Seed Saving: A Living Legacy that Keeps on Growing

Ira Wallace

This article is from the Summer 2022 Agraria Journal.

By Beth Bridgeman

When we save seed, we are saving the important germplasm, or genetic material, within that seed. But it is also critical, to save the story of that seed. Who are those working at the forefront of seed sovereignty today? What are their stories?

Ira Wallace is interested in the seed stories of the African diaspora. A co-owner of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, she was a featured speaker in Agraria’s second Black Farming conference, and was also interviewed by Amanda Siegel, a student in my Seed Sovereignty and Citizen Action class at Antioch College. Here is an edited excerpt from that interview.

Amanda Siegel: What types of seed do you like to save?
Ira Wallace: Well, I personally like to concentrate on two things: family heirlooms, which are varieties that have been maintained sort of outside of the trade, and unusual things, in particular, varieties that come from the African diaspora that are not necessarily so well-known in the U.S.

Amanda: How do you think that seeds are important to retaining black cultural legacies and memories?
Ira: A lot of the history of African people in the United States has not been maintained as a written legacy. Michael Twitty says our stories are hidden in the foods. These recipes, these flavors that we have are sometimes all that connects us to the ancestors and so I think they’re quite important. When you read about seed that has been revived from plantations, such as in the work of Dr. David Shields in the Carolinas, who was in fact doing that work of stewarding those seeds on those plantations? You often find it was a certain overseer who really did that development of those varieties, and to find that out and raise up those people gives more connection to Black people now and makes them realize they weren’t just brought here because they were labor but they were brought because they had farming knowledge from Africa about rice culture and other foods that are part of the foodway of the Low Country.

Amanda: Do you have a special seed story of a particular seed that you save?
Ira: I work with the Heirloom Collard Project, which has some 90 accessions. I never saw so many different colors: small ones, purple ones, curly ones, beautiful dark green ones, really light yellow ones…I work with Seedsavers Exchange in Iowa to retrieve and grow out some of these samples from the USDA gene bank. We’ve been taking some of the ones that are historically connected with African American farmers and getting them grown out and distributed. A favorite is the William Alexander Heading collard that was rejuvenated, and it’s being maintained and spread down in Winston-Salem by a group of Black sorority sisters in North Carolina. Now that variety is becoming more available in their local community. It’s not just that it’s a great collard but it’s a great reconnection of a whole group of people and a community with something that was just about to pass away.

Amanda: As a Black woman, it’s hard for me to convince my family of the importance of working with the earth and also in the fields given the generational trauma of slavery and all of that that impacts us. What’s your reasoning behind saving seed and working with the earth in this context?
Ira: I think the world’s going to be in a challenging position with global warming, and Black people have been separated from traditional foods. When you read Edna Lewis’s cookbooks, the kind of diet that black people on farms were eating was quite varied and seasonal. Growing up we always had a patch of mixed greens. I’m very interested in figuring out how I can help young Black farmers make money because it’s not just in growing food that you make money; it’s like adding value-added products and getting that money that middle people are getting, and having it be more directly connected to the farmers.

Amanda: What advice would you give young people to encourage them to save seed?
Ira: Pick one seed that is important to you to pass on a living legacy to your children and to your grandchildren, something eaten in the community that you grew up with. We have one bean called a wedding bean that used to be given out. I planted two seeds and they covered a five-foot trellis and I got like 10 pounds of beans from these two seeds and this is just one part of self-sufficiency that we lack in our communities. I want to encourage young people to grab that heritage and make it their own.

Beth Bridgeman, an associate professor of cooperative education at Antioch College, leads seed saving workshops at Agraria.

Click here read the full Summer 2022 issue of the Agraria Journal.