Photos: Chicago Seed Archive
The last half century has seen corporations privatizing more and more of the world around us. Beyond water, culture, and natural resources, corporations have begun patenting the very building blocks of life on earth, from DNA to seeds and plants. Agribusiness giants like Monsanto are making billions by selling patented, genetically modified seeds each year to increasingly cash strapped farmers, going so far as to prosecute farmers for saving and replanting seeds, a process that dates back to the beginning of agriculture.
It is in this context that the simple act of saving, sharing, and replanting seeds becomes a political protest. Campesino movements around the world have organized seed exchanges as a part of an organized movement against the industrialization of agriculture, and for what they call food sovereignty, the belief that farmers can and should grow food sustainably to supply their own communities.
In Chicago, forager, urban farmer, and all around food maven Nance Klehm has made her own contribution to the tradition of saving and exchanging seeds. Nance runs a community seed archive that houses a wide variety of seeds and plants, from across North America and around the world. Over the last 18 years, Nance has been collecting and saving seeds that she grows herself or finds in botanic gardens, markets, and parks wherever she goes. "There's so many times where I empty the laundry machine and discover I have a bunch of seeds in my pockets." Over the years her personal collection has grown into a catelogued library of over 350 varieties of seeds, with a focus on foods of the Americas, "particularly corn, beans, squash. Corn is really important to me because I think it's the great mother, and it's been turned into this commodity. It really hurts me that that happened, because it's a really beautiful, nutritious grass that we survive on." Each year, Nance opens up her collection to farmers and gardeners across the region to check out seeds to grow, in the hopes that they will return in the fall and check seeds from those plants back into the archive.
The project is not without its difficulties, however. Beyond the technical difficulties of saving seeds (growing out the seeds before they become too old to germinate, fending off dampness and fungus, making sure that varieties of plants don't cross pollinate in your garden) Nance has encountered a number of cultural difficulties as well. "So few people know how to grow anything these days." People who are interested in the project don't know how to grow the plants, when to collect the seeds, how to store them so they are still usable when they are checked back into the archive. "People are excited about doing stuff, but that's the biggest challenge, is how much we've lost of our grandmother and grandfather's knowledge of how to save. And to be interested in all those very mundane things around seeds. The mundane magic of seeds."
She's also struggled with creating a project that depends on a sense of community and reciprocity in a culture that often values neither of those things. "Seventy-five people came to the seed archive in February, and maybe 15 people brought seed, or brought anything to share, soda, juice, beer, nothing. They came empty handed and took and left, and I don't even know who they were. This whole idea of community, and exchange, are just really hard for Americans to understand."
Nonetheless, Nance continues on with her work, spreading seeds and the love of growing everywhere she goes. "Seeds don't respect political boundaries. It's a really old thing to travel with seed, and people have been exchanging seed for a very very long time, and I just want to keep that going."
Check out Nance’s website for more information about the seed archive, and other inspiring food projects throughout Chicago.
