As a child growing up in the garden, I always knew someday I wanted to work at
a seed company or be part of a seed company somehow. My earliest memories
were either with my grandmother Bertha, who was from Mexico, or my mom and dad or
aunts and uncles and cousins out in the vegetable patch, out in the flower garden,
or even in the orchard, looking at the bees and the grasshoppers and planting
seeds. His folks let him have his own garden, and he was really little then, just
a toddler. Well my husband and I had a garden close by our place, a pretty good-
size one, and I had planted it. He'd come over one day and we were walking up and
down, looking to see if anything had come up and a lot of plants had, and he (said) "Grandma,
look! Your carrots are up! Oh, look at your beets!" And I thought, "wow this kid, he
knows his stuff!" And he does. I mean, he always has. The garden has been his first
love, always. He followed his dream, but he never dreamed it would end up this big.
Jere's family moved to the Missouri Ozarks from Montana when he was 12. By
then, his passion for seed saving was already rooted deep. As I got a little older,
I started requesting every seed catalog I could find in mail-order magazines at the
time, and about nine or ten years old is when I started getting catalogs that
started talking about heirloom varieties. As I got a little older, I joined Seed
Savers Exchange and started trading seeds, and within a year or two in 1998 I
decided to put out my own little price-list catalog. It was 12 pages and it
had about 70 different varieties or so that we grew here on the farm.
He asked me if I thought anybody would buy his seeds, and I didn't know what to tell him
exactly, because I didn't know where he wanted to go with it, and I thought "well,
you know there's lots of big seed companies out there, and you're
just a little boy in the Ozarks with one tote full of seed. Really. One
big blue tote of seed in his bedroom.
And I said," Well, you know, make yourself a
list of what you have that you have enough of to to sell some, and and then
we'll send it out to the relatives and people that you know that garden, like
that and we'll see what happens," thinking you know, it's a good hobby for a
teenager. I think Jere could pretty much handle
it himself that first, you know, the first catalog,
although a year later it was like crazy wild. People were all of a sudden
concerned about what might happen to the computer systems in year 2000 and people
started thinking: "OK, how does how secure is our food supply?" So people
started ordering heirloom seeds, and that was the year we kind of got a boost in
business. It was enough to, you know, build a seed store at least out of cheap
lumber and recycled tin and whatever we could find in the neighborhood, as well
as print a catalog the following year. Y2K, we said, this is this is nice, Jere, but you
know after this it's going to go back down to ... you know. But it didn't. The Lord
wanted it to happen. People wanted the seed; they could see just a need for it.
The country was ready for a seed explosion, for a better food explosion. Of
course the internet really exploded things, too. You have to give Jere credit
for tapping into it. When I started the business you know 20-some years ago now,
I had no idea where it was gonna go. All I wanted to really do is, you know, make
it a hobby that could pay for itself, and make it a hobby hopefully that someday
would become a business where I could, you know, afford to support myself and
hopefully travel a little, and ... basically live cheaply and that's
still my goal, you know. It's not to get a business that will make a lot of money
on. It's making a project that can help a lot of people, work with a lot of
projects, and at the same time ,you know, it has to be able to pay the bills. Baker
Creek Heirloom Seeds is a homegrown business started with just a hundred
dollars and driven by Jere's love of heirlooms. Today it's a thriving
enterprise at the forefront of the international pure food movement, with
its home base on fertile land at the confluence of Baker Creek and the
Gasconade River. I think the reason these old vegetables get people so excited is
they tell a story, and they tell a story about a culture, whether it's your
culture or another culture. It also tells a piece of history about that
culture. It's a living a piece of the past, and it's one of the only things
that every person can have, whether you have finances or not, whether you live in
the United States or you live in Haiti. Everybody can get some seed that they
came in their family or their neighbor's family or from a friend's family. I think
that's what makes it special is that connection to our past. At the same time
kind of handing it to the future, and enjoying it in the present of course.
