Agriculture officials throughout the country are warning residents to alert authorities if they receive a mysterious shipment of seeds in the mail.
Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles warned people in his state on Monday that officials do not know why the seeds have been sent out, but he said that the shipments could be a threat to the U.S. food supply. The seeds have been spotted in Virginia, Utah, Washington, Tennessee, and other states. Officials believe they have ties to China and have offered one common piece of advice: Don’t plant them.
“We don’t know what they are, and we cannot risk any harm whatsoever to agricultural production in the United States,” Quarles said. “We have the safest, most abundant food supply in the world, and we need to keep it that way.”
“At this point in time, we don’t have enough information to know if this is a hoax, a prank, an internet scam, or an act of agricultural bioterrorism,” he added. “Unsolicited seeds could be invasive and introduce unknown diseases to local plants, harm livestock, or threaten our environment.”
Virginia mystery seed update: here’s what one of the packages of seeds looks like, courtesy @VaAgriculture pic.twitter.com/KOKd6TDry9
— Sarah Vogelsong (@SarahVogelsong) July 24, 2020
North Carolina’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services issued a similar warning to alert authorities about unauthorized shipments, but the department said it believes the products are only part of a “brushing” scam.
Brushing scams involve companies sending unsolicited products in hopes that users will leave positive reviews online to increase the legitimacy of the seller on platforms such as Amazon. Phil Wilson, director of the state’s Plant Industry Division, described the scheme.
“According to the Better Business Bureau, foreign, third-party sellers use your address and Amazon information to generate a fake sale and positive review to boost their product ratings,” Wilson said.
“The reason that people are concerned is — especially if the seed is the seed of a similar crop that is grown for income and food, or food for animals — that there may be plant pathogens or insects that are harbored in the seed,” Carolee Bull, a professor who leads the Department of Plant Pathology and Environmental Microbiology at Penn State University, told the New York Times.
