A QUESTION OF SEEDS
When we reconnect to our food as crops and animals that must be raised, we reconnect to both our agricultural and cultural traditions. One growing effort to make this reconnection is the saving and sharing of seeds.
At the Central Library in downtown Buffalo, Amanda Brown oversees a major hub of local seed saving and sharing efforts. Currently, Brown tends to a modest library of seeds that mostly fits into a repurposed tabletop card catalog. While there are a few satellite seed libraries within the larger library system, Brown is working toward having either a seed library in all 37 branches or an interlibrary loan, where patrons can go online, browse a catalog and request seeds to be sent to their home library.
The seed library allows patrons to check out up to four packets of seeds for vegetables, fruits, herbs, flowers and other plant types. The packets come with the expectation that patrons will reciprocate with new seeds from their fall harvest.
“There are lots of interested people who live all over the area,” Brown says. “So we want to make sure everyone within our library system has access to a seed library, not just people near the three or four locations where we already have one set up.”
Since the Neolithic Revolution, seeds for agriculture and personal use were easily reproduced: Plant seeds, cultivate, then harvest the new seeds from mature plants or crops. That basic formula changed over the course of the 20th century. Worried about low seed quality, countries started passing laws to control seed distribution. However, these laws unlocked doors for the development of proprietary seed lines.
Seed companies would go on to develop hybrid seeds engineered to resist replanting. Seeds became intellectual property. Some were patented as inventions. Thanks to the American Plant Act of 1930, patented seeds cannot be replanted without permission from the patent holder.
These developments have facilitated the food distribution system we enjoy today. Major seed companies like Bayer and Corteva have developed standardized crop strains that can thrive in a wide range of climates. This allows them to market standardized seeds to farmers around the world, almost regardless of their location.
Unfortunately, these developments have also led to the disappearance of many crop varieties, likely due to a lack of marketability. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 75 percent of crop varieties around the world disappeared during the 20th century.
This situation has given rise to the seed saving and sharing movement. One of the most prominent organizations in this movement is the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI). OSSI’s efforts parallel those of the Information Commons movement that arose in the 1980s. Seeds, like information, can be reproduced with little cost and freely distributed. However, if the production and distribution of either can be restricted, it creates an artificial scarcity making both valuable commodities. Both the Information Commons movement and the seed sharing movement seek to remove this artificial scarcity.
While this raison d'etre might make the movement sound grandiose, seed sharing is also a form of preservation—not just of crop varieties, but also of the practices and traditions associated with cultivating traditional crops.
In November 2018, a local group of Somali Bantu refugees working with the nonprofit Providence Farm Collective, located in East Aurora at the time, were harvesting their traditional Tanzanian maize, when some of the elder women in the group began building a bonfire.
Alarmed at the sight of people starting a fire on land that the collective did not own, farm director and fellow Somali Bantu refugee Mahamud Mberwa approached the women to find out what was going on. He discovered that the bonfire was for roasting maize as part of the Somali Bantu festival of Kulimbula, a celebration he’d only heard about as a little boy living in a refugee camp in Kenya.
“It took us a couple of years of talking about the whole experience to realize how much it hit us emotionally and in so many ways,” says Kristin Weiss, executive director of the farm collective.
That local Kulimbula celebration was only made possible by the saving and replanting of seeds from Tanzanian maize. Earlier in 2018, Mberwa had gone to Africa and brought back seeds to Western New York so Somali Bantu refugees could cultivate their traditional crops, including Tanzanian maize and amaranth.
“Before that, we had grown many vegetables that were totally unfamiliar to the Somali Bantu community,” Weiss says. “The elders in the community that hold the agrarian traditions were, like, ‘We really appreciate Swiss chard. We really didn’t eat it before and now we really like it. But, we want to be able to grow amaranth and Tanzanian maize.’”
Western New York, obviously, is not the same as Somalia. That could be a problem for Somali-cultivated seeds. Unlike standardized crops from hybrid seeds, replanted crops from “open-pollinated” seeds are acclimated to the climate in which they’ve been cultivated. But if the crops do survive their new environment, successive generations are likely to survive as well. In the case of Somali crops cultivated by the Providence Farm Collective, it means the cultivation of traditional African crops that are acclimated to the microclimate of their new location in Orchard Park.
A major ally in the Somali Bantu effort to cultivate traditional crops is Mike Snyder, of the Seneca Nation and Gakwi:yo:h Farms. Tanzanian maize may be a traditional crop for the Somali Bantu, but maize is also a traditional crop of the Seneca Nation. In 2021, Snyder provided his massive corn huller to Providence Farm Collective so the Somali Bantu could hull their maize, free of charge.
“At one point, he and Mahamud [Mberwa] were talking about corn, and Mike turned to him and said, ‘You know, corn is actually indigenous to the Americas,’ and Mo said he never knew that,” Weiss said. “I think it’s really fascinating to hear those conversations and wrap our brains around the idea of these food traditions coming full circle.
“Part of building a more sustainable and resilient food systems is making those connections,” she muses, “and I think seeds are a way to do that.”
For Amanda Brown, the prospect of greater crop variety through the efforts of the Providence Farm Collective and others goes hand-in-hand with the diversity she sees every day at the Central Library.
“We have such a rich and diverse population here in Buffalo,” she says. “I would love to have a lot more vegetables and herbs that represent a greater cross-section of our community. So people can have that taste of home, or if they’re from Buffalo, they can try something that they may have never heard of before.”
