Ken Greene and Doug Muller are founders of the Hudson Valley Seed Library in Accord, NY.

Open Sesame: What was the origin of the Hudson Valley Seed Library?

I lucked into a job at the library in Gardner, New York. It was a tiny two room library and it was really just me and the library director and a few other part time folks. It was one of those situations where each time I had an idea crazy idea it would be like “Peg would you think if we did this or what if we tried that?” and she was always really enthusiastic about whatever I came up with. The seed library started as a project through a public library, a town library where people could check out seeds like a library book and then grow them in their garden, save seeds from the plants they grew and then return them to the library. The idea was that as a community we could create regionally adapted seeds and a public resource not owned by anyone.

I wanted to be a farmer and so I was gardening and my garden was getting bigger and bigger. I didn’t really know what it meant to be a farmer or what I wanted to farm. So I was doing tons of reading, really abusing the interlibrary loan system… And the books and information that really fascinated me most were about seeds…

And the sort of food politics side of things that interested me the most was about access to seeds and who controls seeds, who’s growing seeds, where do seeds come from, how are they produced and the idea really was for me a way of saying… I may feel powerless as one person, compared to a multinational corporation that is consolidating seed resources and is implementing genetic engineering, but as a community we can find ways to save seeds and share them with others. From there we can create a system for more people to share seeds with each other, that’s a way that we can take that control back.

 Open Sesame: What are some of the challenges you’ve faced?

One of the things that has been a challenge for us is that seeds aren’t valued in the way that we would like them to be in terms of how difficult it is to produce seed in the Northeast specifically. Most seeds are produced in California, Oregon or other slightly drier longer season climates. Seed farms have moved to where it’s easiest to grow seeds. For us we think that’s a problem. It’s important to grow seeds in the region where there’re going to be grown by other people so they can be adapted to that region.

Growing seeds in the Northeast there are a lot of issues, there are a lot of things to overcome. It’s not easy and we I feel like we work extra hard to produce seed here in this climate. And that that doesn’t necessarily translate to how much people are willing to pay for seeds. So we’ve tried to do a lot of outreach and education around why it’s important to be growing seeds in the Northeast and why there are more obstacles and challenges for that.

There are definitely times when we’re like “this is crazy” does this really make sense for us to be doing this? But at the same time this this is what I want to be doing. I think it’s really important to face these challenges and to have the crop failures that we have sometimes. There’s this whole food sovereignty movement happening and I think that we need to think as well about seed sovereignty you can’t have regional food independence without regional seed independence so that’s one of the pieces of what we’re doing, where there’s not a lot of pay off, right now. But I think that it’s an important contribution.