What are F1 Hybrid Seeds?

The other choice of seeds available to you besides regular seeds or heirlooms, are hybrid seeds, in particular F1 hybrids.



F1 Hybrid seeds are first generation seeds that come from plants with two very specific parent plants. They can only be produced by crossing with exactly the same parent plants.

Big Business
They are primarily created for the large scale commercial markets and are specifically designed to be convenient for farmers to grow.
They are created through meticulous hand-pollination, and are then usually patented by the company responsible for their creation. Each seed produced is identical, and they are often sterile.

Terminator seeds?
F1 Hybrids are aggressively marketed as something wonderful, and you are virtually guaranteed a good crop that is straight forward to grow, but you are also getting a genetically unstable seed. This means that if you want to save the seeds from your crop and try to grow them the following year, if they do actually grow, it is unlikely you will get the same shape, size and yield as the parent plant, and most of the time the subsequent generations will be inferior specimens.
This of course, is intentional to make you, and the farmers return to the seed company and buy more seed year after year, rather than saving the seeds to re-plant.

Made primarily for the supermarket farmers not the home-gardener
Tomatoes for example: F1 hybrids will usually be a strain of tomato that has a tough skin – making them easier to transport, that is developed to be disease resistant to certain types of disease and bugs, and is often created to produce a single crop, timed to ripen all at the same time to aid harvesting.
This is fine for the farmer, but not always necessary for the home-grower.

F1 hybrid seed will often produce better looking, larger crops, but they can be inferior in taste and essence – usually the very thing that the home-grower seeks.
Compare the taste and texture of an organically grown heirloom tomato to one purchased from a supermarket grown with F1 hybrid seeds, and the difference may be immediately noticable.

Chemicals
As F1 hybrids are usually developed by the same people who manufacture and sell farm chemicals, they can also be developed vulnerable to a particular type of disease, forcing the farmer to not only buy the seeds each year, but also the chemicals as well, creating huge profits for the seed producers.

Are all Hybrid seeds the same?
No.
The general hybridization of plants has been a natural process that has taken place in nature for all of time.
When buying normal regular seeds, they may or may not include some hybrid varieties. Each plant from these seeds will look pretty close to picture on the seed packet, but only the intensively cultivated F1 hybrids will produce a crop that is identicle.Normal regular hybrid seeds have a mixed parentage, a bit like the difference between a mongrel dog and a pedigree dog.F1’s are the pedigrees, but like most pedigree dogs, they have some genetic flaws.

Footnote
With the seed companies being such huge businesses, and having influence on government policy, it may come as no surprise that buying heirloom seeds (the natural alternative to F1 hybrids) in some countries have now been outlawed.

This proposal is being introduced under the guise of it being for public safety, due to some recent salmonella outbreaks in stored vegetables.

The proposed bill is labled: HR875 and S425 and could technically make gardening illegal in the USA! This article is a must-read:

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