of care or compost will coax wheat from it's cousin quackgrass, or make a bland tomato great- though it may make it better, and the grass greener and seedier.

C.Economy and Roadkill.

The progressing economy of nature puts a high value on every experimental opportunity to find optimal genetics for the next generation. In the case of small seeds and insects, the strategy for progress is in the numbers. The overwhelming portion of every natural crop becomes food and fertility, to the benefit of the survivors. Lots of genetic individuals are spread across the opportune site, the grace and challenges of climate and other life impress upon the expression of the functional genes in those individuals. Those who survive have some combination of good genes and good luck. By the end of that seed and breeding season, a new genomic imprint represents the latest memory of the landscape for best success in the next cycle. There are no favorites, no protected interests, nothing too big or precious to fall. There is inertia, there are reserves, there are escapes-and in this there is the persistence to try again and again those survival strategies that have brought the ecosystem community to this stage. Running concurrent with this persistant conservative genetic strategy is the adaptive tinkering that every generation endures and commonly brushes aside...when life is fine. When life is not fine, it may be that the outcast mutant is a sudden superhero. But much more commonly it is the slightly modified versions of the old success story that move the species ahead, and keep the ecosystem community looking the same as it ever was, in recent memory.

II.Whole Farm Ecology.
Farms are ecosystems, albeit very specialized ones rich in human foods. Farmers and crew are the keystone species, low in numbers and huge in impact. Farmers fill a lot of niches in the chain of life on the farm, including biggest grazer and chief predator, and thereby shapes the system by how he "eats." Just as huge though, is the farmer's role as the organizing principle of the agroecosystem. The goal of biological farming is to create a stable agroecosystem, to find the optimal balance between inputs and outputs, between cash crops and fertility crops, between the domestic and the untamed. Optimal is that point where nutrients are recycled before leaching through the root zone or flowing beyond the fence. Optimal is where every pest species has a predator and a parasitoid, and there are always a few pests. Optimal implies stable stacks of filled niches-a lot of jobs and full employment. The best farmscapes use longlived trees and islands of perennial crops to provide shelter and create stable coherent communities that biologically support the annually productive pioneer commuities that are our crops.

A.Cycles of Energy and Matter
Ecosystems are the total product of local geology being processed by climatic energy and the biological community. As these flows of energy and material pass through the farm system they shape or perturb existing structures and communities driving the process called succession. As the ecosystem matures it develops new internal subcycles that entrain energy and nutrients within the community of bacteria, microorgaisms, fungi, animals, and plants. These internal exchanges trap resources within the community while becoming ever more effecient at gathering and utilizing sunlight, mining and absorbing minerals, and synthesizing more complex biochemicals and enduring perennial structures. As an analogy, one can visualize a newly tilled field as having the absorptive and structural qualities of a sheet of paper, while the old forest is a big natural sponge.

B.Succession, Edges, and Emergent Qualities of Ecosystems-Each stage of succession is refered to as a sere. Following some catastrophic land clearing event-fire, flood, clear-cut, or tillage-the first sere is the pioneer community, made up primarily of annual herbaceous plants, especially the swift, the windblown, and those waiting in the soil seed bank for just such an opportunity. The pioneers quickly canopy bare soil, often in nearly monocultural stands of succulent leafy growth. This is food for grazers large and small; accessible, digestable, and poorly defended. It is also the natural analog to our vegetable fields, and the ancestoral source for most of our annual crop species. The pioneer stage is inherently unstable and exposed. It lacks sufficient subcycles to entrain all the energy that bears upon it, and is subject to overheating, erosion, leaching, and being blown away. With each stage of succession we see a tendency toward stability, an increase in woody perennial structures that provide shelter to soil and community members, and perennial roots and soil organisms that absorb free nutrients and prevent leaching.

A typical succession series in northern temperate climates moves from the annual pioneers to perennial grasslands. Provided enough rain and freedom from fire this quickly progresses to brush and shrubs, then short lived trees requiring full sunlight for establishment, followed by more complex long-lived forests that can regenerate beneath a full canopy. With each stage the biological community thickens, measured either from deepest root tip to highest stem, or by its ability to seive nutrients and energy out of the climate-driven flow. Because neither energy or water flow evenly over the landscape, but are entrained and channeled by the landscape, the ecosystem develops as a community mosaic of its own making, an autopoietic landscape, shaped first by geology and weather, and later by the biology that lives between the two.

