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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Svalbard, SSE Mark a Decade of Safeguarding Seeds Together

Svalbard, SSE Mark a Decade of Safeguarding Seeds Together

Opened in 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a steely compound tunneled 500 feet into an icy mountain in Spitsbergen, part of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. Located just 800 miles from the North Pole, it’s intentionally difficult to find—and even more difficult to access—and it’s no exaggeration to say it may one day save the Earth from human extinctio

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