The Barn at Heritage Farm: Renovation (Almost) Complete!

The Barn at Heritage Farm: Renovation (Almost) Complete!

The questions flew quickly as an inquisitive group of local fifth-graders filed into the iconic barn at Heritage Farm this past September and stared into tubs of fermenting heirlooms tomatoes, excited to learn all they could about how to process tomato seeds: “What is an heirloom tomato?”... “Why are the tomatoes fermented?”... “How do you remove all the seeds?”

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The Beloved Barn at Heritage Farm: Its First Restoration

The Beloved Barn at Heritage Farm: Its First Restoration

In the late 1980s, just like today, the historic barn at Heritage Farm was in need of help—lots of help. In 1987—not long after Seed Savers Exchange bought arguably one of the most beautiful farms in Iowa—Kent Whealy and Diane Ott Whealy, founders of the organization, learned that the homemade laminated bows that supported the barn’s roof were weakening, and, consequently, posed a real threat of the roof collapsing. Thus began months of restoration, conducted by Amish carpenters from Canton, Minnesota, financed with a $20,000 grant from the Ruth Mott Foundation, based in Flint, Michigan. In 2011, Diane devoted a section of her book Gathering, Memoir of a Seed Saver, to the work the Amish carpenters did to restore the barn. An excerpt of that section follows:


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