Sand Mountain Seed Bank needs your help!

First, we wish a heartfelt thanks to all of you who have donated! You do not know how much that means. It will help us get the seed vault built. Yeah!

As many of you know, we lost the bid on the property next to us when it went to auction. So now we are going to plan B. A more manageable but also more limited prospect. As you can see, we lowered the goals for the GO Fund ME to reflect the scale and needs for building the seed vault and the organization. The conditions and mission are still the same on a smaller and limited scale. Below is our mission and who we are for those new to us. The particulars of the build will follow that.

The Sand Mountain Seed Bank is a critical piece of the Southeast (US) regional seed sovereignty movement. It needs support to transition to a new space that will usher in a permanent house for the seeds and a more people-centric future for the Seed Bank.

The Seed Bank can no longer stay in its current space, and its founders are aging and considering how to pass the project on to the next generation of seed stewards. They see their seed-keeping peers across the Southeast aging, their seed collections at risk because they have no one to pass them on to. The community that the Sand Mountain Seed Bank has helped to nurture over its past nearly 20 years of existence is rallying around it in this transitional time to turn a difficult moment into an opportunity for exciting new growth.

The vision for the Seed Bank's future includes:

Building an underground, climate-controlled seed vault and a root cellar for our tubers. There are different requirements for each and a room for processing seeds will also be included.

Space for growing out seeds in proper isolation from one another to guarantee true to type seeds, educational workshops on seed saving and sustainable farming, and horticultural therapy for veterans struggling with PTSD.

Further development and collaboration with people who will help us grow our seeds out in a timely manner to keep the seeds adapted and viable.

SMSB does sacred work that is critical both culturally and ecologically. But unfortunately, that work faces an existential threat in the form of aging, financial hardship, and lack of capacity. This project seeks to preserve and amplify the foundation that Dove and Charlotte have laid, not only keeping SMSB’s doors open but allowing SMSB to grow into something more collaborative, more robust, more sustainable, and more widely and deeply impactful.

Your gift to this campaign is an investment in seed sovereignty, our shared cultural heritage and a future with a new generation and tasty food. That is agricultural, flowering and herbal seeds whose stories and genetics are locally adapted, lovingly stewarded, and shared openly with growers and eaters for whom they have cultural significance and abundance for us all. Your gift is an investment in Southeastern folkways, Indigenous leadership, generational succession and knowledge, sustainable food and community building.

ABOUT THE SEED BANK

SMSB is a nearly 20-year project of Dove Stackhouse, who has been farming organically in Alabama for 22 years with her husband Russell and Charlotte Hagood, who has spent all of her 75 years in Northeast Alabama, mainly in the garden.

Dove and Charlotte met through a mutual love of saving seeds. They collectively have over 70 years of experience collecting seeds and their stories, growing them out to keep them viable, adapting and sharing them with fellow farmers and gardeners, and teaching their community about seed saving.

Currently housed in five refrigerators in Charlotte’s garage, SMSB safeguards about 300 varieties of heirloom, native, and endangered seeds from across Alabama (and, to a lesser extent, across the Southeast). They have worked with Mvskoke communities in Oklahoma to trace back and preserve seed varieties that traveled with Mvskoke people from Alabama to Oklahoma during the Trail of Tears. Given seeds to Native SeedSearch. Preserved African varieties like okra and watermelons that traveled with the slaves. European varieties like collards and other European seeds. Over the years, Dove and Charlotte have partnered with farmers, school gardens, libraries and community groups to get the seeds into the hands of people who will grow them and love them, some of whom also save them and return them to SMSB. Dove has grown seed commercially for Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and Charlotte is a long-time listed member of the Seed Savers Exchange.

But Charlotte and Dove are aging. Charlotte can no longer keep up with the seed varieties she typically grows in her garden through the hot Alabama summer. Dove and her husband Russell are in the process of retiring from market farming, which means she will have much MORE time to commit to growing the Seed Bank for the time being. But she is still thinking about who will succeed her in keeping the Seed Bank alive.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

WHY IT MATTERS:

Seeds are the starting place for nearly everything we rely on for food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and more. Heirloom and native seeds – stewarded by Indigenous people for centuries – carry stories of the human communities of the land and ecosystems that the seeds co-evolved alongside. In addition, each seed has unique characteristics – drought or disease tolerance, for instance – that make it uniquely suited to survive in its specific place.

Seed biodiversity is not just our ancestral inheritance. Still, it is like an insurance policy for whatever critical ecological changes might come our way – preserving hundreds of seed varieties with unique strengths is like proverbially “not putting all your eggs in one basket.” Meanwhile, the consolidation of immense power and wealth in the seed industry has made it such that more than half of global seed sales are controlled by four multinational biotech companies. Three of which are ALSO among the four multinational companies owning 65% of the agrochemical ie, herbicide and pesticide market, hmm). All this reduces our access to seeds and food and contaminates our environment.

As we face climate apocalypse and economic collapse, these extractive systems we know aren’t working. Help us rebuild a system that recognizes our interconnectedness with our environment and helps us realize the human values we need to thrive, be proper stewards, and enhance our earthly inheritance.

The way to preserve seed biodiversity (livestock biodiversity, environmental biodiversity, and human diversity, for that matter) is through the community. Living in cooperation and helping to build and honor interconnections between human society and the land. Not only is it the natural way to save our planet and safeguard our future, but it will also make us healthier and happier people and better humans.

SMSB is a unique and critical piece of our food sovereignty landscape and infrastructure. There is no other entity like it in the state of Alabama, and very few like it in the Southeast. These seeds connect us to our ancestral ways of being on and with the land and one another. Ways we must remember, reconnect with and readopt if we are to reverse climate change, realize food sovereignty and racial healing, and ensure our continued existence on this planet.

This is one way to be part of a solution.

PLAN B

Since we lost our bid for the 21 acres next to our farm, we will build the seed vault on our property. So we no longer have to buy property. It will be more manageable but also more limiting. We will be able to do most of the things we want to do, like the workshops and working with veterans, but it will all have to be outdoors. We will not have the additional insolation distances available. Still, we will have to build and rely on a network of growers to help us grow these varieties out (which, in my view is preferable in the long run but high maintenance in the short term).

The good news is we own the land and we have a basement that was going to be the foundation for our house already excavated and a 40' retaining wall built. We will have a little more digging to bring everything to grade, dig a footing, and pour a wall. We really wanted to construct rammed earth with tires for our walls; unless some of you volunteer to do this, we will have to pour the wall. Then we will build a strawbale room inside of the basement for the vault and one for the root cellar that will house our tubers from year to year. There have to be 2 separate rooms as the seed room is low humidity and the root room has high humidity. We will put floor joists up and cover it. Then as we get materials, we will build the room on top of it as planned, whether it ends up being a seed processing room or living quarters will be decided as needed.

Russell and I will build the basement, and the seed bank will build the seed vault and root cellar inside and all the required hardware, cooling, venting, and electrical systems. Between Russell and I and what the seed bank has in its account, we will be able to construct it if we do the work ourselves with the help of volunteers. We will still need to rent equipment and pursue the regular work of the seed bank. So what we are asking for will help us with unforeseen construction expenses and allow us to start growing a network of other growers while still doing our outreach presentations. This is our labor of love and if it is yours, let us know if you can volunteer your skills, equipment, or a donation. Thank you again to those who have donated; every dollar matters, and you have made it possible that the seeds will have a secure permanent place to live. Text me at [phone redacted] if you are interested in building this with us.