Opportunities and constraints to seed sovereignty for organic vegetable farmers in British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Seed is a primary element in a changing agricultural landscape and has seen a steady shift over the past 100 years from common good to private commodity. This shift has jeopardized long-held farmer traditions of saving, reusing, and selling seed and has catalyzed a response, framed as seed sovereignty, which challenges the corporate enclosure of seed while asserting farmers’ rights to save, sow, share, and breed seed, as well as participate in shaping seed policy. British Columbia (BC) has a history of vegetable seed production dating back to the early 1900s and offers a unique case study due to its high number of organic vegetable farms and locally focused seed companies. I used a mixed-methods approach including archival research, interviews, and an online survey to better understand ways in which BC organic vegetable farmers and seed growers experience seed sovereignty and identify constraints that limit their seed sovereignty and seed security. From 1915 to 1958, BC saw the rise and decline of a vegetable seed sector due to the influence WWI and WWII on seed imports from Europe. This history offers lessons for modern day seed production and a proactive approach to seed security. Currently, BC seed companies, independent seed growers, and vegetable farmers experience seed sovereignty in their rights to save, sow, share, and breed seed, as well as participate in shaping seed policy. However, BC vegetable seed production does not meet the needs of BC organic farmers who require larger quantities of high-quality seed. BC organic farmers’ dependence on imported seed, gives them a low degree of seed security, which they have mitigated by utilizing multiple sources of seed from local and international suppliers – reducing their vulnerability seed import disruptions. BC organic vegetable farmers and seed growers are constrained in their ability to meet provincial seed needs due to space, infrastructure, knowledge limitations, and a lack of data on the economic viability of seed production. However, well-established infrastructure among BC’s seed growers indicates the potential for scaling up seed production to better meet the needs of local farmer and protect the capacity for seed security in British Columbia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".