About a month after Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina last fall, Roger Wynn and I met in an Asheville, North Carolina, supermarket parking lot. He’d driven two hours from Little Mountain, South Carolina, where the passing storm had also left its destructive mark.
“When the power finally came back on,” Wynn said, “two of my freezers didn’t work.” Wynn was worried not about spoiled food inside, but his seed collection. On that autumn day, in an act of forced downsizing and seed philanthropy, Wynn handed over two boxes filled with seeds. He wanted me, as founder of the non-profit Utopian Seed Project, to share the seeds with farmers across the region. The boxes contained a trove of Appalachian varieties: speckled field peas, white mountain half-runner beans, purple-podded bush beans and lots of butterbeans.
Over many years of being active in the seed-saving community, Wynn has more than 100 varieties of carefully stewarded seeds. He recalled collecting sugar maple seeds in third grade when he “planted them in Dixie cups and sold them door-to-door”. As a child, Wynn helped his grandmother shell dry butterbeans on their porch. He remembers how she admired the spectrum of lavender and pink seeds. But “when she died, [family members] basically cleaned the freezers out and threw everything away, including all her seeds,” he said.
Unlike some of his butterbeans, it’s not a rare story.
Seeds have a finite lifespan, but when cooled to below-freezing temperatures, seeds’ metabolism slows and they can remain viable for decades or more. This makes freezers an important, albeit mundane, tool for long-term storage. Essentially, the freezer is an insurance policy against the loss of seed varieties.
That’s also the principle behind facilities such as the Millennium Seed Bank in Sussex, England, which stores billions of seeds underground at -4F (-20C). This kind of institutional seed preservation is called ex-situ, which removes varieties from their natural environment. Wynn is growing and saving seeds within his community, practicing in situ conservation.
Freezing seeds is a double-edged sword. The ability to store large seed collections with a few hundred dollars worth of plug-in technology has created a preservation problem. Or perhaps the problem is preservation itself.
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen said: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” The “Red Queen’s hypothesis” in evolutionary biology argues that species must be constantly evolving and adapting just to maintain their place in the ecosystem. A world without freezers would force seeds to be grown and saved regularly. But preservation can be a trap, both for the seeds frozen in time and the seed keepers who preserve them.
Hurricane Helene reinforced another hard truth: a freezer full of seeds is the literal version of putting all your eggs in one basket. Dr Jim Veteto, living in Celo, North Carolina, manages the Southern Seed Legacy Project and recorded oral histories of people like Roger Wynn. His barn collapsed during Helene, burying his entire seed collection of hundreds of rare seed varieties collected from Appalachian and Cherokee seed keepers. In the days after the storm, he tried to dig the freezer out of the debris and muck. Later, local seed-savers showed up to help, and they pulled the freezer from the wreckage. Amazingly, the seeds appear to have survived.
Large-scale, government-funded seed banks also have their problems. They collect and store seeds from peasant, Indigenous and rural communities across the world. Bonnetta Adeeb, founder of Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, refers to them as “seed jail”. I visited the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) S-9 Seed Storage at the University of Georgia’s Griffin campus. A large room cooled to a constant 18F was filled with hundreds of shelves, thousands of containers and millions upon millions of seeds.
In theory, everyday people can request seeds from the USDA’s extensive collections. But, in practice, the USDA seed banks are primarily accessed by academic and corporate plant breeders, who rely on crop diversity to develop elite breeding lines. The preservation can become predatory, leading to claims of biopiracy and the “gene rush”, equivalent to gold rushes where outsiders rushed in to extract precious metals and profit from them. Seeds over people, even when those people and their relationships to the land are the reason the seeds exist and endure. Often, “improved” seeds are sold back to the original communities, further undermining their stewardship of biodiversity.
Roger Wynn told me that the hurricane prompted an ongoing shift in his own thinking. “This disaster made me start thinking about my seeds. For the most part, it’s been fun. It’s given me purpose.” Wynn highlighted the friends and community he had made along the way, all the times he had swapped and shared seeds. The Southern Seed Legacy Project’s Veteto, who feared for his own life at the peak of the storm, said almost everyone he received seeds from had already died. “It’s just me out here with a freezer full of seeds,” he said. “I’ve become the type of person that I started out documenting. But that’s OK because these seeds give my life meaning.”
Veteto was a student of Dr Virginia Nazarea, co-founder of the Southern Seed Legacy and author of Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers. Nazarea once wrote: “Seedsaver contribution to the conservation of biodiversity needs to be understood as conservation in vivo, or conservation as a way of life.”
This speaks to something greater than preservation, which often treats seeds like artifacts, not living things. Seed-saving should not be the goal, but merely a skill that is used in an ongoing relationship with the plant. People, seeds and relationships change over time. Life is messy, and that’s OK.
In 2019, I accompanied culinary historian David Shields on a visit to the “Dark Corner” of South Carolina, near Greenville. As part of his work with the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, he researched and sometimes rediscovered old seed varieties that dropped out of commercial circulation or had never achieved it.
We traveled there to follow a lead from Craigslist, which mentioned someone growing what was believed to be an extinct corn. In the late 1800s, Cocke’s Prolific was a nationally renowned corn, but became less available by the turn of the 20th century and was considered a lost variety until six years ago. That day, we visited 96-year-old Manning Farmer, who proudly showed us 18in corn cobs. They were perhaps the only ones in the entire world.
He’d grown and saved Cocke’s Prolific for nearly seven decades. Like any good seed-saver, he kept backup seeds in his freezer. His motivations were utilitarian, not preservation. It was his way of life. Farmer died shortly after his 99th birthday, in November 2021.
Our desire to preserve is strongly linked to a narrative of loss, both for biodiversity writ large and for rare heirloom seeds. But we recognize the need for biodiversity and destroy it in the same breath. What if we protected the Amazon instead of just the genetics within it? What if we supported small-scale diversified agriculture instead of industrialized monoculture?
Seed preservation has a place, but it’s not the thing that will save us. Heirloom seed keepers attempt to preserve the past, while plant breeders control genetic resources to commodify the seed. Neither camp is particularly focused on how to expand biodiversity into the future, as if biodiversity and seed varieties are fixed and finite things.
Compounding this problem is the climate crisis, which is dramatically affecting our ability to grow food. Diversity is a core component of resilience, so we need rapid, ongoing and diverse adaptation of our regional food systems – everywhere, all the time. If we’ve been preserving all these seeds for some imagined future need, then the need is now. Arguably, it’s already too late.
For me, events like Hurricane Helene represent the limits of adaptation. You can’t adapt to a 30,000-year flood, which wiped entire farms and towns from the landscape. You can only roll the dice and cross your fingers. Enormous climate mitigation is our only hope. In the meantime, we need to heed the Red Queen’s advice to “keep running”, to adapt while we still can. For me, this means emptying the freezers into the fields, a radical reverse flow from preservation back to the people. Because what’s the point in dying with a freezer full of seeds?
