 This year we've been doing a social media contest called The Hundred Days, Hundred Hours Gardening Challenge. We had seed companies and other organizations donate raffle prizes. Today we're talking to one of them, the Snake River Seed Co-op. This is the Low Tech Podcast. Hello and welcome. I'm Scott Johnson from Low Technology Institute. Your host for podcast number 56 on September 30th, 2022, coming to the Low Tech Institute's recording room in Cooksville, Wisconsin. Thanks so much for joining us today. We're talking with three folks from the Snake River Seed Co-op leadership team. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter. Our handle is at low underscore techno. Like us on Facebook, find us on Instagram, subscribe to us on YouTube, and check out our website, lowtechinstitute.org, where you can find both of our podcasts, as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. Also, some podcast distributors put ads on podcasts. Unless you hear me doing the ad, someone else is making money on it advertising. While all of our podcast videos and other information are given freely, they do take resources to make. And if you're in a position to help support our work and be part of this community, please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as $3 a month through our Patreon page, patreon.com. Slash Low Tech Institute. If you'd like to sponsor an episode directly, please get in touch with us through our website, lowtechinstitute.org. So today we're joined by three folks from the Snake River Seed Co-op. So why don't you guys go around the table and introduce yourself so people can associate a name with your voice here. So who are you? What do you do? Do you say CRCS or what do you say for Snake River Seed Co-op for short? Yes. You can refer to it as SRSC. That's fine. It's Snake River Seed Cooperative or Snake River Seed Co-op or Snake River Seed Cooperative Inc. now. Yeah, and I can start the round of introductions. I'm Danny O'Malley. I've been working with SRSC for about two years now. I'm the Operations Manager and Wholesale Accounts Manager, and I've got a background in. I've worked on several farms a year around CSA Farm over in Viewell, Idaho. My wife and I had a farm in Northern California, and then I've also worked on a pretty large scale, well, I would say medium scale farm here in Boise, Idaho. I'm Riley Carney, and my title at Snake River Seeds is Finance Manager. I also do our seed production side of the business, so making sure that crops are assigned to growers each year with the appropriate quantity for growers and for us. And I had my own little farm as well for several years. I just ended that recently, basically COVID through a wrench into everything, and I just wasn't able to farm anymore. So, yep, that's my story. What about you, Mary Kay? Hi, I'm the Marketing Manager here at Snake River Seed Cooperative and also Communications or Community Outreach Coordinator. And I've got a 20 plus year background in marketing. As far as farming goes, you could call me a pandemic era gardener. I really got serious about it in 2020 as a response kind of inspired by the Victory Gardens, but going into it with an awareness of the World War II aspect of it, with the internment of the Japanese causing the need for a full scale localized reimagining of the Victory Garden era. I'm also affiliated with Cooperative Gardens Commission. Excellent. Well, welcome to all three of you. Thanks for taking time out of your schedules today. Hopefully we're coming down out of the busy season, but not quite there yet. So, would one of you be able to tell me a little bit more about SRSC or Snake River Seed Co-op? How long have you been around? What was the kind of original goal? Why was it started? Yeah, Snake River Seeds was started, basically it came out of two different organizations. One was Earthly Delights Farm, and the other was a Commonwealth Seed Library. So Earthly Delights Farm, the owner of that farm was Casey O'Leary, and she has been farming for over a decade. She now has moved on to being a horticulture teacher at our local community college. So at the time, this was eight years ago when Snake River Seeds was founded, and both of those organizations, Earthly Delights Farm, was saving seeds and selling them under their own label, just Earthly Delights Farm Seeds. And then the Commonwealth Seed Library was bringing in seeds from seed savers in the region and just trying to keep the seeds flowing. But what Casey found was that the farm side of that situation was just much more productive. There were more seeds moving through compared to the library. So she had the idea that if we can get a lot of different seed savers kind of gathered together through a business, then we would be able to move more seeds through the region, produce more seeds that are regionally adapted compared to those two businesses, or one was a nonprofit and one was a business. So she kind of combined the two with her friend, Carrie Jones. So they co-founded Snake River Seed Co-op. Oh, excellent. Has that overall ethos or founding mission changed in the last eight years, or has it largely been able to stay intact or take on new missions, maybe? Yeah, the mission has remained the same, and that mission is to empower intermountain west farmers and gardeners to plant, grow, save, and share locally adapted seeds. So that mission has remained the same. But the methods, I would say our methods have changed over time with how we approach that, how we can just bring that into the business. Okay. And how many farmers in that region are involved with the co-op? Yes, we work with about 50 different growers is what we call them. We do work with small-scale seed savers. So some are just a backyard gardener who is saving one seed crop with us. And then we also work with growers who have many acres of organic farm production. So we've got that full-scale. Excellent. Yeah, we're actually neighbors with a place called Agricoll. It's a prairie seed company, and they have large-scale monocrops of prairie seeds so that they can make mixes. And so it's beautiful to drive by their place because it looks like a patchwork