On a warm and sunny day last fall, a handful of horticultural students from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW-Madison) descended on Elderberry Hill Farm, a small CSA just across the lake from campus. They were harvesting carrots: orange, yellow, and purple; skinny and fat; stubby and elongated.

Photo of University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student, Claire Luby, by Sevie Kenyon, UW-Madison CALS.

With a care and precision not normally associated with carrot harvest, they logged the numbered tags for each small row, selected about a dozen of the better specimens, and bagged them for further study back in the lab. As they worked, they bantered about breeding technology, how long grad school takes, food politics, and the ethics of genetic engineering.

This carrot project led by Claire Luby has radical intent. The season before the UW-Madison grad student had collected seeds for every commercially available carrot cultivar she could find in the U.S.—142 in all. She’d sorted them and run a series of cross pollinations. Now they were harvesting the fruit of that cross. It’s standard practice among plant breeders to mix populations this way just to see what happens—to explore what’s hiding in the DNA. And that’s a part of her mission.

But Luby is also trying to stake out some intellectual property for future carrot breeders. In the last year alone, 15 patents have been filed for carrot varieties, primarily by one company. Some academic plant breeders are increasingly concerned by the economic concentration of seed companies and the concurrent growth of plant patents. What kind of operating room does that leave for academics and farmers?

There’s not an abundance of data, but in the European Union in 2011, the top five seed companies applied for 91% of intellectual property rights. Luby’s graduate project is to map this patent thicket to determine the current operating room in carrot breeding. But she’s also planting a flag. “What we’d like to do is then release some of these populations under the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) so that the diversity remains available to use for breeding,” she explains.

The OSSI is a small but growing organization of breeders concerned about these entangling webs of intellectual property restrictions. Since the 1980s, UW-Madison rural sociologist Jack Kloppenburg has been arguing that economic consolidation of seed companies and the global proliferation of intellectual property restrictions is endangering the tradition of plant breeding, and with it, potentially, our food supply.

The OSSI hopes to build an open-source culture for plant germplasm to mirror the system first pioneered by software developers in the 1990s. These activists promoted universal access to technology through a special license: Developers can use this licensed code so long as they allow others to work with it under the same terms.

The OSSI has discarded the license idea in part because of differences between patent and copyright law and because it’s too complicated to implement. Instead, they’ve settled on a pledge: breeders make their seeds available without restrictions on use and ask the recipients of those seeds to make the same commitment.

“Our ambitions are to actually build a separate pool of germplasm that is ethically based,” Kloppenburg explains. It’s governed as a public trust resource and not by fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders.

Despite the soaring fortunes of various food movements, he sees an uphill battle. “Few people understand what plant breeding is,” he says. A seed is a seed is a seed, and most people don’t see the decades—even centuries and millennia—of culture and care that created it.

Continue reading this story in the November 2015 issue of CSA News magazine.

Want to learn more?

Check out the Intellectual Property Issues in Plant Breeding special section in the November–December 2015 issue of Crop Science.