Sustaining Seeds: A Cohort For Beginning Farmers In Specialty Crop Seed Production

Commodities

Practices

"Sustaining Seeds: A Cohort for Beginning Farmers in Specialty Crop Seed Production" responds to urgent needs from our network of beginning farmers, who regularly share their struggles to source culturally appropriate and locally adapted seed, exacerbated by climate change and related seed shortages. We propose to create a cohort program for 15 beginning farmers to train, trial, preserve and share culturally appropriate and locally-adapted specialty crop seeds. Cohort members are all beginning specialty crop farmers, and the majority are historically under-resourced farmers (New American, Black, Indigenous, Latino and women farmers) in Southwest Iowa and Eastern Nebraska. The project will include several educational activities for the farmer cohort: (1) a two-day intensive “Seed School for Farmers” training, (2) two seed processing and sharing workshops, and (3) one Seed Saving Field Day. Participating farmers will also design and implement seed saving trials on their operations, with technical assistance from project staff. These efforts will build farmers’ seed production and saving skills, strengthen food sovereignty and seed access, and increase regional agricultural system resiliency. 

1. 15 farmers (50% historically under-resourced farmers: New American, Black, Latino, women, and Indigenous farmers) will gain knowledge of specialty crop seed saving, including production and storage methods.
2. 15 farmers will design and implement a seed saving trial on their operations, and save seed from three specialty crops species, selecting for suitability to local conditions.
3. 15 farmers will process, package, and share saved seeds through two seed processing workshops.
4. An in-person Field Day, open to the public, will offer farmer-to-farmer and community education about seed saving techniques for specialty crops, and showcase farmer research in the field.