quilt. It's, you know, purple and then yellow and then blue and then green and all these different flowers, which usually will grow intermixed in a prairie, but they grow them obviously with modified industrial equipment. It's an amazing operation, but this is, you guys are much more a distributed network of small, medium, and I suppose you have some large farmers as well? Yeah, we work with a few farms that are, that we consider to be large. They're still probably kind of small in terms of industrial-sized farms getting bigger and bigger. I would say the majority of our farmers that we work with have under 10 acres. Okay, okay, great. So seeds are kind of the central component here. So let's kind of shift and talk about those. I see on your website, which is snakeriverseeds.com, you have the word seed shed all over that website. So what is a seed shed? What is that? And why is it so important that it's on your website so often? Yeah, so the seed shed, we love this, or I love personally this visual answer my co-workers do too. It's basically when you think about the watershed and there's, you know, it's a cycle of water that's moving through an area. We think of our seed shed in the same way. So seeds are coming from farmers to our office. So it's kind of like the farmers are like a river, river of seeds coming into our office here. This is like a puddle that's growing with seeds. I love that just thinking about all of them coming here. And then we distribute them, we package them up and send them out to customers, which mostly include gardeners in our region as well as farmers who are planting our seeds for food crops. So that flow of seeds is really important to us because that's how we adapt the seeds each year is by growing them continually. Whereas a lot of seed banks prefer to just store the seeds and when you're doing that, they're basically frozen in time. So they're not adapting to any climatic changes that are happening. Okay, sure. And so yeah, we kind of have access thanks to, you know, our global supply chain now. We have access to seeds from all over the world. I'm growing, for example, a Ukrainian wheat, not for any political expediency this year with the events in Ukraine, but just happened to be I'm growing Ukrainian wheat and then I'll send some back to the bank that that came from and the rest I'll distribute out here or eat. If you're, you know, new to an area you want to take on a new crop, when is it best to bring in something and then over a few years or a generation adapt it to where you are locally and when is it best to look into already locally adapted? Where is there no real good answer for that? So yes, so we live specifically in the inner mountain west, that's where we are focused with our efforts. We respect other regions and hope that they can do the same, you know, grow their regional seed shed. And in our region, the great majority of the food that we grow here is not native here. There was not agriculture happening in the valley where we live prior to settlers moving here, European descendants. So in our mind, pretty much all of the varieties that we're that we're producing are not land raised, they have been brought in from somewhere else. So it is important for us to be able to do that because it isn't something that's already here, whereas other regions do have that, you know, long history of agriculture, like in southwestern United States, so they do have varieties that they can grow that are land races. But we don't have that as much. So that's something that we are just kind of always working on and selecting varieties to bring in that already do really well. That's that's basically how our growers introduce a crop is they have to come to me and say, Hey, I really love this variety. I'm already growing it. And now I want to save the seed and produce that for other customers as well. So I wanted to ask, I imagine you guys probably already have a good answer for this. But let's just dance on patenting seeds and the legal, there's other related legal structures that kind of restrict people from using and sharing seeds, even we're using our own seeds. I'd be interested to hear your stance on that. Yeah, we do believe that that is unethical to patent seeds. And for a couple of reasons. So usually seeds are produced either by selection or by hybridization or by genetic modification. Right. So for the first to selection and hybridization, the plant is being produced with the help of a human being. But the characteristics that the plant is showing are already there within the plant. It's not something that the human invented. So just patenting something that already exists in nature doesn't make any sense to us. And then kind of on the more ethical side, we love our seeds that we work with. We know they are living beings and we treat them with respect as much as we can. We treat them as living beings that are with us right now. And when people are genetically modifying seeds through gene editing, we honestly see that as not being really consensual. The seed is a sovereign entity in our mind. It's a living being that we respect. And we just don't think that that is respectful at all. Just to say that is something that I've learned from indigenous seed capers just over the years. It would be interesting if I don't know if anyone's trying this, maybe you guys would know. I know that some rivers or even some animals have gotten legal protections in some countries as beings on par with humans in terms of having rights and things, even if they can't necessarily express them. Maybe somebody should be working for seed citizenship or something like that where they would get some sort of rights where, yeah, like editing their genes without their consent, which they're not going to give. It would be helpful. And so the main reason I found you guys is we were doing a gardening challenge this summer. We were challenging folks mostly on social media, but elsewhere, also to spend more time with a garden like Mary Kay. You were talking about victory gardens. Just so happens in 2020 during the beginning of the pandemic, we had already planned to try and grow all our own