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SFA and North Circle Seeds owner Zachary Paige are pleased to announce an intensive, multi-day Seed School, to be held at the North Circle Seeds Farm in Vergas, MN. October 25-27th, 2024. This opportunity is made possible through a grant from West Central Initiative Foundation (WCIF).

Zachary will lead a three-day immersive training where participants will learn all things seed saving, including: seed sourcing, pollination/isolation, harvest, cleaning, winnowing/threshing, storage, germination testing, and more so participants will learn how to save seeds successfully for their own operation—that is, those seeds best adapted to their particular environment.

This engaging hands-on workshop will touch on the history, structure and growth of the modern seed industry, its extreme centralization, and the worldwide grassroots counter-movement that’s creating new opportunities (especially for smaller and mid-sized operations) to learn how to save seeds. Participants will learn everything from basic terminology to innovative new strategies for transitioning their operation with seed-focused and sustainable methods.

Space in the School is limited to eight to ten participants who have a deep passion for saving seeds and an interest in sharing the information they have learned with others. If this sounds like you, please fill out this questionnaire by September 26, 2024, so we can learn a bit about where you are in your seed saving journey and what you hope to gain from participating in the School.

Participants will be notified by October 1 with a registration deadline of October 6. We’re able to offer this three-day intensive learning experience because of generous grant support from WCIF. Registration is $80 per person. No one will be turned away due to inability to pay.

Tentative Schedule: Friday 10/27 beginning at Noon, Saturday 10/28 all day, and wrapping up Sunday 10/29 about 1pm.

Lodging: Lodging quarters for up to 3-5 people as well as unlimited camping with tents is available on our farm. There is also the Pelican Rapids Motel nearby. Lodging costs will be covered if you prefer to lodge there.

Why seed saving?

The practice of seed-saving — the harvesting, cleaning, drying, and storing of plant embryos — has been around for thousands of years. Indigenous societies in North America stewarded food systems that relied on collecting and saving seeds for nearly 10,000 years. More recently, farmers in Minnesota did the same. Not so long ago, if you wanted to eat you had to grow your own food, and that meant saving seeds from one harvest to plant the next season. The process wasn’t political or controversial; it was what humans did to survive.

But over the past century, a series of changes in how we live and work effectively put an end to small-scale seed-saving. Between 1900 and today, the percentage of Americans who live on farms shrunk from nearly 40 percent to less than 1 percent and in fewer than 100 years, seed-saving, a practice that had always been essential to human survival, went from mainstream to something most of us are barely aware of, something happening at the fringes of our food culture — small farms, Native communities, survivalists. Even in the growing Organic, Sustainable and Regenerative farming movement, barely any farmers save their own seed or know how to, dependent on hybrid seed.

About Zachary Paige

Zachary holds a Masters in Plant Breeding from Iowa State University and has taught dozens of shorter seed workshops. He’s a member of the Lake Agassiz Chapter of SFA, and started North Circle Seeds in 2019.

During the past 10 years, Zachary has taught more than 30 seed saving trainings, but all fall short of a thorough education. Most requests for a seed saving presentation are from 1 to 4 hours, which only scratches the surface of basic knowledge needed to save the dozens of species of vegetable seeds, each with their own rules and guidelines. The reason this Seed School is so special is that we will be integrating seed saving techniques from harvest all the way to storage of all major vegetable categories – each with their own unique rules and guidelines.

About the school

North Circle Seeds farm will host the Seed School, utilizing its community Seed House that was built in 2023 as a central hub. North Circle Seeds has all of the seed saving tools and equipment available for participants to go into the field, harvest and dry/process the seeds on the farm. Zachary has hosted several 1-day seed saving workshops here in 2024.

This immersive workshop will also strengthen social bonds through storytelling, science, and hands-on farming. Our goal is that this rare, collaborative learning opportunity will inspire more farmers to seed save in our region. Seedman Zachary Paige will be available to provide ongoing support to trainers following the School.

Questions? Reach out to Zachary Paige at zacharypaige@gmail.com.