Preserving Food Sovereignty, One Heirloom Seed at a Time

BAKER CREEK SEED COMPANY AND THE PETALUMA SEED BANK

Good food comes from good seeds. Until a few decades ago, farmers were largely the custodians of their own seeds. Then the world’s population exploded and food production became an industrial endeavor. Plants, and their seeds, became commodities to be tampered with, patented and sold to the highest bidder.

Seeds are small, sometimes tiny, but control of them has huge implications. Whoever controls the seeds controls our very food supply.

Today, a handful of giant industrial chemical companies vie with each other, and conspire together, to monopolize the world’s supply of seeds.

By engineering seeds to have certain characteristics—such as quick maturation; the ability to withstand massive doses of chemical herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers; and ease of planting and harvest— these companies quite literally sell farmers around the world on the virtues of their patented seeds, enticing them to plant only these. As a result, in less than a century, a wealth of seed and plant-based food biodiversity has been lost. An infographic published in the July 2011 issue of National Geographic magazine illustrates the dramatic loss of 93% of seed varieties in the United States over a span of 80 years. One specific example of the precipitous drop in crop diversity shown on the infographic is that in 1903 farmers in the U.S. were planting roughly 500 different varieties of lettuce, but by 1983 that had been reduced to just 36. Similar significant losses are reflected throughout the food basket. (Nationalgeographic.org/media/infographic-design)

Enter Jeremiah “Jere” Gettle, who began saving seeds at age 10 after he noticed particular varieties of heirloom vegetables disappearing from the catalogs he perused. Seven years later, in 1998, he started the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog, operating the mail-order shop from his parents’ farmhouse in the Ozark Hills of Missouri.

Today, Gettle’s seed-saving mission has expanded into a thriving business headquartered in a small village he built around the farmhouse where it all began. The village includes a seed farm, retail store, trial gardens and an educational center for visitors. Off the farm, Gettle’s enterprise now includes two additional retail stores, the Comstock Ferre & Co. seed store in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and the Petaluma Seed Bank here in our area. Baker Creek is also one of the organizers of the annual National Heirloom Expo held each fall in Santa Rosa.

Gettle and his wife, Emilee, opened the Petaluma Seed Bank in June 2009, after noticing that a large percentage of their orders originated on the West Coast. Gettle’s love for historic buildings led them to locate initially in a grand old bank building in downtown Petaluma. The huge space really required more to be offered than just seeds, says Ellyn Mavalwalla, the manager of the store, who has been with the company since 2011. The store relocated this past April to a smaller space just down the block, one that allows them to focus on their true mission: selling heirloom seeds.

“Jere wanted seeds to be front and center,” Mavalwalla said. “When you walk in the door at the new location, there is no doubt you are in a seed store, and that’s what he wanted.”