Becoming a Market Society 7taproot could penetrate fifteen feet or more belowground. Its deep
roots improved soil structure and hosted bacteria that supplied it with
nitrogen. Its flowers supported bees that produced honey. Its foliage
provided habitat for wildlife, including cover for pheasants. Cut when
it reached nearly three feet in height, alfalfa consistently produced three
crops of hay each year, which we fed to cattle and occasionally sold to
others.
More than any other crop, alfalfa drove the viability of our farm. Its
added value was a fraction of the price paid. Even today, a pound of seed
(some 00,000 seeds) sells for around three to five dollars in bulk. An
acre (three-quarters of a football field) uses four million seeds. Back
then, the cost of alfalfa seed was minor compared with the annual fuel
bill or property taxes. We likely paid more for the baling wire that bound
cut alfalfa together than for the seed that produced it.
Typical of farmers at the time, my father sometimes stored excess
seed, shared it with other farmers, or experimented. Seed was to farmers
what knives were to chefs or wrenches to mechanics. Not only did seeds
and farmers go together, they defined what farming was all about.
It is not surprising to me that when Congress enacted the first Pat-
ent Act in 790 , seeds were not included. While its leaders sought
to encourage innovations that were “sufficiently useful and impor-
tant,” they excluded products of nature. This was not because seeds were
unimportant. It was Thomas Jefferson, the first patent office adminis-
trator, who said that “the greatest service which can be rendered to any
country is to add a useful plant to its culture.” And when John Adams
assumed the presidency from George Washington, he directed overseas
consuls to collect rare seeds, which were then shipped by the navy and
distributed by the Treasury.
Awarding patent protection to seeds would have bestowed tempo-
rary monopoly power, as it were, to set price and limit access. While
the country was all in on “useful art, manufacture, engine, machine,
or device, or any improvement thereon not before known or used,”
letting private interests meddle with the nation’s food supply through
the control of seeds was out of bounds.
Though patent protection was not offered, the government played an
active role in other ways. By the end of the nineteenth century, USDA
had mailed some one billion packages of seed to farmers who planted,