High Mowing Organic Seeds
= a farm-based seed company located just northwest of Hardwick, Vermont.
Discussion
by Jessica Conrad:
"Over his years working in the seed business, Tom Stearns has come to understand that, even more so than the land he works, the seeds themselves are a special kind of commons. The vegetable seeds we have now, he says, are vastly different than the seeds that existed one hundred years ago, and today’s seeds will assume new qualities in the future. That’s partly why privatization and commodification have become commonplace in the seed industry. Corporate giants have denied public access to information about our seed resource because “when you control seeds, you control a lot,” says Stearns.
But as Stearns says, “seeds are powerful,” and that power can be harnessed to advance the common good, too. “Right now we have seeds that were developed for high‐input chemical systems,” Stearns notes. “We do not have seeds for the type of food system we need to build, nationally or internationally.” But that could soon change. By defining and protecting seeds as a commons, Stearns encourages the kind of information sharing necessary for developing the seed varieties we need today and in the future.
Just so, the High Mowing team engages and interacts with everyone who uses seeds, including farmers and gardeners, plant breeders at universities, other seed companies, and soil scientists. They do this in an effort to bring the seed community’s collective wisdom to bear on how to develop new seed varieties, how to make seeds available to consumers, and how to promote them as a critical element in building healthy food systems. By encouraging this knowledge sharing, High Mowing empowers the whole community to engage in a ten thousand-year‐old practice of food provision that is vital for the future. They are framing seed saving as a commons‐based solution.
High Mowing also engages in their immediate community through business‐to‐business collaborations with local organizations, including Pete’s Greens and Vermont Soy. They’ve done everything from lending money to sharing employees to developing co-branding and co‐marketing programs. On the day I spoke with Stearns, Pete Johnson of Pete’s Greens had planted three acres of carrots on the land he rents from High Mowing. Together with another seed breeder, Johnson and Stearns are working to develop a new organic carrot variety." (http://www.onthecommons.org/seed-saver-inspires-wide-ranging-economic-renaissance-his-hometown)