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Simon Groot scattered better plant seeds across the world
The seedsman from Enkhuizen died on July 6th, aged 90
What started him thinking was a cabbage. Not any old cabbage, but the variety, “Glory of Enkhuizen”, which his family company, Sluis and Groot, had produced in that town in North Holland in 1899. It was a beautiful cabbage, round, compact, with a light-green head framed in darker leaves. It could weigh as much as three kilograms, had a sweet flavour, and was easy to grow, as it did all over Europe.
But not here. Simon Groot was walking in the highlands of Java, on a sales trip for the company in 1965, when he came across a field of them. They were a sorry sight, sparse and with misshapen heads. Clearly the seed was not quite right, messed up or mixed in, adulterated somehow; he hated nothing more than bad seed. But it was also clear that these cabbages, which shrugged off frost, did not enjoy a semitropical climate and could not cope with local pests and diseases. Meanwhile the farmers who had sown them, unable to sell them, remained as poor as ever.
For 16 years he brooded on this. It became his mission. In 1981, when Sluis and Groot was sold to Sandoz, he branched out on his own to improve the seeds, crops, trade and nutrition of the tropical parts of the world. **The staple grains *(especially wheat in India and rice in China) had been hybridised already, with great success, but lowly vegetables had been ignored. He, by contrast, loved them. Producing fine vegetable and flower seed had been the family business since 1867, when venerable, bearded Groots had* pioneered **the work in Enkhuizen. Seeds had been lucky for the town, too; because of close contacts with local farmers, it did not suffer the famine that followed the war.
For him the vegetables of tropical Asia were a cornucopia of species he had never met before. Amaranth, with grain-heads like huge catkins; kangkong, or water spinach, growing in any fresh water; mung beans, full of protein in both seeds and sprouts; daikon, tatsoi, choy sum. All were packed with vitamins and good nutrition. As a seedsman more used to cauliflowers and potatoes, he was fascinated. As a market man, here was a huge chance.
He surpassed his own expectations. By the 2020s the seeds produced by his company, East-West Seed, had improved the incomes of 20m small farmers in more than 80 countries, from Asia to Latin America to Africa. The company’s red-arrow logo was as well-known to them as the sign for Coca-Cola. He also set up a programme in which successful farmers trained their neighbours. With better seed, farmers stayed in farming, market traders had more to sell and consumers had healthier diets. That simple formula lifted everyone.
Seeds came first, carefully bred by cross-pollination to produce the right traits. But the farmers were key. He talked to them constantly, a tall and almost colonial figure in his white clothes and sun-hat, to learn to think with them. Most of them had plots of only one or two hectares, so vegetables were an ideal crop. Routinely, though, the glossy packets they started with had bad genetics inside. They then saved the seed from their crop from year to year, because they were poor and it cost nothing. So, inevitably, their harvests declined.
Yet they were most reluctant to change. When he set up his first base in the Philippines in 1982 and, after many months, produced his first **hybridised **seed, farmers were loth to try it. The plant was ampalaya or bitter gourd, not unlike a fat, warty cucumber, astringent but useful to bulk out a stir-fry; so many farmers already grew it. The new variety was called “Jade Star”. It could resist downy mildew, its chief threat, but almost all the trial crops failed. Hence the importance of any farmer who had succeeded passing on his knowledge of how to handle the seeds, space them, **fertilise and irrigate **them. Seed was all about trust: trust that the tiny speck you sowed would grow into the plant you imagined. Both would take time to appear.
Over decades, though, the farmers were won over. When the crops did well, they were extraordinary: healthy, profuse and vigorous. As more vegetables were hybridised, tomatoes began to flourish in the Indonesian lowlands, where they could not grow before; productivity per plant of bird’s eye chili, a Thai favourite, increased by 30-40%, and long beans grew like forests. Farm incomes doubled and sometimes even tripled. Certain cases became famous. One woman did so well with chai sim, a leaf vegetable, that she built a kitchen and bought a motorbike. Another produced a pile of pumpkins worth $3,500 from $6-worth of seed.
Hybridisation meant that seed from the crop could not be kept, because the second crop would be unreliable. But he set the price of new seed as low as he could. In 2017 the company sold 24m “value-packs”, enough for a small plot, for the equivalent of a dollar each. Any profits went to growth and research. The farmers seemed to take this system in their stride. When he visited them in later years they cheered for joy and held parties for him.
In 2019 he was awarded the World Food Prize, a nutritional equivalent of the Nobel. His work, however, was far from done. In Asia he still hoped to shift more farmers away from rice; the world had plenty of that, and carbohydrates, as well as meat, were starting to feature too much in Asian diets. Plants needed constant fortifying to adapt to climate change. And he had barely made a start on Africa, where small farmers were struggling terribly and the potential for growth was so obvious.
