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How do we fix what's broken? The Seed Circus investigates!

When a massive wildfire sweeps across thousands of acres, every square inch of land doesn’t start to regenerate immediately. Instead, a bird might fly in, land on a burned-out tree stump, and poop out a few seeds that were stored in its belly. Those seeds might germinate and grow, and in turn become habitat for other species to thrive nearby, creating a little island of recovery after the devastation. Spores of lichen and moss and seeds from a nearby healthy stand of trees might blow onto a different spot on the wind and take hold there. And the seeds of sun-loving annuals who were waiting under the shade of the canopy in another spot might also germinate and grow in the newfound sunlight.

On its own, each of these tiny islands are not repairing the entire degraded landscape. But given enough time, they will grow together in a patchwork that will eventually make a new forest from what seemed to be barren destruction. This is the way every beautiful forest we know has come to be—no currently-beautiful forest has been intact forever.

There are many who would say that the entire world feels like it’s on fire right now. So what lessons can we take from the way the earth heals from trauma?

We’ve just returned from the southern Idaho stops on our traveling Seed Circus, and it’s safe to say that little islands of restoration are popping up all over.

Janine Benyus, who coined the term “biomimicry” in her 1997 book, has been studying the way the earth heals itself for decades, and she believes that in human communities, the little islands of restoration are starting to grow together. In an awesome On Being interview last year, she said, “If you were to reach out your hand in the dark at this point, you might find another hand.”

In the post-Covid world, many of us have forgotten the importance of gathering together in real life and sharing an experience. The dangerous thing about isolation is that, when we’re isolated, we become more susceptible to the lies constantly being foisted upon us that we are separate from each other and separate from the rest of nature. That “the other” is our enemy. That we do not have companionship and support here and we must look to those with obscene power and wealth for security, for safety. But the system that extracts resources and money from our communities and funnels them into the hands of a few wealthy individuals in the name of “freedom” does not make us safer. In fact, it is this system which created the destruction we’re living through in the first place.

What actually makes us safer is gathering together, forming relationships with each other and the lands we live in. As one brilliant young woman at the Magic Valley Seed School shared, “There are so many forces trying to separate us from each other and from the natural world right now. This gathering and the focus on seeds brings us together with each other and with the rest of nature.”

What actually makes another world possible is remembering how to take guidance from the natural world. Mohawk seedkeeper Rowen White says, “I always think about ‘remember’ as meaning ‘to put things back together.’ You’re re-membering; you’re putting things back together again. As we begin to put the pieces back together of our food, of the way that we feed and nourish ourselves, I think that the seeds have a lot of ways in which they’re animating us—and animating our hands, and hearts, and bodies—to grow a way of nourishing ourselves and sustaining ourselves on the land that honors the grand lineage of ancestors, human ancestors and non-human ancestors, who went through so much adversity, and joys, and all of what it means to be human, so that we could have food and seed here today.” We have powerful teachers who can show us how to cultivate our little islands of restoration to be as beautiful and healthy and resilient as possible, so that as they grow together, we’ve actually remade our society into something connective and nourishing and life-giving and life-honoring.

adrienne maree brown has helped so many of us see the prevalence and importance of fractals in the way this world is organized. Fractals are patterns that repeat at scales from the very small to the very large. The veins in our lungs look at lot like the braids of streams that feed the rivers, and the veins sending water coursing through the leaves of the trees. Our fingerprints mirror the shape of the galaxy. The health of the cell becomes the health of the planet.

Here are a few of the fractal highlights of our southern Idaho Seed Circus travels, each of which offers us tangible actions we can take to help make more islands of restoration.

Fractal: Organic Agriculture

King’s Crown Organics and Purple Sage Farms are both pioneering organic farms who helped create the organics program in Idaho over 30 years ago. King’s Crown in the Glenn’s Ferry area stewards over 700 acres, while Purple Sage in Middleton concentrates the majority of their production in 10 hoophouses that comprise just a few acres. But both farms prioritize building healthy soil and growing a diverse array of organic crops even as they are surrounded by conventional monocultures on all sides. Each one is literally an island of biodiversity in a sea of chemical agriculture.

