History
The SSE was founded by Kent Whealy and Diane Ott Whealy in 1975, inspired to protect and preserve heirloom varieties after Diane was bequeathed the seeds of two heirloom plants that her great-grandfather had brought to the U.S. from Bavaria in 1870. It has more than 13,000 members worldwide, passing on more than one million seed samples and distributing over 20,000 varieties of endangered seeds. The SSE publishes a list of members' seeds annually in the Seed Savers Yearbook, complete with a description of the crop and its known history.
It is headquartered at the 890-acre (3.6 km2) Heritage Farm, located six miles from Decorah, Iowa. A certified organic farm, Heritage is called the "most diverse farm in the world" by ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan. At Heritage Farm, more than 25,000 rare fruit, vegetable, and plant varieties are regenerated, refrigerated and preserved in a central collection. A herd of White Park Cattle is also maintained on the farm.
In December 2007, Seed Savers Exchange made an inaugural deposit of nearly 500 varieties to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault that opened on February 26, 2008 in Svalbard, Norway. It was the only citizen-led group in the United States to contribute to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault for opening day.
Read more about this topic: Seed Savers Exchange
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)