Jere didn't just want to sell heirloom varieties -- he also wanted to celebrate
them in community with others. Baker Creek held its first gathering in 2000,
and the Spring Planting Festival now draws upwards of 10,000 people to the
farm. Monthly gatherings on Sundays during the growing season also bring
vendors and visitors to Bakersville, the pioneer village just steps from the
farmhouse where Jere launched his seed business and where he and his family now live. I
met my wife, Emily, in 2006. Her and her folks actually came to our seed store,
and we got talking, and we married about four months later, and she's been a, you
know, a partner in ... my life, of course, in the business and has actually
come up with a lot of ideas for the buildings and the village here. And we
also have now four children, three daughters and one son, and they
also love being in the garden and working outside and you know doing all
these different activities and being involved. A new decade ushered in a phase
of phenomenal growth for the company. After Jere and Emily built up Bakersville,
they started expanding beyond the Missouri homestead. In 2009, they opened a
seed store in Petaluma, California in an iconic old bank building in the heart of
town. Not long after, they acquired Comstock Ferry in Wethersfield,
Connecticut, the oldest continuously operating seed company on the East Coast.
In 2011, Hyperion Books published "The Heirloom Life Gardener," followed by "The
Baker Creek Vegan Cookbook." And inspired by conversations with other heirloom
aficionados, in 2011 they also launched the National Heirloom Expo. It's been
called "The World's Fair of Pure Food," and it is spectacular. When we were at an
event in New York City actually, we also got talking to a bunch of different
people at a heirloom event and we talked about putting on an old-time kind of
exposition for showcasing produce. In the olden times, like in the 1880s, 1850s,
people would come together and bring their harvest together like what fairs
were originally founded as, agricultural expositions, and we wanted to bring that
back. And so we got talking and came up with the term "Heirloom Expo" with several
others. We finally decided to have it out in California and Santa Rosa
each year. We get about 15,000 people from around probably two dozen different
countries every year and across America.
The three-day event features a breathtaking display of heirloom
varieties from dahlias to watermelons. At workshops and lectures, visitors connect
with internationally known experts on gardening, heirlooms, sustainable
agriculture, and more. There's a seed swap, and a kids' expo hall, and of course a
vendors' hall that includes other heirloom seed companies. Baker Creek also
works to draw the world closer together through collecting and sharing seeds. Jere
believes that the best way to preserve heirloom varieties is to grow them. One
of the things I love to do besides, you know, gardening of course is traveling
and collecting seeds as we travel, and learning about gardening techniques and
learning about how local people in each area garden and their cultures. That's
one of the things when we travel overseas -- we love to visit people, learn
about their varieties, and bring those back. I first started traveling in about
2002 and went to Mexico and then Thailand and Guatemala and a few other
places. And now each year we visit, between my family and different
employees and friends, we visit probably between 12 and 18 countries each year.
And whether it's to fairs or festivals, or just visiting people and farmers, and
collecting seeds, trading seeds, bringing seeds and exchanging seeds and ideas, of
course, that's one of the most important things I think we do.
Thousands of regional and family-based seed companies once provided American
farmers and gardeners with what they needed. But in the 1930s, as hybrid
varieties took hol,d private companies began to consolidate control of the seed
supply, and that trend has accelerated in an age of corporate agriculture that's
put the squeeze on family farms. In 1996, for example, there were 300 independent
seed companies in the U.S., but by 2009 there were fewer than a hundred. Baker
Creek and companies like it serve an important role in reviving and restoring
seed diversity and security. Along with, you know, the importance of the history
of heirloom seeds, there's also so many other issues involved. One is simply
the right of people to save their own seed. You know, so many modern seeds have
been patented or hybridized that the farmer has basically lost control of
their seeds and it's in the hands of a few corporations or governments and
oftentimes these controlled varieties are actually not even as nutritious as the
older varieties. The older varieties were bred for flavor, and you know, in some cases
they were bred for certain qualities. Modern varieties are not so diverse.
They're oftentimes just bred for a few things, like huge production, uniformity,
and also how hard they are so they can ship well. They have to have a hard skin,
and in the case of like corn and many commodity crops, they're genetically
engineered so they can take, you know, massive amounts of herbicides that would
kill any other plant. I think there's just maybe one in a, you know, multi-
million that are master seedsmen. Because when you kind of look at the
seedsmen of yesteryear, they were all innovative. They knew their craft, they
knew how to attract customers. They were really special people, and I would put
Jere right in in that class. From a mailing list of 500 friends and family
members in 1998, today almost 750,000 people receive our catalogs. Baker Creek
has a global reach, offering heirloom seeds from nearly every continent. Jere
says Baker Creek's growth is ultimately guided by the open-pollinated, beautiful
varieties that form the heart of the business. There's so many different ideas
continuously in a garden, you can't help but have plenty of ideas. So what the
future holds for Baker Creek, I really don't know. It kind of depends on where
the plants take us.