I would like to share here my short FB post, I hope you will find it interesting.
Farmers in Poland are facing a nightmare season.
Media reports reveal that in several regions – Świętokrzyskie, Lublin, Łódź, Mazovia, Lesser Poland, and Greater Poland – farmers bought what they believed were root parsley seeds. But when the crops came up, it turned out they had been sold leaf parsley instead.
The mislabeled seeds came from the Czech company MoravoSeed and were distributed in Poland by PNOS in Ożarów Mazowiecki (usually a highly reputable Polish company).
The fallout is massive: losses are counted in millions. In the Świętokrzyskie region alone, damages are estimated at over 10 million złoty, and nationwide the figure may reach 20 million. That’s not just a year of wasted labor – it also means broken contracts and heavy financial strain on farms. Farmers feel betrayed and are seeking compensation, though the road ahead looks long and uncertain.
This crisis highlights just how fragile farming becomes when it’s fully dependent on outside seed suppliers. Imagine instead if farmers relied on their own saved and trusted seeds.
Seed saving has powerful advantages. It preserves varieties best adapted to local soils and climates. It prevents disasters like this one, caused by errors in the supply chain. It saves huge amounts of money each year, while giving farmers confidence in what they’re actually planting. And at the local level, seed production can become a source of income that stays within the community instead of flowing out to distant corporations.
In a broader sense, this is about food sovereignty – about ensuring communities, not corporations, decide what to grow and how. When farmers control their seeds, they regain control over the foundation of their livelihood. They regain freedom.
Let’s be honest: humans and their corporations can modify life, but they cannot create it. One of the three core ethics of permaculture – fair share, or sharing the surplus – clashes directly with the idea of claiming ownership over something as fundamental as a plant’s ability to reproduce. Seeds are a common good, part of humanity’s shared heritage. Corporate claims to own varieties violate not just permaculture ethics, but basic justice.
That’s why seed saving, exchanging seeds among growers, building seed banks, and networks like the Seed Savers Exchange are so vital. They preserve diversity, strengthen local resilience, and stand as acts of resistance against corporate monopolies.
And let’s push this idea even further: what if farmers started by securing everything truly essential – food, energy, fodder, seeds – within their own farms? A glimpse of this future already exists: the Dervaes family in Pasadena, California, run an urban farm on just 800 square meters (!), producing vegetables, fruit, eggs, meat, and even fuel. They live largely independent of outside markets, right in the middle of the city.
This is the permaculture vision of security and freedom: not relying on fragile global supply chains that fail at the worst moment, but building vibrant local economies rooted in soil, plants, animals, and people.
The parsley disaster – as painful as it is – can serve as a wake-up call: our food independence is the foundation of our freedom.