The prevalence of large-scale monocultures has turned many rural areas into food deserts, making accessing healthy food difficult for the farmworkers who tend those fields. Nate Jones’ wife Colleen has made their farm’s produce, meat, and raw dairy available to local residents at her Six Creek’s Mercantile in Glenn’s Ferry, and Purple Sage makes their fresh herbs, veggies, and lamb available through a large diversity of markets accessible to area folks. Seeking out and buying food from local farmers who are choosing this healthier way of farming supports their families and allows them to keep doing this important work. It also shows their conventional farming neighbors that organic farming is viable!

Fractal: Public Seeds

Every stop on our Seed Circus includes a visit to some type of publicly-owned agricultural infrastructure. It isn’t well-known to the general public, but our tax dollars support a good number of citizen-owned regional seed banks which each house hundreds of thousands of unique accessions, as well as regional public plant breeding, variety trialing, disease testing, farmer education and other programs. We got to visit the University of Idaho Kimberly Research and Extension Center, one such program who is doing research on potatoes, wheat, beans, and more. They also meticulously grow foundation seed for private seed companies who support their work. These programs combine innovative public-private partnerships and collaborations between a wide range of stakeholders.

This crucial public agricultural infrastructure is under threat right now amid a push to eliminate more federal programs and workers, presumably replacing them with private, for-profit companies. The thing is, a single private company has no incentive (or resources) to, say, keep a collection of 40,000 varieties of wheat alive. So when a disease breaks out in their commercial wheat crop, they turn to these public seed banks to find a variety in the collection that might confer resistance to that new disease, and they use the genes from that variety to breed a new one. As Jack Harlan says, “Wild [crop] relatives stand between man and starvation.” We can make our voices heard to our elected representatives that our future ability to feed ourselves is too crucial to be thrown further into the hands of for-profit corporations, and that we must continue to fund the important work done by these public entities.

Fractal: Native Plants

Wonder-filled entomologist and new University of Idaho Ada County Extension Agent Sierra Laverty took us on a delightful pollinator walk through the public garden outside the Garden City library and reminded us that flowers and bees are in a constant evolutionary dance, each one changing itself slightly to better fit the needs of the other. Each of us, simply by planting a diversity of flowers on any land we are fortunate enough to steward, can also support a diversity of bees and other pollinators.

And Idaho native plants are particularly important for supporting populations of Idaho native pollinators (and the other creatures who eat them!). Sierra shared that we have over 700 species of native bees in Idaho! Some of those bees are specialists who only forage for nectar and pollen on a single plant family or species. Learning more about the fascinating lives of our native plants and pollinators turns our everyday lives into epic explorations and connects us more deeply to the world around us.

Since native plants are so crucial to our regional ecosystem health as well as giving us a

regional sense of place, each stop on our seed circus also includes a component on native plants and their wild and wooly seeds. Native Roots Nursery in Twin Falls and Draggin’ Wing High Desert Nursery in Boise both specialize in propagating and selling native plants for landscape use, and they shared insights into the unique challenges and opportunities of working with native plants and native seeds. Incorporating native plants into our landscapes is one way that we can support the health of our local ecosystem. And trying to grow them from seeds is an exercise in patience and humility, because unlike our cultivated plants, native seeds don’t just germinate and grow when we add water. They are taking their cues about when it is sensible to sprout from the complexities of the natural environment. We are wise to apprentice ourselves to their teachings, because they have been figuring out how to live here for a LOT longer than we humans have—millions of years longer!

And City of Boise Ecologist Martha Brabec literally uses the concept of Restoration Islands as she leads teams of people restoring degraded habitats in the Boise foothills. Like many public lands managers at all levels of government, Martha is having difficulties sourcing seeds for the native plants she uses for restoration work. There is tremendous opportunity for us to increase our native plant seed growing in Idaho…and we’re keenly exploring ways of supporting those efforts! Please reach out if you would like to be involved!

Fractal: Grains

Grains are remarkable in that they form the backbone of our diets and also the backbone of our agricultural systems. They are the reason we humans have been able to stay in one place and build agricultural civilizations. They themselves are the food we eat AND the seeds we use to grow the food! They’re brilliant little bundles of life-giving sustenance!

Each stop on the seed circus also includes a component on heritage grains, the older varieties with greater nutrition and more genetic diversity than some of their common modern counterparts. In Buhl, we visited 1000 Springs Mill, where Tim Cornie toured us around their massive facility that is shipping Idaho-grown grains all over the world, many of which he grows on his own certified organic 800-acre farm. I got to tour this 150,000 square foot facility in 2019 just when Tim had bought it. The cavernous, neglected, empty warehouses echoed with daunting possibility at the staggering undertaking that lay ahead for him. It was truly remarkable to return 6 years later and see them brimming with harvested grains and bustling with people grinding them into flour, popping them into popcorn, and sending them onto the railcars and trucks waiting out the back doors.

