Saving Seeds in the Panhandle Heat

Lessons from Meadowlark Hearth’s 10th Annual Seed Festival

This story from fall of 2022 was originally published in the 2023 edition of the Groundwater seed catalog, a product of Omaha. All the photos were taken by Dawaune Lamont Hayes on our group trip to Meadowlark Hearth.

The highlight of my summer was taking a group of my friends on a road trip across the Great state of Nebraska. In the dog days of early September, nine of us packed into a big white Sprinter van with our tents and sleeping bags to drive 8 hours across the windy plains to visit a biodynamic farm in the panhandle of Nebraska.

Living along the Missouri river, many of us think of Nebraska as a rather flat place. And that’s pretty much true, but if you were properly educated as a fourth grader in the Nebraska public schools, you probably heard of the sandhills. They really do exist! Explore west and you will be amazed as the rolling sandhills progress into small mountains and rocky bluffs. By the time you reach the panhandle you have ascended thousands of feet into the edge of the Rocky Mountains. At 4,000 foot altitude, it’s enough to cause a nosebleed. Luckily there are plenty of natural remedies in the farmhouse of Beth and Nathan Corymb, the feisty and rugged operators of Meadowlark Hearth, a 492 acre organic farm in Scottsbluff. 

Beth greets visitors with an engaging tour that sporadically winds between historical facts, housekeeping advice, and the distinctive mathematical patterns of each plant family as she leads us through the seed gardens. She grew up here, but left at a young age for experiences in sustainable agriculture that she would eventually bring home. She found herself farming at Camphill Village, the residential community in the Hudson River Valley where she met Nathan in the 80s.

Nathan is a quiet but cheerful man. His dedication to organic vegetable seed is evident in his unrelenting focus as he winnows trays of seed for hours. When I step in, he provides non-stop feedback trying to help me master in one day the precise technique that he has spent decades finessing. Nathan trained with seed farms in Germany and Switzerland in the early 90s. Upon returning to America, Nathan and Beth worked on several projects cultivating biodynamic seed before settling in 2010 at the Scottsbluff farm where Beth grew up. Now they have turned it into a thriving farm, where they raise seed, vegetables, and livestock using biodynamic practices.

Biodynamic farming is a holistic approach of doing agriculture in alignment with the natural rhythms of the universe. It is based on the philosophies of Austrian architect and social reformer Rudolf Steiner, who lived from 1861 to 1925. I suspect many readers of this almanac would think biodynamic agriculture is pretty rad. The farm is treated as a whole ecosystem and healthy soil is enhanced with natural herbs like yarrow, dandelion, and stinging nettle. Biodynamics also considers astrological influences, as I discovered in the Stella Natura Biodynamic Planting Calendar Beth shared with me. I will definitely use it to inform my crop plan in 2023 because it offers guidance on the best days to plant, cultivate, and harvest different types of crops based on lunar cycles and other cosmic events.

Nathan and Beth understand the importance of education, and they are passionate about spreading the lessons of biodynamic agriculture. One way they do this is by  welcoming interns to live and work on the farm for the growing season. We loved getting to know Derick, a skilled weaver from Iowa who was working and living at the hearth this season in a tiny house that he renovated himself. Maintaining a place like Meadowlark Hearth requires hard work and intentional community, which is part of why they bring people together for a seed festival each labor day weekend.

2022 was Meadowlark Hearth’s tenth year hosting the seed festival. It has typically been a humble affair with a dozen guests or less, but this year there were nearly 80 participants coming from Virginia, Washington, Colorado, North Dakota and Minnesota. The numbers were so high in part because of our large group from Omaha and another collective of farmers from six hours north of Omaha. The New Roots cooperative is a group of about 12 new American farmers located in the Fargo-Moorhead area. One farmer from Burundi brought his specialty crop, the African white eggplant called Intore. This egg shaped fruit, which turns red when ripe, was one I have seen grown by new Americans here in North Omaha.

Seeing the parallels and shared origins among African growers in Omaha and other midwest towns gave me some perspective on the global significance of saving seeds. Refugees come with an entire lifetime of wisdom, skills and experience before being displaced to unfamiliar land. For farmers, acclimating to a new climate and soil type can be its own challenge, but it’s nothing compared to the economic and political barriers of breaking into agriculture. 

Incubators like New Roots provide a degree of access and opportunity for new Americans, which creates small-scale producers and local food systems. However, given the colonial history of the United States, Indigenous people and Black Americans are just as deserving of access to land stewardship and ownership as our migrant friends. Genocide and displacement have ruptured the destiny of our lineages, and left us contending with the question of what to do with our current fate on this land.

Intore and other diaspora crops like molokhia and okra provide one answer to this question. Saving seeds from our diasporas and planting them where we’ve ended up allows our ancestors to traverse generations to shape the land and make their mark. For marginalized farmers, seed-saving can provide a source of liberation and ancestral connection.

Bringing practical seed-saving knowledge back to my community was my main goal of attending the Seed Festival. The programming included dry and wet seed-saving, as well as a workshop on the population, selection, and isolation requirements required when growing certain plants for seed. These are concepts I was familiar with because of the Blazing Star Co-op’s seed school here in Omaha, but there was much wisdom to be gleaned.

Dancing traditional folk dances like the Virginia Reel and Troika over piles of Kohlrabi and beans was our method for threshing the seed from the chaff in Nathan’s dry seed-saving workshop. These dances with Scottish and Russian origins bring an air of festivity and ritual to the act of seed saving, a tradition that would be just as meaningful in the tune of the Cha-Cha Slide or Cupid Shuffle! We’ve already danced on black eyed peas this fall in North Omaha, and those are available in the Groundwater seed catalog.

The dances showed us how important joy and pleasure are to the experience of saving seeds. The perfect sensual complement to this lesson was wet seed-saving. We grinned at each other as we slid our fingers through wet and juicy overripe cucumbers, knowing nature intended this to be erotic.

After a long day of processing seeds in the blazing sun, we got to take a plunge in one of the ponds on the farm. The water was a refreshing oasis in the midst of a very dry countryside that had not seen a drop of rain in over two months. The brittle gold and brown prairie grasses made me want to say a prayer for Scottsbluff. As the sun dipped behind the horizon, we swam, kayaked, and danced in celebration of nothing more than our own existence on this beautiful land.

On the way home we took the scenic route along highway 2 through the sandhills prairie. The remarkable discovery when traveling through the middle of nowhere is how beautiful and vast this land we call Nebraska is. Without the visible markers of colonialism and geopolitics, this land feels as much ours as anybody else’s. It was truly hilarious to see the confused looks on locals’ faces as they watched our eclectic group file into a remote gas station. We marked the land with our presence and propagated our joy. As we drove into the sunset, we sang, laughed, and discussed our plans for seed-saving and community-building in the future.