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2015 Native Seeds/SEARCH $2000 Grant

2015 Native Seeds/SEARCH $2000 Grant

Amaterra’s $2000 grant to Native Seeds/SEARCH Conservation Farm for improving and building new  infrastructure will help take their seed conservation mission to a new level. To meet a critical infrastructure need of expansion and growth, a green house is being constructed for the production of crop seedlings and food crops.

nssseedprocesing400Sorting and Packaging Seeds

The seedlings will be sold in the NS/S Retail Store for our Spring, Monsoon, and Fall plant sales. The retail store sells seedlings from several growers in Arizona. Seedlings from the Conservation Farm will introduce new crops from the seed bank and make them more widely available to gardeners, thereby increasing the diversity of adapted and drought tolerant crops for local food production. Food produced in the green house will be sold to restaurants to promote the mission of NS/S to the public. The sale of the plant seedlings and produce from the green house will also provide a reliable income stream for the Conservation Farm each year.

Another function of this green house will be to produce seedlings for the Conservation nssfarmsunflower175Program’s grow-outs of crops from the NS/S seed bank. A new seedling house with phytosanitary protocols ensuring disease-free seedlings is, therefore, critical. Some seedlings are grown from seeds that are endangered so there is a need to ensure that the seeds can be multiplied from healthy plants. The green house also provides a season extension function so that crops that may need a longer growing season than the Patagonia site normally provides, have an improved chance of producing seed in the field.

Farm Greenhouse under big windIn addition to the season extension function, the green house will provide climate  mitigation for seed crops and for food production. This is an ever more important function in this time of changing and extreme climate. The unheated hoop house type of greenhouse will use only solar energy and ventilation to control the conditions inside the structure. This type of inexpensive, energy efficient, structure is widely used in agriculture today. These efficiencies are transferable to a wide geographic area, urban areas, and to different scales of food production.

2014 Amaterra $1000 grant to assist NSS in the following two projects

SEED CLIPPER CLEANER
We (NSF) are purchasing a seed cleaner and screens to make our seed processing more efficient and to provide higher quality seed for our seed distribution programs. The new seed cleaner costs $5,800 and is partially funded for $3,500 by a USDA SARE grant that NS/S received to work on heirloom wheats in Arizona. The seed cleaner uses different types and sizes of screens for cleaning a variety of crops. At the Conservation Farm, we grow and clean a lot of crop diversity, therefore we will also be purchasing a set of 13 screens for the seed cleaner that cost $60 each ($780). This seed cleaner is a small-scale, 2-screen type that is an appropriate model for small-scale farms. It will be available to our farming community to use, including Borderlands Restoration who work on native plant seed conservation for land restoration. It is an example of appropriate technology that is transferable to other small farms and it could be run on solar power.

OVERHEAD SPRINKLER SYSTEM
We are in the process of improving our water and energy conservation on the Farm by switching from flood irrigation to overhead sprinkler irrigation. The Farm has always pumped water up to an irrigation pond using a lot of electrical energy in order to flood irrigate. The pond is now in a endangered species restoration project with Fish and Wildlife that requires a continuous level of water to be maintained in the pond. For this reason, and for reducing the Conservation Farm’s water and energy use, we have decided not to use the pond to flood irrigate. We are looking to fund the equipment for an aluminum sprinkler irrigation system that will include mainlines, moveable hand-line sprinklers, and valves. This system will replace the gated PVC pipes that we have been using to flood irrigate. The aluminum pipes and metal sprinklers will be more durable and eliminate PVC from our farm landscape. PVC is a material that breaks down under UV in 3 to 7 years and it is not recyclable when it wears out.

Thank you Director Nancy Wall for arranging this grant.

Native Seeds Search Grant 2013

Native Seeds Search Grant 2013

Native Seeds/SEARCH was named as the recipient of a $1000 grant for 2013. Their mission statement best describes the nature of this rapidly growing organization.

Native Seeds/SEARCH conserves, distributes and documents the adapted and diverse varieties of agricultural seeds, their wild relatives and the role these seeds play in cultures of the American Southwest and northwest Mexico. We promote the use of these ancient crops and their wild relatives by gathering, safeguarding, and distributing their seeds to farming and gardening communities. We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Tucson, Arizona.

In April of this year, Danielle Johnson, who recently received a Master’s degree in social anthropology, along with four other impressive apprentices, was selected to assist at the NS/S farm and learn the process of conserving seeds. They were given room and board in exchange for 30 hours of work a week.  All of these interns put in a lot of extra time—planting, dealing with an infestation of squash bugs, harvesting the seed and working on special events for the organization. But Danielle put in more than 150 hours beyond those devoted to the other activities when she agreed to take on an extra project, The Seed Diaries.

This project was inspired by an art exhibit, Sacred Places: Watercolour Diaries of the American Southwest by Tony Foster. Each of his paintings was accompanied by topographic maps, his journal entries, and sketches of local flora and fauna that, in the words of Belle Starr, Deputy Director of Native Seeds/SEARCH, gave the viewer “a much more engaged and curious appreciation of the natural settings captured on the canvas. More than just beautiful images to be casually observed, through the attending materials the landscapes began to come alive with a complex, multi-layered story.”

In what she described as an “aha moment,” she thought about the possibility of using this approach to tell the stories of the seeds in the NS/S collection. A discussion with an art professor who was also at the exhibit led to a meeting with Bobby Long, a professor of illustration at the U of A. He agreed to take on the Seed Diaries as a project for a fall semester class. In October students in the class visited the NS/S Conservation Center for a presentation by Executive Director Bill McDorman and a tour of the Seed Bank. Danielle also volunteered to give a presentation, telling the students stories of the seeds, and to curate a sampling of 25 seeds from the collection. She photographed the seeds and plant materials and sent these photos along with information on each seed—origin, use, cultural importance, etc.—to the class, at which point each of them selected a seed to work with.

Danielle continued to devote her time to this project, visiting the class along with Melissa Kruse-Peeples, the NS/S Collections Manager, to work individually with the students. The results of the project, now completed, will be displayed at one of the University galleries, and Janos Wilder has suggested displaying them at some point at his Downtown Kitchen.

The Seed Diaries would not have happened had Danielle not graciously agreed to take on this ambitious project because, in Belle’s words, “she believed so solidly in its ability to inspire and viscerally change the way people look at and experience our seeds. As one student exclaimed upon leaving his visit at the Conservation Center, ‘This was 500 times more interesting than I expected.’”

The grant, this year, goes to compensate the unpaid apprentices for the incredible work they performed for Native Seeds Search during 2013. These funds are to be distributed at the discretion of Bill McDorman, Executive Director and Belle Starr, Deputy Director, under whose creative and inspiring leadership this organization is wildly flourishing. We thank Director Nancy Wall for arranging this grant.