Aside from the incredible amount of work and resources he’s had to put into getting this project up and running, what impressed me was that, even though he is operating at what is to me a very large, commercial scale, he is less interested in the holy grail of uniform, high yielding crops and more interested in a total overhaul of the industrial food system that is making us all sick. His passion for growing healthy grains, including gluten free grains like buckwheat, and making them available to more people, really shone through.

This same passion is evident in the intriguing popcorn breeding projects Wayne Marshall

has been doing on his 40-acre farm in Buhl, as well as in Matt Bishop’s front yard grain production in the heart of Boise. Hearing Matt's (who also roasts coffee and serves it in the Boise foothills with his mule) tales of growing 50 pounds of wheat in his urban front yard every year along with chickpeas, grain sorghum, and other seed and food crops really stretches your mind about what is possible at any scale.

Fractal: Trees for the Future

John Caccia has been planting trees from seeds at Wayne’s farm, tending hundreds of seedlings planted in haphazard pots. When asked what he plans to do with them, he says, “I don’t really know. Give them away to someone. It just feels important to grow trees.” This sentiment—planting tiny seeds that can grow into large, long-lived trees—is such a hopeful act. He doesn’t need to know the outcome in order to start planting them, and neither do we, in order to take action.

The act of planting and tending a seed is profoundly important. It helps us form a relationship with another being, and with all of the beings who come into contact with them. As the seeds we tend to grow, we grow as well. One seed can make a hundred, or a thousand, each with the potential to nourish other life.

We can help create islands of restoration in a world in desperate need of repair. We don’t have to know exactly what the outcome will be in order to plant a seed. We just have to start.

Thanks to everyone who offered their wisdom at our southern Idaho seed schools, and to everyone who came together for the love of seeds. We’ll see our northern friends next month! We’d love for you to come join us!

Grow What You Like to Eat!

How do we fix what's broken? The Seed Circus investigates!

When a massive wildfire sweeps across thousands of acres, every square inch of land doesn’t start to regenerate immediately. Instead, a bird might fly in, land on a burned-out tree stump, and poop out a few seeds that were stored in its belly. Those seeds might germinate and grow, and in turn become habitat for other species to thrive nearby, creating a little island of recovery after the devastation. Spores of lichen and moss and seeds from a nearby healthy stand of trees might blow onto a different spot on the wind and take hold there. And the seeds of sun-loving annuals who were waiting under the shade of the canopy in another spot might also germinate and grow in the newfound sunlight.

On its own, each of these tiny islands are not repairing the entire degraded landscape. But given enough time, they will grow together in a patchwork that will eventually make a new forest from what seemed to be barren destruction. This is the way every beautiful forest we know has come to be—no currently-beautiful forest has been intact forever.

There are many who would say that the entire world feels like it’s on fire right now. So what lessons can we take from the way the earth heals from trauma?

We’ve just returned from the southern Idaho stops on our traveling Seed Circus, and it’s safe to say that little islands of restoration are popping up all over.

Janine Benyus, who coined the term “biomimicry” in her 1997 book, has been studying the way the earth heals itself for decades, and she believes that in human communities, the little islands of restoration are starting to grow together. In an awesome On Being interview last year, she said, “If you were to reach out your hand in the dark at this point, you might find another hand.”

In the post-Covid world, many of us have forgotten the importance of gathering together in real life and sharing an experience. The dangerous thing about isolation is that, when we’re isolated, we become more susceptible to the lies constantly being foisted upon us that we are separate from each other and separate from the rest of nature. That “the other” is our enemy. That we do not have companionship and support here and we must look to those with obscene power and wealth for security, for safety. But the system that extracts resources and money from our communities and funnels them into the hands of a few wealthy individuals in the name of “freedom” does not make us safer. In fact, it is this system which created the destruction we’re living through in the first place.

What actually makes us safer is gathering together, forming relationships with each other and the lands we live in. As one brilliant young woman at the Magic Valley Seed School shared, “There are so many forces trying to separate us from each other and from the natural world right now. This gathering and the focus on seeds brings us together with each other and with the rest of nature.”