In one of his late interviews he appeared with an array of home-grown vegetables in front of him. His tomatoes and French beans, laid out on a dark-wood table, looked as glossy and beautiful as a still life from the Dutch Golden Age. The vegetable he most often chose to pose with, however, was not the “Glory of Enkhuizen”. It was the warty, bitter, ugly “Jade Star”, which had transformed the lives of his farmer-friends 6,000 miles away. ■
西蒙・格魯特將更優良的種子撒播至全球各地
來自恩克赫伊曾（Enkhuizen）的種子商於7月6日辭世，享壽90歲。
讓他開始思考的，是一顆高麗菜。不是普通的高麗菜，而是「恩克赫伊曾的榮耀」（Glory of Enkhuizen）這個品種，早在1899年，他的家族公司 Sluis and Groot 就在荷蘭北部的這座小鎮育出這種高麗菜。這是一種漂亮的高麗菜，圓潤緊實，淺綠色的菜心外圍包著深綠色葉片。重量可達三公斤，味道甘甜，容易種植，在歐洲各地都表現良好。
但在這裡卻不行。1965年，西蒙・格魯特在爪哇高地為公司出差推銷種子時，發現一片種滿這種高麗菜的田地。這些菜看起來慘兮兮，稀疏又畸形。很明顯，種子有問題，可能是品質不佳、混雜或遭到摻假；而他最痛恨的，正是壞種子。更重要的是，這種耐霜的高麗菜根本不適合在亞熱帶氣候中生長，也無法抵禦當地的病蟲害。種下它們的農民無法出售這些作物，仍一貧如洗。
他為此苦思了16年，最終這成了他的使命。1981年，Sluis and Groot 被賣給了瑞士的山多士公司（Sandoz），他決定自行創業，致力於改善熱帶地區的種子、農作物、貿易與營養狀況。當時主要糧食（特別是印度的小麥與中國的稻米）已透過雜交育種成功改良，但蔬菜這類「不起眼」的作物卻遭到忽視。然而，他恰恰最愛蔬菜。自1867年起，他家族便開始培育優良的蔬菜與花卉種子，那些鬍鬚滿面的格魯特祖先在恩克赫伊曾率先展開這項事業。種子對這座城鎮也是福氣，因為與農民密切合作，它在戰後逃過了飢荒。
對他來說，熱帶亞洲的蔬菜簡直像是裝滿新奇物種的寶庫：像巨大花穗的莧菜、可在淡水中生長的空心菜、種子與芽都富含蛋白質的綠豆、白蘿蔔、塌棵菜與菜心……它們全都營養豐富、含有大量維生素。對這位習慣花椰菜和馬鈴薯的種子商來說，一切都令人著迷。從市場角度來看，這更是個巨大機會。
他甚至超越了自己最初的期望。到了2020年代，他創立的「東西種子公司」（East-West Seed）所生產的種子，已提升了全球80多國、2千萬小農的收入，範圍涵蓋亞洲、拉丁美洲與非洲。公司那個紅箭頭的標誌對他們而言如同可口可樂的標誌般熟悉。他還建立了一套制度，讓成功的農民教導鄰里。種子好，農民就能繼續耕作，市場有更多貨源，消費者也吃得更健康。這簡單的循環讓所有人受益。
種子是根本，透過雜交育種培育出理想性狀。但農民才是關鍵。他常常親自與農民對話，一身白衣、戴著太陽帽，身形高大、神似殖民地官員，只為學著與他們一同思考。他們大多只有一兩公頃的小田地，因此蔬菜是理想作物。然而，開始種植時買的精美包裝裡，常常裝著劣質基因的種子。他們因貧窮而習慣自行留種，年復一年，導致產量不斷下滑。
但他們極不願意改變。1982年，他在菲律賓設立第一個基地，花了好幾個月才培育出第一批雜交種子。當時的作物是「苦瓜」（Ampalaya），一種像疙瘩黃瓜、味道澀卻常用來炒菜的蔬菜；許多農民本來就種它。他的新品種名為「翡翠之星」（Jade Star），可抵抗霜黴病——這是主要威脅——但幾乎所有試驗作物都失敗了。這也凸顯出，成功的農民如何傳授種植技巧（如種子處理、株距、施肥、灌溉）至關重要。種子全憑信任：相信那顆微小的顆粒會長成你心中想像的植株。而這兩者都需要時間培養。
數十年過後，農民終於被說服。當作物成功時，成果驚人：健壯、繁茂又旺盛。隨著越來越多蔬菜被雜交改良，番茄在印尼低地得以生長，這
在以前是不可能的；泰國愛吃的朝天椒單株產量提高三到四成；長豆長得像森林一樣。農民收入翻倍甚至三倍。有些案例成了佳話。有位婦人種菜心賺了足夠的錢蓋廚房、買機車；另一位用6美元的種子種出價值3500美元的南瓜。
雜交種的缺點是：收成後的種子無法再用，第二代品質不穩。但他總是盡可能將種子售價壓低。2017年，公司販售了2400萬包「超值小包裝」種子，足夠種一小塊地，每包只要一美元左右。利潤全投入成長與研發。農民對這制度似乎欣然接受。多年後他回訪時，農民會歡呼迎接，還為他開派對。
2019年，他榮獲「世界糧食獎」，這被視為營養界的諾貝爾獎。但他自認任務遠未完成。在亞洲，他仍希望更多農民轉作非稻米作物——世界上稻米與碳水已過剩，亞洲飲食中碳水與肉類佔比過高。他還指出，植物需不斷強化，以因應氣候變遷。而在非洲，他才剛起步；那裡的小農情況艱難，但潛力巨大。
在晚年一次受訪時，他面前擺滿自家種的蔬菜。紅蕃茄、四季豆擺在深色木桌上，彷彿一幅荷蘭黃金時代的靜物畫。但他最常與之合影的蔬菜，卻不是那顆「恩克赫伊曾的榮耀」，而是那顆疙疙瘩瘩、苦澀難看、卻改變了6000英里外農民命運的「翡翠之星」。■
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