School of Sustainability

One week, one outsider, and every shelf in the seed vault

For one week in October 2025, Janny van Beem did not sit in a meeting room. The Crop Trust's global genebank partnership coordinator spent her days at Heritage Farm, working alongside the staff of Seed Savers Exchange - walking the workflows, watching how seeds move through the place, and asking the questions that only an outsider can usefully ask. It was the first time a nonprofit genebank in the United States had undergone a comprehensive external assessment by the Crop Trust.

The preparation had taken the organisation months of unglamorous labour. Staff gathered data, wrote down processes that had lived for years in people's heads and habits, and pieced together the history behind their own practices - the kind of documentation nobody has time for until someone makes them. Executive Director Mike Bollinger and Farm Director Corbin Scholz sat through it all with the preservation, farm and operations teams.

What van Beem's review affirmed is the thing that makes Seed Savers Exchange unusual among genebanks: its conservation model does not end at the vault door. The organisation describes it as community-based, engaging gardeners nationwide in the work of seed saving, so that part of the collection lives wherever those gardeners grow. The freezer is real, but so is the wider holding.

The review also pointed at three gaps, and the organisation has named them plainly: data systems that would let gardeners and researchers actually find and use what the collection holds, better flow of information from the field into the digital archive, and tighter methods for regenerating seed stocks so that vigour is not lost over repeated grow-outs. Whether the feedback changes anything will be visible only in the next few growing seasons.

Seed Savers Exchange · Read the source