“The corn is one of my greatest teachers,” says Jessika Greendeer, a Ho-Chunk Nation tribal member from Baraboo, Wisconsin, and a Deer Clan member who serves as a seed keeper and farm manager for Dream of Wild Health, a Minneapolis-based organization that works to recover knowledge of and access to healthy Indigenous foods, medicines, and lifeways.

“You can’t have food sovereignty without seed sovereignty,” says Jessika Greendeer, seed keeper and farm manager at Dream of Wild Health in Hugo, Minnesota. “That is why this work is so important.”

Amy Goldman of Rhinebeck, New York, is a gardener, author, artist, and advocate for seed saving, plant breeding, and preserving heirloom fruits and vegetables. Her mission? To celebrate and catalogue the amazing diversity of standard, open-pollinated varieties, and to promote their conservation. A former board chair of Seed Savers Exchange, she now serves the organization as a special adviser.

In 2004 Helen and H. Lee Thomas of Ravenswood, West Virginia, donated the colorful ‘Wick’s Lima’ bean to Seed Savers Exchange. The couple had grown the cherished variety (a pole lima bean) since the 1960s after receiving it from H. Lee’s grandfather, Wick B. Smith of Sandyville, West Virginia.

Seed Savers Exchange’s Heritage Farm headquarters is just a quick, five-mile jaunt down US 52 from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. And this past January, five inquisitive Luther students took advantage of that proximity to spend more than three weeks immersed in the work of saving and sharing open-pollinated seeds.

It should come as no surprise that there are fields, heirloom plants, and rare seeds aplenty at Heritage Farm, Seed Savers Exchange’s headquarters in northeast Iowa.