Within this landscape mosaic are the edge zones between sere types, where forest species can take advantage of brush or meadow resources. These edges often contain more species and denser populations than are found within either sere. This is known as the edge effect, and is generally asscribed as having the best of both worlds. This is not the ideal for all species, but humans are eager to be edge dwellers, with a particular attachment to shore and riverfront property. Certainly the first farms were by a river, as are the oldest and most populated cities. Boundries are often endowed with extra solar energy, extra nutrients and water, sheltering nooks and bays, and more resources.

As ecosystem communities mature throughout the succession process they develop new emergent qualities that previous stages did not possess. Among these are resilience to perturbation, increasing niches with stacked functions, and increased species diversity. While pioneer communities are rich in food for vegetarians, and grasslands are the mainstay for big grazers that are the main course for big predators, and the brush and sun loving trees provide our sweet desserts, the climax communities are primarily rich in food for decomposers. The photosynthetic energy of mature systems goes into longlived woody perennial structures rather than fast growing annual tissues and energy rich seed and fleshy fruits. Though climax forest ecosystems are the the most energetically and materially effecient terrestrial landscapes, most of the annual yield comes in the form of litter on the forest floor, where detritus feeders, fungi, and bacteria return it to the soil as humus and free nutrients in the root zone. These are not good feeding grounds for heavy animals like us and our kin, but they are rich in other resource values, including biochemical complexity. Most of the energy impinging on old growth and mature forests is absorbed my multiple photosynthetic layers beneath the main canopy, by the waving of stout woody branches in storm winds, by countless leaves between the sky and the soil. Life in a mature sere is denser and more secure in its future prospects than life just after the fire in the pioneer days, which is exactly why we want the qualities of mature communities as part of our farm ecosystems even as we require the annual digestive productivity of the pioneering landscape. This implies the wisdom of landscape diversity in order to combine the stabilizing, sheltering, and recycling qualities of mature seres with the annual yield of young ones. It also suggests that adding more qualities of mature systems to our fields, like species diversity and sheltering plant structures, may foster some other emergent qualities of such communities, including stability in the face of challenge.

C.Being Plants, Pests, Predators, and Pathogens-It's Just a Job.
In that seeds create plants in an otherwise bare landscape, we can say seeds create jobs on the farm. Every plant both fills a nich and creates an opportunity for some other life's work. Grazing, pollinating, colonizing, decomposing and seed dispersing-these are all important niches from the standpoint of the plant as well as those doing the work and getting good return for their time and energy. Even disease organisms have their benefit to the plant population, just as large predators have a beneficial net effect on grazing herds. Something has to thin populations to avoid overcrowding, overgrazing, and the episodic population crashes that follow these unsteady states. The presence ot plant pests serves a similar function, and from a pest predator's point of view, there must always be a few pests. Without steady low levels of aphids, populations of lady beetles, lacewings, syrphid flies, and parasitoid wasps can't regenerate among the crops, and this can lead to boom bust cycles of crops, pests, and beneficials.

D.Diversity and Stability.
The more kinds of employment a community has to offer, the steadier that community's economy will be in the face of incidental insult or general downturn in conditions. This is equally true of human and ecosystem communities, and the general trend is for niche and species number and diversity to increase with sere maturity, just as the number and diversity of jobs and skills increase as communities grow from crossroads to village to city. Dynamic stability is one of the emergent qualities of mature, diverse, autopoietic (self made) ecosystems. The question for conscious agroecologists is whether we can design and implement functional farms that will evolve into fully functional ecologies capable of effecient nutrient recycling, self-regulating pest and pathogen control, and economic production. In truth, this is an unanswered question, a work in progress.

