When the remnants of Hurricane Helene battered Western North Carolina in late September, floodwaters flowed into Chris Smith’s basement in Leicester, North Carolina. Water slowly climbed to eighteen, nineteen, and then twenty inches, and Smith had a major concern. He kept part of his prized store of seeds in his basement. The other portion resided in a climate-controlled trailer at his farm that had lost power. As Helene dumped inch after inch of rain, flooding and humidity threatened to decimate the lot, including around eighty varieties of peanuts.
“I got my family to start trying to get five-gallon buckets to empty it out,” Smith recalls. “But we couldn’t keep up with it. My nine-year-old was up to the thighs in water. So we were not beating the water coming in. And in the trailer, hundreds of pounds of seeds were at risk of molding.”
Smith is a seed saver and founder of the Utopian Seed Project, an organization that grows and distributes seeds to partner farms throughout the region to promote agricultural biodiversity. (G&G named him a Champion of Conservation last year, highlighting his work in preserving rare collard varieties.) Which is why, as Helene approached, thousands of tiny seeds were drying in his trailer.
In retrospect, he got lucky. Power to his seed trailer came back after three days, and most of its contents didn’t rot. His basement collection stayed safe in airtight buckets. His fellow growers in other parts of the region weren’t as fortunate. One friend’s entire sorghum field turned to mold after the storm. Another farmer’s barn, containing a fridge full of seeds, collapsed. “Those are seeds he has collected over a lifetime,” Smith says. A third farmer friend lost more than a hundred thousand dollars worth of crops. And a fourth had to wipe out his entire crop because it came into contact with toxic floodwater.
The growing season is now over for farmers in Western North Carolina, but when the frigid nights of winter give way to the cool nights of spring, seed saving groups like the Utopian Seed Project’s Appalachian Seed Growers Collective and the Seed Savers Exchange will kick into action. Their shared crops will help farmers impacted by Helene, rebuilding farms seed by tiny seed.
How seeds will save us
The idea of protecting seeds may conjure up vaguely dystopian images, like those of Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a concrete gene bank near the North Pole. While seed savers like Smith do stow away some seeds here and there, their focus is on preserving plant diversity through active growth—not a what if proposition but a now.
Thus groups like the Utopian Seed Project create a continually evolving supply of seeds. Each year, the crops that fare the best in the changing climate will get harvested for their seeds, and those seeds will go on to grow a new generation of plants better adapted to the environment than those that came before.
This method is nothing new—farmers and gardeners have saved and swapped seeds for millennia. It wasn’t until the rise of industrial agriculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that seed saving started to seem like a quaint hobby of the past. Why put in the work of growing regionally adapted seeds when large companies have become so good at producing huge quantities of crops we can buy?
“We are losing this vast, deeply layered relationship with our agricultural story,” says Janisse Ray, a naturalist, writer, and seed saver in Reidsville, Georgia. “The loss of stories of seeds makes us a more vulnerable people.” Although large-scale farms only make up about 3 percent of farms in the U.S., they dominate produce production. To maximize efficiency, many of these enterprises plant massive fields of just one crop, known as monocultures, which leaves them, and us, at risk.
“Maybe it’s a new pathogen, or an early frost, or a really wet spring. Whatever it is, those monoculture-style crops perform well in perfect conditions,” Smith says. “But more and more often, we’re not seeing perfect conditions. We’re seeing chaotic climate conditions. When you have climate chaos, you need to have very diverse genetics to stand up against that.”
Enter what Smith calls “seeds that know the South.” Like heirloom collards that can tolerate freezing temperatures, okra that has weathered Southern storms for centuries, and taro that is okay with “getting its feet wet,” the plants these seed savers are protecting, whether native or tropical, have adapted to survive.
A wake-up call
In the wake of Helene, Smith also hopes to learn and adapt just like the seeds he nurtures. Looking to the plants that best survived flooding may give farmers a clue as to what crops fare best in a future with more strong hurricanes. “A seed is like a flash drive,” Ray says. “It’s like this little storage unit, and stored in there are genes. No doubt, as conditions change around us, we are going to need some of that genetic makeup. And we don’t know what we’re going to need.”
The Utopian Seed Project is looking at partnering with donor farms from across the Southeast to provide seeds when spring comes. Another organization, the Seed Savers Exchange, has already started shipping boxes of fifty different seed packets to interested farmers whose crops were destroyed by the storm.
But to make it until spring, farmers have immediate needs. “Most farmers have lost their third- and fourth-quarter income because either they’ve had to destroy crops, or crops have been destroyed. It’s too late to replant for most people. Farmers just need money so they can survive long enough that they can do a spring planting,” Smith says. Organizations like the Organic Growers School, which is based in Asheville, are actively compiling resources to directly fund farmers as winter approaches.
More than anything, Smith wants this moment to be more than a one-time rally for support. “I want people to care about seeds and care about farmers and care about regional food outside of the news cycle,” he says. “I don’t mind a wake-up call moment—we’ve all had it. But will people stay awake, or will they just go back to sleep?”
To view a list of farms in need, visit this page compiled by the Organic Growers School. The Utopian Seed Project and Seed Savers Exchange share information as well.
