Hyper-Local Seed Collecting Gains Momentum in the Northeast

Tucked away among 215 acres of fields, forest, and creek at Seed Song Farm in Kingston, New York, are two inconspicuous plots that seem devoid of life. Looking closer, one can see about 200 minuscule plants poking through the black landscaping fabric. In a few hours, when the farm store opens, hungry visitors will stop by and pick up late-fall produce. But these plants are not for eating. 

Creek Iverson, who runs Seed Song, is one of dozens of farmers in the Northeast participating in a movement to cultivate hyper-local, or ecotype, seeds, which come from parent stock that has evolved over time and adapted to a specific area. He is growing these 200 perennial plants, a combination of swamp milkweed and turtlehead, with support from the conservation group Catskill Mountainkeeper and the Ecotype Project, an organization working to address a local seed shortage in the Northeast. Its mission is to increase the quantity of local seed available for restoring damaged landscapes, creating ecological buffer zones, landscaping people’s homes, and more. 

“Fall is a great time to plant perennials and trees,” said Iverson. “If you can plant in late October, early November, before the ground starts freezing up … they'll come back and bring a whole crop of seed next year.”

Iverson describes himself as a “local guy.” When we think of a local farming movement, we often think of farm stands and farmers’ markets selling edible items. But Iverson is also catering to other needs in his community by making ecotypes available for landscaping and restoring conservation lands. A challenge in the Northeast, and in many regions across the globe, is that there’s a shortage of these products for sale. 

When a Northeast homeowner, municipality, or land trust orders seeds, those seeds are likely grown hundreds if not thousands of miles away, even if they’re native species. And the nursery is likely selling cultivars—seeds that have been propagated for certain traits and are identical to one another. Therefore, the chance that the “native” seeds come from the region that the consumer lives in, and that there is genetic diversity among them, is slim. 

“We don't want milkweeds from the Midwest,” said Sefra Alexandra, who cofounded the Ecotype Project and goes by “Seed Huntress.” The Northeastern monarch didn’t co-evolve with Midwestern milkweed and could be “missing the bloom times of the milkweeds all the way down the coast.”  

Proponents of hyper-local seeds argue that the plants grown from them interact more successfully with local pollinators and leaf-eaters, and that they offer a kind of resilience that comes from millennia of adapting to a local environment. 

“When I learned that local ecotype seeds are actually much more attractive to local pollinators, I was like, ‘Oh, of course!,’” Iverson said. “Because it's like an evolutionary dance. Those pollinators have grown up or evolved with these particular genetics of this land.” 

Even as some eco-regions shift northward due to climate change, many believe that preserving this ancient genetic information is important. It’s like holding onto a body of knowledge, even without knowing exactly how it will be used. 

“Diversity of genetics allows them to be most adaptable to different stresses, whatever those stresses may be,” said Linda Rohleder, director of Wild Woods Restoration Project in New York, an organization that collects and propagates seeds for restoration projects. “And so keeping the most diversity in genetics just makes sense for the long-term viability of the species.”

Wild Woods Restoration Project volunteers sowing seed. | Photo by Linda Rohleder

Alexandra said that it’s critical to have local and diverse seeds in order to respond to civil unrest and climate disruptions that “take out our wild lands.” A 2022 Mid-Atlantic Regional Seed Bank study of native plant material users east of the Mississippi highlighted just how difficult that is. The study found that 74 percent of respondents preferred local ecotypes and that there’s a production bottleneck, because growing seed from the wild is labor intensive and most nurseries don’t do it. 

“None of us have … a large enough quantity of the truly local native seeds that exist exactly where we're from to ecologically restore those lands,” Alexandra said. “No one has this backed up.” She was referring to the seed stock of not only Northeastern nurseries and seed banks but also those around the world. Just because there is a larger seed industry in the western United States, it doesn’t mean that the nurseries there are selling local ecotypes or offering seeds with genetic diversity.  

Ninety percent of survey respondents that preferred local ecotypes said they had less than two years’ lead time for their projects, which means they needed seed relatively quickly. But two years is often not enough time to acquire that kind of seed.

“You might need plant material for your wetland restoration project, and you know of that project maybe three years in advance, when it might take twice that to actually find the species that you need, collect the right materials, start to scale it up,” said Eve Allen, program director for the Northeast bioregion of the Ecological Health Network and co-coordinator of the Northeast Seed Network, which fosters relationships among farmers and other groups amplifying local seed. “So the timelines are often incompatible.”

“It really does require ... that we [bring] seeds from the wild populations in an ethical way into agricultural production systems and amplify their seed and their plant material,” Allen said.

The production of local seeds and plants involves multiple steps: harvesting seeds from the wild, growing plants from those seeds on agricultural plots, and then harvesting the seeds from those plants and/or harvesting the plants themselves. 

In the early 2020s, Rohleder started the Wild Woods Restoration Project after observing a roadblock faced by the 50 organizations she oversaw that were doing invasive-species control work. “The topic kept coming up over and over again,” she said. “We feel like we need to restore after we've [removed] the invasive species … but we can't find the sources.” 

Rohleder realized that she could organize volunteers to go out, find the seeds, grow them into plants, and plant them in the restoration locations of the partner organizations. This year, a team of 50 volunteers grew 30,000 plants in pots from seed collected on a range of participating properties in the Hudson Valley of New York and northern New Jersey. They either gave away or sold the plants for a “nonprofit price” to partners like New York State’s Fahnestock State Park and The Land Conservancy of New Jersey. 

She said that because it’s a nonprofit organization, it can focus on species that most nurseries won’t, because it takes them too long to grow them from seed or it’s simply too difficult to source them. But the 30,000 plants her team produced last year are just a drop in the bucket in terms of what’s needed.

“Each [restoration site] is probably less than an acre, and we've done multiple plantings in them. If there's a need for restoration of hundreds of acres, we just don't have the seed sources for that kind of thing.”

Allen said that preserving seed in the Northeast is especially critical because of “extremely fragmented habitats and a very long history of land use transition and pretty heavy land use, especially in the urbanized corridor.” 

Alexandra believes that things are changing for the better. In the early years of her work in the seed movement, she said, gardeners would ask where to buy ecotypes, and she had few sources to offer. Now she can lead them to a farmer-led seed group called the Northeast Seed Collective and to a handful of nurseries, including Catskill Native Nursery and Barkaboom Native Plants. Back at Seed Song Farm, Iverson explained that he’s not participating for the small amount of money he may get from selling local plants at his farm stand but because he believes in promoting local ecology and local community. In addition to nonedible seed plots, his farm has corn, beans, and squash grown from seed passed down by the Ramapo Munsee Lenape Nation. 

Allen agrees that the movement is about something bigger: “It's not just coming from an ecological need, but I think from this growing sensibility that we could promote bioregionalism and a stronger connection to place.”