food that year. So in January, we started and then in February, COVID actually became a big deal. So it worked out really well for us, because we had already bought all our seeds and things like that. But this last year, we challenged people to spend 100 hours in their gardens over 100 days, which is probably a bit of a steep challenge. Maybe we should do it less hours. I think that may have been intimidating. But you guys donated seed packs, which will be probably here in the next week or two, drawing participants and sending them out. So hopefully we'll get some people in touch with you guys. So first, I want to say thank you guys for being part of that. I thought the challenge was good. I thought 100 hours seems reasonable for trying to grow any substantial amount of food. But we're glad you're doing the challenge. Yeah. I'm so glad to have you guys on board. It seems 100 hours isn't a lot when you're growing subsistence levels amounts of food, but otherwise it might seem a lot. I don't know. So we'll see. It's hard sometimes. I spend and you guys probably also spend so much time outside. I get home from work, get home from work. I work from home. We're based in our residence, but when I'm done with work and my wife has been working all day, she says, let's go for a walk or she wants to eat lunch outside. I'm like, oh, I've been outside in the sun all day. I want to be inside. Anyway, so speaking of my organization, maybe we have some folks listening who are big Snake River fans and are coming new to us. So my organization, another technology institute talks about what things are going to be in a quarter century when we don't have as much access to gas, diesel and other oil products, among other things, but that's going to be, I think, the big deciding factor is where we're going to change how we grow food. And so I know this is kind of speculation on your guys as part, but you have experience with this. So it's a locally distributed co-op model useful for folks as we become more local in our distribution networks. Would this be a useful model or would you guys lean towards something else? Yeah, that's a good question. You know, the image I like to think of when we're asked this question is just like many hands holding the seeds. So Snake River seed co-op has operated in the cooperative spirit since the beginning, really, but only within like the last nine or so months, we've had employee and grower ownership. That really means a lot to us. We operate as a benefit corporation. It took us a long, a long path to get to actually officially becoming employee and grower owned. Just really last summer, we started the conversations, had a steering committee, worked with a really great local attorney. And the value we see in cooperative ownership is really what you're talking about is being resilient in uncertain times. And then, you know, especially we could, you know, the original owner Casey O'Leary, she could have sold the business to somebody else, most likely with good intentions, but then you never quite know exactly what the outcome of that sale will be. And so we're really proud of the fact that we are cooperatively owned and our governance structure is really based on centering the voices of those with the most day to day work in that area. And so we listen to our growers concerns and needs, it's paramount, you know, to what we do. So definitely not sure if that totally answers your question. It seems like we're definitely in the same vein and committed to a lot of the same values. And if we look at the seeds themselves. So for example, in 2018, we did a potato growing study with USDA funding. And when I had to do comparative literature research for this grant, I was doing non mechanized potato growing methods, right? And it was really easy because nobody's ever done any studies with non mechanized potato growing methods with the USDA in the last 150 years, because everybody's mechanized with everything, especially commodity crops like potatoes, for example. And so it's really easy for me to say we're comparing five different potato growing methods, non mechanized potato growing methods for market gardeners who might not have potato harvesting equipment. And they're like, Oh, great. And we got funded. But that's just, you know, one crop, one example of how things would change if we're not able to use our tractors, use our large scale powered implements. So how do you think maybe seeds that you guys deal with a lot? I don't know, maybe if you could pull an example or two, how would they change if at all, when we'd be doing a lot more hand work in the gardens? Or maybe you have some growers who prefer to use more hand methods for crops. We talked about this, you know, generally speaking, we would be looking for drought hardy short season, long keeping plant varieties that will, those will be really critical for localizing our individual and community food supply. Looking at things that could be grown vertically using water really carefully. It's very precious out here. So we have a lot of lettuces, a lot of mustard greens, and there's a fair amount of, I'm like branching a little bit out of our region here, and then I'll bring it back in. But there's a fair amount of exploration in hydroponic and aquaponics efforts, for example, Microsoft main offices in the Washington, you know, Seattle, Washington area. Supplies are all cafeteria with fresh greens readily using an aquaponics system that's vertically situated. But outside of that, a few friends here and one fellow visiting our booth at Farmers Market a couple of months ago in Boise, I'm not aware of a scaled up effort in the Intermouth West. And I hope I hear about one now that I've said it out loud on the recording. My co-workers here were pointing out that, you know, that involves plastic. So it's not really like venturing out of fossil fuel. But I actually live in like a little permaculture collective household, and my house, housemate landlord does do aquaponics. I mean, we have like a little pond in the backyard powered by goldfish that are really robust. They overwinter, and then he's recycled like rain gutters. And he's got like, you