Fear opens market for seeds

April 24, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Philadelphia Inquirer

PHILADELPHIA

The news unquestionably is frightening: political turmoil at home and abroad; worries over oil, gas and food prices; earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns ...

And that’s just in the last few months.

Marketers are on high alert. “Doomsday is nigh! they shout online and on late-night TV as they hype “survivalist seed banks” and “apocalypse gardens” to the nervous and fearful. More than a dozen companies offer deals of up to 94,000 vegetable seeds, stored in tightly sealed buckets and “ammo boxes,” that will feed a family of four for years or decades.

With all the world’s disasters of late, and the 24/7 news hype, the peace-of-mind business is predictably excellent.

“It’s going well, a little too well right now. We didn’t really anticipate that we’d get busier every time something happens,” says Dustin Merritt, co-owner of Emergencyseedbank.com in American Fork, Utah.

After last month’s earthquake in Japan, business spiked and hasn’t subsided, says Merritt. He sells a $139 package of 37,000 broccoli, beet, corn, lettuce and other vegetable seeds in a “military-grade” container that “is virtually indestructible” and, if wrapped in a garbage bag, “can be ... buried for decades.”

Merritt and a brother-in-law started the company in 2009 as the economy was falling apart. So far this year, he says, Emergencyseedbank.com is doing as much business in one month as it did in three months last year.

Merritt says he doesn’t believe “seeds are the be-all and end-all of preparedness. If you can’t stay alive for four or five months, till the seeds are growing, it doesn’t matter how many seeds you have.”

But “I think people’s fears are based on real possibility.”

Others are dismissive.

They ask: If disaster struck, how would anyone be able to even start a garden, let alone keep one going for 10 or 20 years? Gardens don’t produce instant food, anyway, and can be wiped out by pests, disease or extreme weather.

And what’s the point of buying thousands of seeds? Chester County master gardener Elizabeth Alakszay can fill a letter-size envelope with lettuce seeds by shaking one stalk from a single spent lettuce plant.

“You don’t need to buy thousands of seeds unless you’re going to feed the whole country,” she says.