What actually makes another world possible is remembering how to take guidance from the natural world. Mohawk seedkeeper Rowen White says, “I always think about ‘remember’ as meaning ‘to put things back together.’ You’re re-membering; you’re putting things back together again. As we begin to put the pieces back together of our food, of the way that we feed and nourish ourselves, I think that the seeds have a lot of ways in which they’re animating us—and animating our hands, and hearts, and bodies—to grow a way of nourishing ourselves and sustaining ourselves on the land that honors the grand lineage of ancestors, human ancestors and non-human ancestors, who went through so much adversity, and joys, and all of what it means to be human, so that we could have food and seed here today.” We have powerful teachers who can show us how to cultivate our little islands of restoration to be as beautiful and healthy and resilient as possible, so that as they grow together, we’ve actually remade our society into something connective and nourishing and life-giving and life-honoring.

adrienne maree brown has helped so many of us see the prevalence and importance of fractals in the way this world is organized. Fractals are patterns that repeat at scales from the very small to the very large. The veins in our lungs look at lot like the braids of streams that feed the rivers, and the veins sending water coursing through the leaves of the trees. Our fingerprints mirror the shape of the galaxy. The health of the cell becomes the health of the planet.

Here are a few of the fractal highlights of our southern Idaho Seed Circus travels, each of which offers us tangible actions we can take to help make more islands of restoration.

Fractal: Organic Agriculture

King’s Crown Organics and Purple Sage Farms are both pioneering organic farms who helped create the organics program in Idaho over 30 years ago. King’s Crown in the Glenn’s Ferry area stewards over 700 acres, while Purple Sage in Middleton concentrates the majority of their production in 10 hoophouses that comprise just a few acres. But both farms prioritize building healthy soil and growing a diverse array of organic crops even as they are surrounded by conventional monocultures on all sides. Each one is literally an island of biodiversity in a sea of chemical agriculture.

The prevalence of large-scale monocultures has turned many rural areas into food deserts, making accessing healthy food difficult for the farmworkers who tend those fields. Nate Jones’ wife Colleen has made their farm’s produce, meat, and raw dairy available to local residents at her Six Creek’s Mercantile in Glenn’s Ferry, and Purple Sage makes their fresh herbs, veggies, and lamb available through a large diversity of markets accessible to area folks. Seeking out and buying food from local farmers who are choosing this healthier way of farming supports their families and allows them to keep doing this important work. It also shows their conventional farming neighbors that organic farming is viable!

Fractal: Public Seeds

Every stop on our Seed Circus includes a visit to some type of publicly-owned agricultural infrastructure. It isn’t well-known to the general public, but our tax dollars support a good number of citizen-owned regional seed banks which each house hundreds of thousands of unique accessions, as well as regional public plant breeding, variety trialing, disease testing, farmer education and other programs. We got to visit the University of Idaho Kimberly Research and Extension Center, one such program who is doing research on potatoes, wheat, beans, and more. They also meticulously grow foundation seed for private seed companies who support their work. These programs combine innovative public-private partnerships and collaborations between a wide range of stakeholders.

This crucial public agricultural infrastructure is under threat right now amid a push to eliminate more federal programs and workers, presumably replacing them with private, for-profit companies. The thing is, a single private company has no incentive (or resources) to, say, keep a collection of 40,000 varieties of wheat alive. So when a disease breaks out in their commercial wheat crop, they turn to these public seed banks to find a variety in the collection that might confer resistance to that new disease, and they use the genes from that variety to breed a new one. As Jack Harlan says, “Wild [crop] relatives stand between man and starvation.” We can make our voices heard to our elected representatives that our future ability to feed ourselves is too crucial to be thrown further into the hands of for-profit corporations, and that we must continue to fund the important work done by these public entities.

Fractal: Native Plants

Wonder-filled entomologist and new University of Idaho Ada County Extension Agent Sierra Laverty took us on a delightful pollinator walk through the public garden outside the Garden City library and reminded us that flowers and bees are in a constant evolutionary dance, each one changing itself slightly to better fit the needs of the other. Each of us, simply by planting a diversity of flowers on any land we are fortunate enough to steward, can also support a diversity of bees and other pollinators.

