One of our seedy mentors Bill McDorman likes to say, “When you plant a seed, you plant the entire agricultural system that produced that seed.” We take this a step further. Because food is so completely intertwined with everything else, and because seeds are the foundation of the food we eat, if we change the way seeds are grown and shared, we change much more than just the food system. We change the economic system, the ecosystem. We change the culture, and we change the future. At Snake River Seed Co-op, we believe: if we want to change the world, we start with a seed.   
 

Let’s imagine this seed is planted on one of our Co-op growers’ farms. Each one of those small farms is itself a diverse ecosystem that the grower is carefully tending organically. As we feed our soil to support a wide variety of different plants, the life churning within that soil proliferates wildly and it begets a whole life-giving ecosystem as more biodiversity flourishes in every strand of the web, including within the seeds themselves! Counter to the "business as usual" narrative that seed varieties should be as genetically uniform as possible, we tend large populations of seeds in our diverse farm ecosystems so that these naturally variable crops can maintain the genetic diversity that will allow them to continue to adapt and change as the environment around them changes as well. This will allow them to continue to nourish us into an uncertain future.
 
And what if, instead of a multinational corporation bullying the farmer into selling their seeds at a pittance that doesn’t cover the cost of production and keeps them locked in an endless cycle of debt, the farmer themself actually sets fair prices for the seeds they grow, and the seed company happily pays them, sowing mutual respect for the farmer, the earth, and the seeds? Better yet, what if the farmers themselves own the seed company? And what if those farmer-owners welcomed the staff they hire to run the company to also become co-owners? 

Does this sound like too much of a utopian fantasy? Well, we’ve been doing it for years, setting the standard for worker- and farmer-ownership nationally, right here in the podunk Intermountain West!

As the rapidly-consolidating globalized corporate seed trade is busy protecting their market share by cranking out hybrid seeds that won’t grow true-to-type if you save and replant them, and patenting anything that can reproduce true-to-type, SRSC proudly refuses to sell hybrid or patented seeds so that everyone is free to save and share them. Furthermore, we are literally giving away thousands of packets of seeds for free to community organizations working on food access and food security, hosting free seed swaps, and teaching people how to grow and save their own seeds!
 
Is this a poor business decision? Might we end up putting ourselves out of business by teaching folks how to grow and save seeds themselves? If we end up being that successful, first off, we'll raise a toast to the regional resilience we all can now enjoy, and then we’ll take guidance from the seeds themselves and we'll adapt! Because we recognize that we’re all safer and more well-cared-for in a world where the exponential abundance of a seed is recirculated widely, bringing nourishment to everyone.

 
Here's to turning this upside-down world right side up through business as Unusual. Thank you for being on the journey with us!