know, broken up lava rock and there's things grown out of that actually snaps and photos when I was home for lunch, just like share it and prove it and whatever. And then, you know, we have so much, so much stuff in our in our world right now that could be repurposed that wouldn't involve, you know, utilizing new fossil fuels that could still accomplish a similar situation. So there's lots of PVC that, you know, without municipal water being pumped, because all of that's driven by grid energy, which is largely fossil fuel derived, you know, there's probably a lot of extra water lines out there that could be pulled up and turned into, if that's what you wanted to do. Yeah, much infrastructure. I mean, we, you know, we have land out here, but we're also in a big development boom, but that's been draining off the topic a bit. And there's the recent situation with tomatoes in California, causing pretty big concern about general large scale supply for tomatoes, labor impacts from COVID, rising fuel and fertilizer costs, increased demand and strain in that situation, plus drought and fire season. There's concern about national availability for tomatoes next season. So large scale producers like some of your ketchup producers and whatnot are already looking to develop drought resistant varieties, but so saving tomato seeds that survive this hot, dry summer in this region and help bring a sense of security in that crop locally. And I found in the community garden, school garden that I've been working on this year, where I definitely got my 100 hours in. We did all right. Like some of those tomatoes went for three or four days without watering. I'm kind of learning by suggestion and learning by from experienced other gardeners or even scientists that are like, you know, I hear you can actually dry farm tomatoes. So I gave that a shot and they, they did better when they didn't get water over the water. Yeah, I just picked some tomatoes today and I was, I was, we were gone for the weekend and so I had uneven watering and I had some cracked tomatoes because they were so used to even watering. But yeah, selecting for, and for you guys, I think drought is so much more of a driving issue than, you know, for us in Wisconsin, occasionally we have dry years, but we also have very, very wet years. Do you guys get unusually wet years or is it pretty much unusually dry years all the time now? Yeah, I think it's primarily unusually dry years all the time. It just rained here for like three minutes and we're like, oh my God, let's go stand outside and look at the rain. Yeah. And then to kind of like piggyback on what Mary K was saying, you know, that's why we choose to focus so heavily on the inner mountain west and on our regional area because of these like, you know, fears and concerns is one reason, but the other reason is just we, you know, we really support small local growers anyway. We don't really necessarily sell our seed to larger scale farmers. We're not really at that scale. And so we're really in service to the local producers and so providing them things that are easy for them to grow and harvest without machines is super important to us. Oh, that's wonderful. Are there other groups? So you guys talked about being situated in the inter-mountain west. Are there other groups like you that you know of in other regions that I don't know, maybe folks listening, you know, other parts of the US or the world could look up? Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance for one. There's not a lot of regionally sourced seed companies at this time. There are some that are moving in that direction, which is really exciting. And hopefully they'll continue, but it does have some challenges because it is putting a boundary around where you are in your business and saying, this is it. This is the only place where we will source our seeds. So that does create some challenges. Yeah, unfortunately, it looks like the market pushes people to do things that are not long term helpful for. Yeah, we have that discussion all the time and as a values based business, we continue to just stay within the inter-mountain west. We sell seeds online to, you know, whoever will buy them, but all of our wholesale accounts and all of our growers are in the inter-mountain west. Another helpful resource for people are seed swaps, seed libraries for people that are looking for those locally adapted seeds. And also, I would imagine, at least I know in this area, there's a lot of Native American groups that are actively working on maintaining and reviving their own local varieties and things that have been at least in this place in this area, you know, corn and other things that have been grown here for, oh, I don't know, a couple centuries or more. And so, you know, those will be very locally adapted, longevity and all kinds of variety and all hand harvested and things like that. So, people might avail themselves of local groups, if they're around, if they're willing to work and share outside their communities. We do have, we do carry some drought-hardy Native species that are native to our area that have been traditionally used by the indigenous communities in the inter-mountain west. Like kind of Podia type things or? Like berries, some herb varieties, flowers, and grasses have been used for medicine, have been used for food that have high nutrient value, things that could be, you know, stocked because this has been a really hard area to live in without all of the alterations that we brought with it or brought to it, I should say. So, the people here, from what I've learned from Indigenous Idaho Alliance in conversation, was that traditionally it was a seasonal, people moved around seasonally, they moved to where the salmon were for fishing, they moved to the mountains and they had caches of food, different seasons of the year, but you know, our varied vegetables and fruit trees, that's something that we've been cultivating. I'm probably missing some foods that have grown here naturally in the desert that we have no idea about, we don't carry those seeds. Yeah, unfortunately, so it's kind of funny in anthropology, there's