And Idaho native plants are particularly important for supporting populations of Idaho native pollinators (and the other creatures who eat them!). Sierra shared that we have over 700 species of native bees in Idaho! Some of those bees are specialists who only forage for nectar and pollen on a single plant family or species. Learning more about the fascinating lives of our native plants and pollinators turns our everyday lives into epic explorations and connects us more deeply to the world around us.

Since native plants are so crucial to our regional ecosystem health as well as giving us a

regional sense of place, each stop on our seed circus also includes a component on native plants and their wild and wooly seeds. Native Roots Nursery in Twin Falls and Draggin’ Wing High Desert Nursery in Boise both specialize in propagating and selling native plants for landscape use, and they shared insights into the unique challenges and opportunities of working with native plants and native seeds. Incorporating native plants into our landscapes is one way that we can support the health of our local ecosystem. And trying to grow them from seeds is an exercise in patience and humility, because unlike our cultivated plants, native seeds don’t just germinate and grow when we add water. They are taking their cues about when it is sensible to sprout from the complexities of the natural environment. We are wise to apprentice ourselves to their teachings, because they have been figuring out how to live here for a LOT longer than we humans have—millions of years longer!

And City of Boise Ecologist Martha Brabec literally uses the concept of Restoration Islands as she leads teams of people restoring degraded habitats in the Boise foothills. Like many public lands managers at all levels of government, Martha is having difficulties sourcing seeds for the native plants she uses for restoration work. There is tremendous opportunity for us to increase our native plant seed growing in Idaho…and we’re keenly exploring ways of supporting those efforts! Please reach out if you would like to be involved!

Fractal: Grains

Grains are remarkable in that they form the backbone of our diets and also the backbone of our agricultural systems. They are the reason we humans have been able to stay in one place and build agricultural civilizations. They themselves are the food we eat AND the seeds we use to grow the food! They’re brilliant little bundles of life-giving sustenance!

Each stop on the seed circus also includes a component on heritage grains, the older varieties with greater nutrition and more genetic diversity than some of their common modern counterparts. In Buhl, we visited 1000 Springs Mill, where Tim Cornie toured us around their massive facility that is shipping Idaho-grown grains all over the world, many of which he grows on his own certified organic 800-acre farm. I got to tour this 150,000 square foot facility in 2019 just when Tim had bought it. The cavernous, neglected, empty warehouses echoed with daunting possibility at the staggering undertaking that lay ahead for him. It was truly remarkable to return 6 years later and see them brimming with harvested grains and bustling with people grinding them into flour, popping them into popcorn, and sending them onto the railcars and trucks waiting out the back doors.

Aside from the incredible amount of work and resources he’s had to put into getting this project up and running, what impressed me was that, even though he is operating at what is to me a very large, commercial scale, he is less interested in the holy grail of uniform, high yielding crops and more interested in a total overhaul of the industrial food system that is making us all sick. His passion for growing healthy grains, including gluten free grains like buckwheat, and making them available to more people, really shone through.

This same passion is evident in the intriguing popcorn breeding projects Wayne Marshall

has been doing on his 40-acre farm in Buhl, as well as in Matt Bishop’s front yard grain production in the heart of Boise. Hearing Matt's (who also roasts coffee and serves it in the Boise foothills with his mule) tales of growing 50 pounds of wheat in his urban front yard every year along with chickpeas, grain sorghum, and other seed and food crops really stretches your mind about what is possible at any scale.

Fractal: Trees for the Future

John Caccia has been planting trees from seeds at Wayne’s farm, tending hundreds of seedlings planted in haphazard pots. When asked what he plans to do with them, he says, “I don’t really know. Give them away to someone. It just feels important to grow trees.” This sentiment—planting tiny seeds that can grow into large, long-lived trees—is such a hopeful act. He doesn’t need to know the outcome in order to start planting them, and neither do we, in order to take action.

The act of planting and tending a seed is profoundly important. It helps us form a relationship with another being, and with all of the beings who come into contact with them. As the seeds we tend to grow, we grow as well. One seed can make a hundred, or a thousand, each with the potential to nourish other life.

We can help create islands of restoration in a world in desperate need of repair. We don’t have to know exactly what the outcome will be in order to plant a seed. We just have to start.

Thanks to everyone who offered their wisdom at our southern Idaho seed schools, and to everyone who came together for the love of seeds. We’ll see our northern friends next month! We’d love for you to come join us!

Grow What You Like to Eat!