III.The Impact of Seed Growing On the Farmscape Ecology
The remainder of this discussion centers on the vegetable farm, which in it's most extreme manifestations (chemically managed lettuce monocultures) would rank as the least diverse, least stable, pioneer communities that we might design. The food chain above the soil is very short and straight; there is the crop and those creatures that eat the crop, with only the farmer between them to fill all the functions necessary for crop protection. The farmer is charged with "eating" a lot of little creatures, including weeds, before they eat or outcompete the vegetables. In a better designed vegetable agroecology, crop species with different pest/pathogen profiles are interspersed in space and timing (crop rotation) to help escape pest and pathogen species. Some weed species can be managed to further diversify the crop landscape and attract beneficial insect species. By interrupting the monoculture landscape, managed volunteer species in the planted field can benefit the crop yield and quality through fostering beneficial insect and spider habitat amid the crops. More species of plants invite more species of insects. With each new species come opportunities for new food relationships, and food relationships are the essence of community balance, that is, which species are plentiful or scarce. The population dynamics between species in the food web are ever-fluctuating, the result of season, weather, and the introduction of new species by the wind or wing, an overturned seed bank, or the farmer. Once such systems are established, they will continue to further diversify and stabilize over time, evolving more feedback cycles that dampen sudden change or disturbance to the community. This is all dependent, however, on the continued participation of the keystone species in this system. That is, if the organizing behaviors of the farmer change or cease, the fundamental relationships within the whole agroecology change. This is because the (vegetable) farmer's overriding influence is to halt succession at the pioneer sere, preventing the change to grassland and brush, thereby allowing community development within the pioneer community. In a similar situation, the North American Central Plains were maintained in a grassland sere since the last Ice Age by a shortage of moisture and ample lightning-caused fire, allowing the evolution of an extremely diverse, stable, and productive landscape. Think of the bison and their role in maintaining such a system.

Another thought provoking example of succession limitation followed by sere community evolution is found in the Pacific Northwest, between the Coast and Cascade Ranges, from California up into British Columbia. Humans have been part of this ecosystem since the end of the glacial period 10,000 years ago. Pollen evidence from lake sediment cores indicate that succession progressed from arctic steppe to open-canopy Ponderosa pine grassland with oak scrub. Following the eruption of Mt. Mazama (now Crater Lake) the climate shifted suddenly to a warmer moister regime that encouraged the establishment of the closed canopy Douglas Fir forests that still dominate the Coast and Cascade Mountains today. These are classic climax forest communities that specialize in food for fungi and other decomposers, which in turn direct nutrients right back to the trees and undergrowth. Poor pickings for people and the grazers that support us. Apparently, the Old People of the valleys west of the Cascades recognized climate change when they saw it, and the effects on their food supply, and they took landscape management under their cultural wing, with fire. The pollen history shows a momentary spike in fir population at the beginning of the modern climate period (just above the layer of Mazama ashfall), followed by a sudden shift to the pre-European valley ecosystem of white oak savanna grasslands. This community is more typical of the lightning-fire limited oak savannas of northern California, except that lightning stops being the pyrogenic agent as one moves north.

We now know that human-managed fire has shaped the valley ecosystems west of the Cascades for 6000 years, engendering a food rich anthropyrogenic landscape that provided the food, medicine, and technology materials for the culture that greeted Europeans by ignoring them, only to die from novel pathogens within three generations. In fact, the Old People cared so little about us, and died so quickly in our presence, that we learned nothing comprehensive about their techniques for producing wild garden crops of all the major food groups-starchy roots, grass fed meat, protein-rich oil seed cake, acorn flour, dried berries, and sugary roots of springbank clover for ceremonial event desserts. The New People finally pieced together our current understanding of this pre-European management style only after the landscape began to change under our own fire-supressive style. Presently, the oak savanna grasslands of the Pacific Northwest are the most endangered ecosystems in the region ( less than 1% of their original range), and all of the food crops natively fostered by the annual anthrogenic fires that followed food rounds of the Old People are now threatened species. For the first time since the Ice Age, because of a change in keystone species behavior, the fir ecosystem has finally claimed what the climate says it may have. Oregon white oak, the climax species within the Old People's wild garden ecology, is now overtopped by the new Douglas fir canopy and has stopped regeneration throughout it's range. Fungi are doing well.

A.The Soil Seed Bank, An Engrained Memory of Landscape.
After any landscape catastrophe or land clearing event, the initial reconstruction plans and biosynthetic resources are in the soil seed bank. Whether laid bare by the elements or the plow, the regreening of bare soil begins when dormant seeds receive a signal-All clear!-often conveyed by a brief exposure to light, the heat of fire, or the chemical constituents of smoke. The required strenght of such signals is no more than a few photons, or degrees, or molecules. Clearly such signals are behaving in the manner of hormonal switches. The seeds are aware, alert for significant messages from the outside. The seeds of the soil represent the plant communities that came before. The larger and more recent and successful the presence, the greater the representation in the seed bank. There is some analogy here between the organizing principle of the seed bank for the ecosystem and the genome for the species. In either case, information regarding past experience, challenge, and success is made physical, literally engrained so that it may pass reliably from generation to generation.

