Notes from a Kansas seed library facing impossible choices
Meeting prep, 6:30 PM. Church basement, tables set up, coffee brewing.
The Turkey Red wheat packet sits in my hand, seeds rattling like a question I don't want to answer. Mary Ellen's great-great-grandfather carried these from Ukraine in 1889. Germination rate this year: 34%. Below our distribution threshold.
We have a different Turkey Red line—Schmidt farm, 1902—testing at 78%. But Mary Ellen will know it's not the same. She'll know by the seed color, the way the heads set, probably by the smell of the flour.
The back room hit 85°F for three days during August's power outage. Seven varieties gone. This is what happens when you can't afford climate-controlled storage and summer temperatures run 105°F for eighteen straight days.
Thirty-five varieties maximum with current storage. We're holding fifty-seven.
Last frost: February 28th. Earliest in county records. The growing season keeps shifting and nobody's celebrating because early warmth means late freezes catch the wheat after it heads out. Jim Porter lost his entire Marquis planting that way in April—$8,000 in seed and labor. He called yesterday: "I'm done with heritage varieties that don't account for reality."
Tonight we decide what reality means.
Dennis Kowalski walks in first, moving slower than last year. Seventy-one now, farming since he was twelve. He sets a mason jar on the table—Stowell's Evergreen corn, the sweet corn everyone's grandparents remember.
"Smut got it again. Every year I watch it die. I'm tired."
If Dennis is giving up on Stowell's Evergreen, we're past something.
Elena Martinez arrives with her laptop and a packet of Sonoran White Wheat from the Tucson exchange. She's thirty-four, moved back from graduate school in Arizona three years ago.
"We need to think like the climate is moving. This wheat evolved for heat and drought over 4,000 years. That's a longer test period than K-State's three-year trials."
Dennis will counter that desert drought is different from our precipitation variability. Elena will point to the summer dry periods getting longer and hotter. I don't know who's right.
Beth Koerner, the K-State extension agent, sets up her presentation on KS-HTW-2039, the experimental wheat. Heat tolerance rated to 108°F. Yield data looks solid. Cost: $45 per bushel versus $18 for heritage varieties. But the aquifer's pulling up saltier water every year. If we invest in varieties needing irrigation, what happens when the wells run dry?
Folding tables covered with seed packets: Provider beans that never fail us. Bloody Butcher corn—deep red kernels, performed beautifully through last June's heat wave, everyone wants more. Golden Bantam corn with its weak stalks. The melons nobody's successfully grown since 2038 without shade cloth and drip irrigation.
Tom Hendricks will bring up diversity. If everyone plants Bloody Butcher because it's reliable, and we get a pest it's vulnerable to, we're finished. But we can only maintain thirty-five varieties. Every one we discontinue is knowledge we lose—how to select, how to adapt, how to notice what the plants are telling us.
The Hopi Blue corn sits in its packet, untested. Traditionally grown at high elevation, selected for centuries to handle late freezes after early warmth. It's blue. Try selling that to farmers who've grown yellow dent their whole lives.
Although—Bloody Butcher is red, and that's working. Maybe we're past the point where color matters. Maybe people are just grateful for corn that grows.
The coffee smells burnt. Someone brought cookies that taste like they were made with the last of someone's sugar ration. The fluorescent lights flicker. The basement smells like old hymnals and seed packets and the particular anxiety of people trying to figure out how to feed themselves.
Mary Ellen walks in and I have to tell her about the Turkey Red.
Tom wants to discuss connecting with libraries further north. Montana. The Dakotas. Their cool-season crops might have heat tolerance we need. Our warm-season crops might have cold tolerance they need. The Tucson library has been good to us, but their monsoon season is collapsing. Phoenix shut down last year. Albuquerque barely hanging on.
Or maybe that's just desperation talking.
Heritage varieties matter. Of course they do. The wheat we plant has a story. The corn connects us to people who figured out how to feed themselves from this land.
Stories don't prevent crop failure, though. Stories don't feed people when the harvest fails.
How many can we save while still helping people survive? How do we decide?
Five minutes until meeting starts. The charts are posted. Little packets laid out containing both history and gamble—Provider beans and Bloody Butcher corn and Stowell's Evergreen and Turkey Red and Sonoran White and Hopi Blue and all the others.
We'll make some decisions. We'll defer others. We'll argue. Someone will probably cry.
Spring planting window is short. If spring keeps coming early, we're looking at March 25 for some varieties. Ten days from now.
Then we plant. That's what you do in March in Kansas, even when March comes in February now. Even when you don't know if what you're planting will grow.
You plant. You save what you can. You make decisions you'll second-guess for years. You wait to see what grows.
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Seed library networks: Michigan's seed library network expanded to serve 331 libraries in 2025, with each year focusing on a different open-pollinated heirloom variety that participants attempt to save and share.
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Great Plains precipitation patterns: Climate models project that summer precipitation may decrease by up to 37 percent in parts of the Great Plains by end of century, with the strongest agreement for drier summers occurring in Oklahoma and west Texas.
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Kansas crop switching: A 2024 study explored how Kansas farmers could maintain nutritional output while reducing water demand through strategic crop switching compatible with predicted future climate conditions.
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Ogallala Aquifer depletion: The rate at which water is withdrawn from the Ogallala Aquifer exceeds the recharge rate, forcing wheat growers to consider reducing planted acreage as groundwater becomes less available.