Building A Local Seed Economy With Bill McDorman
I was first exposed to the world of seed saving through a film, Seed: The Untold Story. The film is so inspiring, and there was a character in the film who shone brightly with so much passion for seeds, talking about returning to winnowing seeds by hand, the way people have done for countless millennia. Later, I met and was mentored by this hero: Bill McDorman.
Bill McDorman was a key part of developing our Food Systems Fellowship program. Jeff and Keshet brought a group of 10 students to take a seed saving class from Bill and his partner Belle in Cottonwood, Arizona during the pandemic. Through that relationship, we joined a Seed School teacher training, and ideas for what become Groundwork’s fellowship took root. Thanks to Bill for his mentorship and passion!
Bill has been a core figure in the US seed saving movement for decades. He was involved in Garden City Harvest in Montana and Native Seed/SEARCH. Later, he helped found Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance (now Seeds In Common), and he designed Seed School, the widely-attended seed saving class series which is now offered online at Seeds In Common. Bill has inspired thousands of people to save seeds. We’ve written about Bill before, in a 2023 seed story about the Galina cherry tomato that he helped smuggle out of the Soviet Union to seed high altitude gardens in the western states.
An image that Bill uses to teach about seed diversity is the pinch—as seed diversity decilned through the late 1900’s and about 95% of agricultural diversity was lost in North America, Bill describes the present moment as a pinch point, like an hourglass, with seeds flowing through the narrowest gap they have in agricultural history. We are the people at that moment, and when our hands are full of seeds, they’re holding the remaining diversity of food and seeds from all human history. It’s up to us to save those seeds and continue to build diveristy moving forward. And remarkably, since we met Bill in 2020, he thinks that in North America, the seed movement has grown enough and produced enough new diversity through innovative breeding work that we may be emerging out the other side. It’s a hopeful time to save seeds.