On the weekend of November 15 – 17, 2024, seed enthusiasts gathered in Mt. Baldy for the California Organic Seed Summit. The weekend was filled with discussions on seed libraries, coyote seeds, record keeping, corn, and activities like seed cleaning, nixtamalization, cooking, and seed art making. In the closing circle, attendees shared their vision for what a thriving seed community could look like five years from now. We are grateful to all who came and shared in this time together, including participant Emily Kuhn, who listened to folks’ visions, and distilled them into this beautiful poem.
Collective Dreams for the Future of Seed
By Emily Kuhn
Our climate is changing, the seeds know this. New rainfall patterns can teach us old ways of nourishing ourselves. We are a dynamic web of growers, here in the southwest of Turtle Island… envisioning wild foods, seed banks, and beloveds on land together. These are the visions that sustain us.
There must be resource redistribution, access to land for migrants, and those we know and love who carry tradition. We see a thriving hub being born from these relationships; from the fruit trees in our communities to the recovery of ancestral seeds. Indigenous and migrant communities who are most vulnerable at the center, displacing the corporations.
Aging farmers become elders, spreading what they know to eager youth like mycelium. This is what we are becoming, with each breath. The void is being filled by our expansion, because the plants are so generous. We can feel that seeds are the center of our sovereignty; the key to our joy, the foundation for health care, and the blueprints for livable wages. This is the infrastructure: a place to gather and be held, learning with the seeds and each other.
She braids her daughter’s hair and lets her heart be known. Because this work is intergenerational, we must care for each other and visibilize the hidden ache of this spiritual reckoning with the loss of the sacred. We are intentional in the transfer of knowledge, this is the stewardship of life after all. Mutual aid keeps us growing and becoming justice-based.
Localized food systems are created by the sharing and recognition of diasporic communities. We are here for rematriation, the return of land to communal, reciprocal, liberation theologies. Walking and riding horses with seed so that local flowers can bloom. We must stand for the right to health for all people. Every street could be filled with food if we continue asking: Why not?
In 2006, New Mexico made a declaration of seed sovereignty — may we create this here to align ourselves with the life cycles.
Multicultural schools are the frontlines of cultural resilience and ecological coherence. The common language of our plant relatives builds bridges across imagined borders, the coyotes know.
Seeds instead of candy Halloween!!!
We are present with the wave, which is swelling in our children. Beyond these walls there are many more of us. This weekend is a preview of what will be in 5 years. We can trust in the butterfly effect of our actions when we start where we are: with cacao, panela, and amaranth.