kind of a joke that like, oh, there's so much emphasis on the hunting of hunter gather, we're talking deep time, right? Because, well, what do we find in archaeological record? We find arrowheads and spear points and things like that, we don't find the baskets, we don't find the food, we don't find the remains of all the food that was gathered and across cultures, this is a generalization, but across cultures, many times the women and children were doing most of the gathering and they were also getting most of the calories anywhere from 60 to 95 percent of the calories were women, the women and children were doing it because it's something you could put up and put down, but we don't see it archaeologically, so there was forever overvaluation of the contribution of hunting to these societies, whereas gathering would have been by far, gathering it and then propagating and also growing food would have been by far the most important input into people's diets. I mean, yeah, it's just it's really a shame that we can't reconstruct quite everything because there's probably some pretty great or at least interesting food out there that we're missing. So I used to be an anthropologist and archaeologist and so yeah, seasonal sedentism was seen all across the world right before people started to really get intensively into agriculture and so you know imagine doing this seasonal sedentism and then maybe grandma or grandpa gets sick or breaks a leg or something and can't move with the camp, so maybe you start to be more sedentary, so you focus more on the plants around you and things like that and that's one way that domestication may have happened and you guys are so close to one of the richest natural environments the west coast where people could live in these really large permanent settlements because the land was so rich, you guys definitely are in that rain shadow that makes it a lot more difficult, but yeah, we're starting to wind down on time here so I just want to say thank you guys all so much for taking real time out of your data chat with me about the co-op and kind of your outlook on you know what's important for seeds and growing co-ops and people working together to preserve seeds and grow food and kind of think about the future a little bit with me, I appreciate that, ask them kind of oddball questions you guys playing, playing so nicely. Are there places besides snakeriverseeds.com, are there places online that people could find you or learn more about what you guys do or have going on? Yeah you can follow us on Facebook or Instagram both of those are linked on snakeriverseeds.com and I'll put the show notes too. Yeah and then since we're you know since we're regionally focused all of our wholesale accounts are in the inner mountain west so anywhere in Idaho we have got about 70 wholesale accounts in Idaho Wyoming Utah Oregon and we just got our first one in Nevada this past year and so we don't you know snakeriverseeds.com is the only place online that you can buy them but if you're in the inner mountain west go check out your local garden center and if they don't have us let us know. Oh yeah good point good point but yeah you guys are it's great that you guys are there to I like that you started as a seed bank that's really that's really fun and now we're I've turned that into a larger scale business to to share those seeds with everybody so thanks again so much for taking some time out to chat with me today and now for a brief recap of the research we have going on around the institute we had member event this last weekend picking apples and we had a dozen people out and we were in our orchard we picked apples for the afternoon and pressed cider so that was a lot of fun if you want to find out more about more member events please sign up as a member on our website as I mentioned before or patreon.com slash low tech institute we also demonstrated thatching at an event called the Wisconsin permaculture convergence so feel free to check that out on their website or next year's permaculture convergence please ignore the crying in the background that's my daughter we do have a couple of of things coming up a prairie seed gathering event and we also have two other things coming up on the 8th of october we have a free prairie seed collection workshop find out information at our website lowtech institute.org and then on the 9th we'll be demonstrating coopering that is making small buckets in the village of new glaris wisconsin at the heritage festival for the historic new glaris village museum there you'll be able to find out more information on our website that's it for this week the low tech podcast is put out by the low technology institute the show is hosted and co-produced by me scott johnson and co-produced and edited by miss azuki this episode was recorded in the low technology institute's recording room which still needs more soundproofing uh subscribe to those podcasts on itunes spotify google play youtube and elsewhere we hope you enjoyed this free podcast if you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do please consider going to patreon.com slash low tech institute and signing up thanks for our forester and land steward level members maryland skirpon sam b and the hambuses and i did just want to know i met sam uh randomly this last weekend when i was demonstrating that change so that was great to meet some of the people that help us and support our community uh people i know in person and some are from far away so thank you to everybody and i hope to meet many of you at uh random future times so thanks again low technology institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members grants and underwriting you can find out more information about the low technology institute membership and underwriting at lowtechinstitute.org find us on social media and reach me directly at scott at lowtechinstitute.org our intro music was ancient memories of the album forager by holizna that song is in the public domain this podcast is under the creative commons attribution and share like license meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit thanks so much and take care