02/05/2026
The origin story of Seed Savers Exchange.
Missouri, 1975.
Diane Ott Whealy stared at the small seeds resting in her palm—tiny black morning glory seeds and wrinkled pink tomato seeds, barely larger than grains of rice.
Her grandfather Baptist John Ott had given them to her four years earlier, just before he passed.
He'd told her the story: His parents had carried these seeds across the Atlantic from Bavaria in 1884. For ninety-one years, his family had grown these plants and saved the seeds each season, keeping an unbroken line alive through Iowa winters, through world wars, through the Great Depression.
That spring, Diane and her husband Kent planted them in their small Missouri garden.
The morning glories twisted up the trellis in the same deep purple her grandfather remembered from his childhood. The tomatoes exploded with a flavor she recognized from summer visits to his garden.
Then the panic hit.
What if she'd tossed that yellowed envelope? What if she'd forgotten?
An entire bloodline of vegetables—ninety-one years of her family's history—would have vanished in a single careless moment.
She began researching and discovered something terrifying: a silent extinction was happening in backyards across America.
Old seed varieties were disappearing as grandparents died. Heirloom plants were surviving in only one person's garden—then nowhere at all. Commercial seed companies were abandoning century-old treasures for patented hybrids.
In the last hundred years, the world has lost seventy-five percent of its edible plant varieties.
Diane and Kent were broke newlyweds. He had a journalism degree and did odd jobs. She'd grown up on an Iowa dairy farm but had no professional agricultural training.
They had no connections, no funding, no plan.
But they couldn't unhear the question haunting them: If not us, then who?
In 1975, they wrote a letter to Mother Earth News asking if anyone else was interested in saving older seed varieties.
Twenty-nine gardeners responded.
The first newsletter of the "True Seed Exchange" was six pages long, copied on an unguarded Xerox machine at Boeing Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas.
Those twenty-nine strangers began mailing precious family seeds to each other on faith alone.
What happened next sounds impossible.
Word spread. Letters poured in—not just with requests, but with seeds and stories.
Seeds that supposedly came over on the Mayflower.
Tomatoes that General Robert E. Lee had sent home to his family during the Civil War.
Beans carried by Cherokee ancestors over the Trail of Tears—the winter death march of the 1830s that left four thousand graves between the Smoky Mountains and Oklahoma.
One retired dentist from Oklahoma, Dr. John Wyche, had preserved those Cherokee beans for 140 years in his family before donating them.
Seeds came in from Mennonite and Amish families. From elderly gardeners in Appalachia and the Ozarks. From Italian immigrants who had carried their family's peppers across the ocean in 1887.
Each packet arrived with a letter telling its story.
Diane and Kent cataloged everything. They stored thousands of bean varieties in their basement. They went without health insurance for years. They worked day jobs and night jobs while devoting every spare moment to the collection.
Their five children grew up tired of hearing about seeds.
In 1986, they finally purchased Heritage Farm—170 acres of rolling land near Decorah, Iowa—to give the collection a permanent home.
In 1990, Kent Whealy received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant."
It was the first time in their married lives they could afford a safe car.
Today, Seed Savers Exchange maintains over 20,000 endangered plant varieties at Heritage Farm—the largest nongovernmental seed bank in America.
Their collection holds beans from the Cherokee. Tomatoes from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. Corn planted by Native American tribes. Peppers smuggled from Italy. Apples from nineteenth-century orchards.
Seeds with stories.
Kent Whealy passed away in 2018. Diane still tends the gardens at Heritage Farm.
What started with twenty-nine gardeners and a photocopied newsletter has distributed over one million samples of rare seeds to growers around the world.
All because one woman understood something that commercial agriculture had forgotten:
Seeds aren't just biology.
They're living history.
They're the taste of a grandmother's kitchen. The color of a great-grandfather's garden. A family's journey across an ocean, carried in a pocket or sewn into a hem.
They're edible memory.
And if we don't plant them—if we don't pass them on—they disappear forever.
Ninety-one Iowa winters kept Grandpa Ott's morning glories alive.
Now gardeners across the world are keeping them alive for the next ninety-one.
