Friday Video: Seed Swap Documentary

From Seed Swap Documentary

This week’s Seed and the Story column looked at the organization Conserving Arkansas’s Agricultural Heritage (CAAH) and the annual Seed Swaps currently taking place throughout the state.  This afternoon we will be posting a radio piece which will air on KUAF today  profiling voices from the swap last year in Russellville.

In keeping with this coversage of CAAH, today’s Friday Video is a trailer for the film, Seed Swap Documentary.  Produced by Zachariah McCannon, the film documents the early days of the CAAH organization and the work of anthropologist Dr. Brian Campbell as he organizes the first seed swap in Mountain View, Arkansas.   According to the film’s Facebook page:

This documentary film uses the development of a seed exchange and agricultural biodiversity conservation project in the Ozark Mountains as an ethnographic lens to explore the seed saving subculture of the region. 

To learn more about the film, follow the project on facebook here.

To read more and to keep up with screenings around the state, visit the film’s webpage.  It looks like there will be screenings coming up this March in Fayetteville, Hot Springs and Eureka Springs.

And don’t forget there will be a swap this Saturday in Russellville and one Sunday in Conway.  Go here for a full listing of swap dates and times. 

The Seed and the Story: CAAH and Arkansas Seed Swaps

2011 Russellville Seed Swap. Photo by author

The Seed and the Story is a bi-weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!

The Seed and the Story column is just of many features you can find on the Boiled Down Juice.  

You can follow the Boiled Down Juice on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading!

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Beginning earlier this month the organization CAAH (Conserving Arkansas’ Agricultural Heritage) began their yearly series of Seed Swaps across the state.  With the motto “One for the cutworm, one for the crow, one to share and one to grow,” the organization seeks to preserve both the agricultural folkways of Arkansas and the seeds themselves, many of which have been in families for generations.

They operate a Seed Bank on campus at the University of Central Arkansas, studying and preserving the genetic diversity of regional seeds and host twelve statewide swaps, providing a space where community members can trade heirloom seeds and gardening knowledge, sharing the wealth with both fellow community members and the CAAH organization.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting project leader Dr. Brian Campbell and hear him speak about this project and his other work, and I attended the Russellville Swap last year.  Regardless if you’re a master gardener with decades of experience or a person who’s never put a thing in the ground but posses an interest in learning more about growing your own food, CAAH is an excellent resource.

They seek to raise awareness about the problems with crop monoculture, wherein regional heirloom seeds are replaced by hybrids, the seeds patented and owned by major corporations.  As growers shift to these seeds, the regional ones die out, taking with them genetic diversity, regional traditions and a hardiness to local conditions. Just take the example of tomatoes.  There are only few varieties sold in grocery stores but literally hundreds of different heirloom tomatoes you can grow at home, ranging from pink to green to yellow and each with their own unique taste.  Heirloom gardening opens up a whole new world of eating.

Last year when I attended the swap in Russellville there were several people who brought seeds to give away and an even larger group of folks who just wanted to meet other gardeners in the area, many of whom were starting their first plots.  I came home with some okra seed, daffodil bulbs, a hummingbird vine, and French melon seeds, all of which have done well. If you have seeds passed down in your community, donating some to CAAH is an excellent way to make sure they never die out.  But don’t feel like you have to have seeds to swap to attend the event. It’s for everyone, gardener or not.

The event in Russellville will take place on the 25^th of this month at All Saints Episcopal Church from 10:00-1:00.  If you miss the Russellville event, you can make it to the Conway swap on Sunday the 26th 1:30-3:00 at the Faulkner County Library.   You can check out the full list of swaps below.

You can read more about CAAH and learn what’s in their Seed Bank here: www.arkansasagro.wordpress.com.  If you want to read more about last year’s swap and see a few more photos, go here. If you have seeds that have been passed down to you, I’d really love to hear about them!  I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for spring.  What are you going to be growing?

Friday Video: Alice Walker

From AALBC.

We’re back up and running with a Friday Video after a few weeks without a dependable computer.

This week’s video features poet, novelist, and activist, Alice Walker.  She’s most well known as the author of the novel The Color Purple and the person who saved Zora Neale Hurston from historical obscurity.  The name of this blog is drawn from a Zora Neale Hurston quote, and no doubt I’d never come across her work if it weren’t for the diligence of Walker, who revived her legacy and place a tombstone at her burial site.

A few years ago when working full time for public radio I had the opportunity to interview author Evelyn White about her then recent book, Alice Walker: A Life.   I’d loved Alice Walker for years—poured over Once during college and underlined 3/4 of the story “Everyday Use.”  But it wasn’t until I read her official biography that I began to fully comprehend the layers of Walker’s influence as author, social radical and freedom fighter. Walker is both loved and hated, lauded and discredited.  Her work brings out strong emotions, asking people to wrestle with questions of race, peace, environment, and self.  Her biography remains one of my favorite books of all time.