As seed crops are introduced to the crop mix in a farm ecosystem, the seed bank begins to reflect this. Along with the pigweed and barnyard grass come volunteers of the small seeded crops. These may be seen as a mere nusiance, as a den of pathogenic refuge, or as an opportunity to harvest the self-sown, select from the unpampered, and observe the experimentation of the revised seed bank. Over years of seed growing multiple species of volunteers find their way into the seed bank and arise like weeds with every turn of the earth. In mature seed growing systems, these feral wildlings can coalesce into "whole salad" wild gardens representing the same complimentary traits one might design into a rotation scheme, except the diversity is in one community at one time, rather than spread over time.

B.Crop Achitecture and Period; Canopy and Biomass
Vegetable crops seem a tidy lot compared to the floppy and unruly seedbearing stage of life. And it goes on forever from the plant/insect point of view, during which time the entire body of the plant becomes a niche for a community of spiders, sap suckers, leaf chewers, predacious larvae of lady beetles and syrphid flies, and frogs and garter snakes. By contrast, most green vegetables and root crops are short timers and lack the flowers, top biomass/surface area, and longevity that fruiting and seed bearing plantings provide to the field community. A block of blooming broccoli in the midst of an otherwise tilled field is the insectary for the following crop. If the broccoli is full of aphids with few predators, woe arugula sown nearby. If the opposite balance is the initial condition, the arugula and other crops may be aphid free throughout their life cycles. The canopy provided by maturing seed plants creates a seasonal understory and sheltered soil surface. The seed plant's stems and mature leaves return complex carbon compounds like cellulose and lignin to the soil surface as general predator and decomposer habitat, later incorporated as stable humus. The soil building effeciency of mature plant residues exceeds that of quick "catch crops" or immature cover crops.

C.Power of Flowers-Nectar and Pollen as a Resource
Flowers are the among the most potent sensory signals on the landscape, attracting the eyes and chemical sensors of all species, either as an invitation or warning. On the farm, the number and diversity of flowering species in a mature system is generally correlated to the diversity of insect species in the system. This isn't surprising since insects and flowers have been involved in coevolutionary embrace since the veiled origin of flowering species. The nectar of blossoms provides flying insects, especially parasitoids and the adult stage of larval predators (like lady beetles and syrphid flies), with the sugar-power to fly in constant search of caterpillar or aphid-bearing plants for egg-laying sites. Some beneficial species require high protein pollen-feeding prior to egg production. Certain plant families are especially attractive to small beneficials, like parasitiod wasps, because their nectar is readily accessible even to those with small mouth parts-umbels, composites, and crucifers are prime examples of important crop families with superior insectary qualities. One goal of agroecosystem management is to maintain a rich florascape throughout the year to encourage early beneficial populations and to maintain reproductive habitat for a constant population that keeps pest numbers low.

Some blooming weeds fill calander niches more effeciently than flowering crops. Chickweed is a potent insectary wildling that is edible and sought after for salad, easily managed among crops, and is the earliest source of nectar and pollen for an orgy of syrphids, lady beetles, microwasps, and robber flies in March and April. Lambs quarter and some relatives are drought tolerant summer wildlings with nutritious leaves and late summer flowers visited by honeybees and autumn syrphid species for pollen. Mint and composite family plants often persist in bloom beyond early frosts of autumn, attracting syrphid and robber flies still in search of aphid and root maggot infested plants. Syrphid larvae eat far more aphids during cool autumn conditions than lady beetles or their larvae.

Future Sections:

D.Complex Carbon-Lignin, Humus, and Mulch Spider Digs.
E.The New Soil Seed Bank-Habits, Help, and Hazards of Volunteers
F.The New Farmscape Ecology

IV.Integrating Seed Growing With Vegetable Production
A.Own Use or Commercial Scale?
B.The Trouble and Rewards of Double Cropping
C.Insectary Borders, Hedges, and Leys
D.Intercropping Seed With Vegetable Production
E.Seed Guilds

V.Making Money From the Seed-Truly the Hard Part
A.By Not Purchasing Seed You Make Money (?)
B.By Selling to Seed Companies...(?)
C.By Selling Direct to Consumers...(?)

VI. Conclusion: Growing Seed Will Mix Up Your Farm, Generally for Good