I’m Farmer John and I speak for the seeds!
Believe me when I tell you friends we are losing seeds! And everyone needs seeds for their healthy nutritional food needs! We cannot live without seeds that produce green, red and abundant fruit. BUT here today, no one seems to give a toot! They say I’m a fool to speak of such things for “nobody needs seeds”. Not when the supper market shelves are so full they make you weak in the knees. But the day will come, and I promise it won’t be fun, when the big giant companies and governments will do things that make you want to run. But all that will be left are infertile fields and the dust in your eyes. For the living soil that once nourished seeds is gone and all we have left are the lies….
I believe it is important to preserve our farming heritage. Our great grandfathers learned to farm without destroying the earth. They knew how to save heirloom seed from year to year. They were strong and healthy because they grew their own food. Their very hands nourished plants that later nourished their bodies. They were deeply connected to these plants and the earth. Now, most people know nothing of their food, where it comes from, or if it is genetically modified. They blindly stuff this food down their mouth with little regard as long as it is cheap.
Well, their is no such thing as cheap food. There is a consequence to what is being done to the earth and man is just now figuring this out. We cannot blindly keep dumping chemical fertilizers
on the earth and washing them into our seas with killing consequences. The earth’s very skin is alive and we seem to be doing our best to kill it. Do we not understand that we are a part of this very life? That if we destroy this biosphere we too will die?
I remember my mother and father reading Dr. Seuss stories to me as a kid. My favorite was The Lorax. He was my hero! It was a story of a small furry critter who tried to protect the trees. He always said “who will speak for the trees? For the trees have no tongues.” Most people know this story from their childhood or they read it to their children now. Did it do any good? The story that is?
I look back, that was the early 1970s when the story came out and we are killing ourselves and the earth at an even greater pace. Will we find ourselves “at the far end of town”….
“At the far end of town where the Grickle-grass grows and the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows and no birds ever sing excepting old crows… is the Street of the Lifted Lorax And deep in the Grickle-grass, some people say, if you look deep enough you can still see, today, where the Lorax once stood just as long as it could before somebody lifted the Lorax away….
It all started way back…such a long, long time back…Way back in the days when the grass was still green and the pond was still wet and the clouds were still clean, and the song of the Swomee-Swans rang out in space…
But now,” says the Once-ler, “Now that you’re here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear. UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not. “SO…Catch!” calls the Once-ler. He lets something fall. “It’s a Truffula Seed. It’s the last one of all!
You’re in charge of the last of the Truffula Seeds. And Truffular Trees are what everyone needs. Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care. Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.”
Now, this story is coming true. We live in a time when companies patent life, create terminator genes in seeds so they will not sprout and we watch as the last heirloom seeds slip away.
What will you do? You are in charge of the last “truffle tree”.
Again I ask…what will you do?