Yesterday ColorLines magazine posted this video, in honor of Walker’s 68th birthday.  It was originally released in 2010 by Google, but I’d never seen it until yesterday.  It’s full of timeless concepts, so it’s not dated.  It’s a long one, and I have not had a chance to get through the whole thing yet.  But what I’ve watched so far discusses her work in Gaza regarding International Women’s Day, her belief in the power and democracy of new media, and the importance of imagination in empathy and action.  She also talks about her “literary formothers,” including Hurston, her own mother, and others.

You can visit Walker’s blog here. 

If you have’t read it already, I highly reccomend her biography written by Evelyn White. 

Friday Video: “I Will Be a Hummingbird” Wangari Maathai

From the Dirt webpage

Earlier this week Wanagari Maathai, founder of the Kenyan Greenbelt Movement, Nobel Laurette, and human rights advocate died at the age of seventy-one.    Quoting from the New York Times obituary,

“In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dr. Maathai said the inspiration for her work came from growing up in rural Kenya. She reminisced about a stream running next to her home — a stream that has since dried up — and drinking fresh, clear water.

“In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness,” she said, “to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now.”  (Read the entire piece, written by Jeffrey Gettleman, here). 

We posted another video from Maathai earlier this week, but this video in particular has been circulating a great deal this week, so we decided to share it here.  It’s taken from Dirt: The Movie, a film which strives to bring “to life the environmental, economic, social and political impact that the soil has.”  This clip from Wangari Maathai reminds us of the choices we have and the decisions we can make, even amid huge challenges.

Wangari Maathai Passes Away

From Taking Root webpage

You have probably heard the news that Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya and Nobel Peace Prize winner, passed away after a long battle with cancer.   Quoting from Richard Black’s tribute article for the BBC:

The Green Belt Movement, which she founded in 1977, has planted an estimated 45 million trees around Kenya.

The straightforward environmental benefits of that would have been important enough on their own in a country whose population has grown more than 10-fold over the last century, creating huge pressure on land and water.

But what made the movement more remarkable was that it was also conceived as a source of employment in rural areas, and a way to give new skills to women who regularly came second to men in terms of power, education, nutrition and much else.

Maathai published a wonderful book several years ago that goes into the specifics of how the movement worked, both its successes and early setbacks.   You can find this work, The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and Experience by clicking here. 

In discussing her Nobel Peace Prize Richard Black points out Maathai’s holistic approach to cultural and environmental sustainability and her deep understanding of the multi-layered connection between humans and the land:

In other words, it’s not just planting trees – it’s the reasons why trees are planted, it’s the social side of how the tree-planting works, it’s the political work that goes alongside tree-planting, and it’s the vision that sees loss of forest as translating into loss of prospects for people down the track.

You can read the rest of the moving article here. 

You can read moving testimonies about her life on her facebook page here.

From the documentary Taking Root: The Vision of Wangair Maathai:

Other Links:

Taking Root:  The Vision of Wangair Maathai

The Official Site of the Green Belt Movement

Books by Wanagri Maathai 

Thank you Wangari Maathai for your life’s work. 

Know Your Chicken, You Got to Know Your Chicken: Pickin Chicken App for Iphone

Ever heard that song by Cibo Matto called “Know Your Chicken?” Well anyway, there is an Iphone app, sponsored by Mother Earth News, to help you discover which chicken breeds best meet your needs. I love reading about the various ways people are returning to food sufficiency and sustainability while also embracing the tools of technology.

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The Rural Assembly and the Rural Compact.

Today I came across an organization called The Rural Assembly and I am so excited about their work and I think you will be too. The Rural Assembly is a part of the Center for Rural Strategies, an amazing organization whose fingers are all over most of the rural sustainable movements going on these days.

The Rural Assembly

According to their webpage, “The National Rural Assembly is a movement of people and organizations devoted to building a stronger, more vibrant rural America.” At the core of their work is the Rural Compact: “The National Rural Assembly encourages individuals and organizations to endorse the Rural Compact, a basic statement of principles for building a stronger rural America that improves opportunity for all of us.”
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Native Seeds/S*E*A*R*C*H

Just the other day my friend Dr. Kristin Dowell, an anthropologist who works with Native American communities, suggested I look into a project called Native Seeds, a seed bank and cultural memory bank based in the southwest. It am so excited about the information that I had to post about it.
Native Seeds

Started in 1983, this organization was one of the founders of RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions ), and safegaurds seeds native to Native American communities in the southwest. What’s even more amazing is not only do they safegaurd the seeds, they also maintain what they refer to as a Cultural Memory Bank. Their website explains it this way:
“In the late 1990s, NS/S undertook to expand our seed bank efforts to include a cultural component, integrating cultural information – the agricultural practices, stories, songs, and recipes associated with specific crops in the seed bank – with our existing database of collection information. In effect, we would combine the geneticist’s concern for conserving unique traits of a crop with a folklorist’s concern for conserving oral history about the crop.”
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The oral history and folklore of Climate Change and an extension of what we mean by PLACE.

In working with a few different oral history programs, I have always been intrigued by how much information these interviews about rural life in North Carolina, Arkansas, or central Kentucky contain about climate change. When men and women in their 80s and 90s discuss their childhoods, they often recall extended winters, greater amounts of snow, creeks running so deep they would flood their banks, and trees so filled with robins that robin soup was a popular dish.
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