Damatsu snap pole bean from Oregon. Photograph: Howard Sooley.
Between November 2006 and March of 2007, Andrew Still and Sarah Kleeger, the Oregon Seed Ambassadors and young married farmers from the Pacific Northwest of the United States, are traveling through Europe to freely share seed of some of America's finest food crops and gather European seeds to share when they return home. Here, Sarah, who with Andrew met with the magazine allotment team last Sunday also shares some of her thoughts on their travels.
Andrew and I, two young, landless, vegetable growers and educators from Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest of the US, have been increasingly involved with seed saving and plant breeding for the past few years. We chose to involve ourselves with organic farming because we saw it as a way to help the planet. And we chose to work with seeds because, well, seeds are the foundation of it all. Faced with some time to fill during our winter off-season, we started to think about how we could travel and address some of the regional, global, and socio-political issues that we care most about.
We didn't want to just sit back in our corner of the universe and some of our friends felt the same. And so the Seed Ambassadors Project was born. We decided to spend our winter (and our life savings) traveling Europe, talking about and sharing open-pollinated, organic seeds with people.
We brought with us some recently developed vegetable varieties, bred by some of the top independent breeders in the US. These varieties have slightly different genetics and may help people to grow more of their own food for more of the year. Nutri-bud broccoli, whose delicious dark green heads pack more vitamins than any other broccoli available today, is an example. Farthest North Melon mix, a mixture of teensy melons (the size of two fists held facing each other), that mature weeks earlier than most other melons, is another.
In the two and a half months that we have been traveling so far, we have spoken with people involved with organic and open-pollinated seeds on numerous levels, and have discovered that the seed scene is as different in each country we visit as is the language. In Germany, for example, we found the most well organized network of professional open-pollinated, organic seed breeders -- funded in part by foundations to do the work of developing vegetable varieties for organic farming. In Latvia and Lithuania, there is a dying culture of seed saving. There, most of the work of developing new varieties has been in the hands of Institutes of Agriculture and Horticulture. In Switzerland, Pro Specie Rara, the country's seed saver's exchange, focuses only on Swiss heirloom varieties, and has succeeded in making several of these varieties available on a commercial scale bringing many of them back from the brink of extinction. And in England, the Seedy Sunday movement is putting seed saving back into the hands of gardeners and allotment holders.
Most countries have people involved with the organic seed scene on several levels, and so we have spoken to single-family seed companies and "large" biodynamic seed companies. We have met with the Chamber of Agriculture in Lithuania and been to the legendary Vavilov Institute in St. Petersburg Russia. We have talked to variety stewards and "collectioners" -- people that have taken it upon themselves to collect as many varieties of food plants as they can. And in every country we visit, the contacts we make amaze us with their different strategies for preserving and developing new food plant varieties -- diversity stewarding biodiversity.
As we are sharing seeds and stories with people, we are also looking for seeds that may not be available in the US, seeds that will help us and our neighbors feed ourselves. To this end we have collected somewhere around 500 varieties, including grains, tomatoes, beans, parsnips, spinach, and much more. We have a USDA permit to ship them back in small quantities, fifty seed packs at a time, to a Plant Protection and Quarantine Station in Seattle, where a USDA employee evaluates them and sends them on to our fabulous home base organizer and co-conspirator in Eugene. We are in the process of developing a scheme to do field trials of these varieties, to determine which will be good for our region and our taste, and also which will be good for breeding material for the next generation of open-pollinated vegetable varieties, adapted to our climate and conditions.
What began for us as a project to keep ourselves busy over the winter has blossomed into an international network of seeds people, learning from and exchanging seeds with each other through us. Every stop we've made on the way has met us with inspiring, generous people that are as pleased to share their stories and seeds with us as we are with them. At this point, a high percentage of the seeds we are sharing with people are seeds we have picked up along the way, passed on from dedicated seeds people in one country as a gift to those in another.
I think that's what happens when people start saving seeds -- they start giving them away. When this giving reaches an international level, I think we're on to something. As one woman in Latvia put it, "It's our nature."
You can meet Andrew and Sarah at the Biodynamic Agricultural Association in Stroud on Sunday
