University Sustainability Initiatives
MUM Produces Heirloom Seeds for Seed Savers Exchange
By contributing heirloom seeds to the Seed Savers Exchange, Maharishi University of Management is helping in an effort to preserve the genetic legacy of vegetables, herbs, flowers, and fruit trees that is rapidly being lost as a result of factors such as industrial agriculture and genetic engineering.
The Seed Savers Exchange is an Iowa-based nonprofit organization founded in 1975 to preserve the vanishing agricultural heritage. Part of the Exchange’s work is maintaining a huge collection of heirloom and open pollinated varieties of vegetables, herbs, flowers and fruit trees that is available to the public. Heirloom varieties are defined as those that were known before World War II.
The Seed Savers Exchange has also initiated a global network of home gardeners and small-scale farmers who grow these varieties to save their seeds and thus keep them alive and available to other people.
The organization also publishes a yearbook, with the current volume listing 690 members from the U.S. and Canada who together offer 13,263 varieties of rare heirloom vegetables.
Maharishi University of Management is contributing an heirloom seed to the yearbook — a colored butterbean that has been grown and propagated by the family of Sustainable Living faculty member David Fisher for more than 100 years. The unique are being grown in the campus greenhouses by Sustainable Living faculty member Alex Kachan and students in order to save the seeds and offer them in the yearbook.
“This is our first variety in the famous Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook and the satisfaction and sense of accomplishment is really great,” Mr. Kachan said. ”It’s an extremely important work that the Seed Savers Exchange is doing, and we are happy and proud to be active participants in it.”
He said that with the upcoming new community supported agriculture track that the Sustainable Living Department is offering, each student will actually get to grow one such heritage variety into seed and then offer it in the Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook. “Growing to seed and seed saving is fundamental to sustainable agriculture,” he said.
For more information, see the website www.seedsavers.org. An online forum to help locate rare and lost varieties can be found at www.forums.seedsavers.org.
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