economicmultipliers_68

Economic Multipliers (68)

Do you know what these are?

They help CREATE wealth in systems.

'Seeds' are economic multipliers.

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Joe Sabah (a motivational speaker) has many times said:

'Ideas are a dime a dozen: The person who puts them into practice is priceless.'

AND

'You don’t have to be great to start: But you have to start to be great.'

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Ideas, put into practice, are ‘seeds’ for growth but that’s not why I’m writing this piece.

In fact, I’m not even writing this piece: I will merely state a simple fact:

Communities and nations that know how to cultivate (i.e. grow), harvest and properly store seeds tend to be wealthier than communities and nations that don’t.

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Keywords and concepts:

• • Going to seed (plant propagation: seeds, bulbs, ‘runners,’ cuttings)

  • Hybrid and genetically engineered seeds (many times disease and insect resistant but NOT always good for harvesting seeds for storage and possible future use): planted for high yields but lack ‘buffers’ when something goes wrong: bad crops, storms, floods, droughts, etc.

  • Heirloom and heritage seeds: what you see (from a crop perspective) is what you tend to get if you ‘harvest’ the seeds and keep them ‘viable’ … i.e. with good future germination rates

  • Seed storage, drying, humidity, container types, temperature … the goal is to save seeds in a manner whereby they could produce a future crop

  • Germinating saved seeds: It’s possible to save and store seeds properly and then plant them wrong!

  • Cultivating plants through to harvest (for the crop) and seed collection (for future crops)

  • Seed and plant banks among neighbors, in communities, in nations and even globally

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Our ancestors harvested, shared, traded and bought seeds, roots and plant cuttings and archeological discoveries of containers of VERY OLD seeds (that were properly stored) that can still be used to plant crops is a reminder to existing generations that we may not always be as ‘educated’ as we think we are.

Perhaps the truest measure of ‘education’ for any generation is found in all the ‘seeds’ that it leaves behind.

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P.S. I’m a non-gardener (although I’ve dabbled in it and grew up in an ‘agricultural environment’). If someone says a field many times floods (resulting in the loss of crops), I wonder if the crops could be elevated (or even floated). If an area gets too much sun, I wonder whether a slatted structure would provide sufficient partial shade. If bugs are attacking my plants, I wonder what kind of ‘trap’ could be set (at least until any crops are harvested).

An Australian turned American (through marriage) told me one day that it’s not practical to engineer yourself out of every problem you create. I told him that if a problem existed and I couldn’t convince millions of people to stop creating it, perhaps an engineering solution could at least minimize the problem.