The Founder of Sistah Seeds talks Harvest and Heritage
BY MADDIE MARRIOTT | PHOTOS BY LAKOTA GAMBILL
ON A 1.5-ACRE PLOT AT THE SEED FARM IN EMMAUS, Amirah Mitchell has taken the matter of seed-saving into her own hands. As the founder of Sistah Seeds, Mitchell has made it her mission to find, save, and share herb, vegetable, and grain seeds of the African diaspora. Think white watermelon, green-striped squash, Malawai cherry tomatoes, and so many unique peppers, plus grains like amaranth. Mitchell farms in a low-tillage, low-input regenerative manner, using open pollination and no genetic modification. She is part of a growing number of farmers of color (you may have heard of notable Farmer Jawn in Philly) who preserve the history of the soil by connecting Black and brown farmers to culturally important seeds.
Please explain the difference between seed farming and typical crop farming?
With vegetable production, if I’m growing a tomato, the end goal is to have a tomato to eat, but if I’m growing that tomato for seeds, the end goal is to have another generation of seeds to replant. I often can and do harvest these vegetables for my own consumption, but the goal production-wise is to offer these seeds to others. I am with these plants for their entire life cycle, from seed to seed, generation to generation. If you have a vegetable garden and are primarily focused on growing food for yourself or for others, it’s unusual to see the full life cycle of some of those plants. Something like lettuce, for example, you eat as an immature, leafy plant, and you typically don’t wait for that stage where it’s producing seed. Something else, like a pepper or tomato, you do see the seed stage.
What is your process with the seeds?
I would say the bulk of my work happens after harvesting. For many farmers, harvesting is the end, but for me, it’s almost the beginning. We remove the seeds from the plant and then we have to clean them, so we remove any debris or additional plant materials. We also want to remove any underdeveloped or damaged seeds.
Then, they have to be thoroughly dried, which can be challenging in our relatively humid climate, but it’s necessary. They then have to be tested, so they’re sent to a laboratory where we can make sure they’re up to our germination standard. After that, I put the seeds in packets, put them up on our website, and send them out to people.
Your website details the histories of every seed you sell. How do you come across those stories? How do you choose which ones to plant?
It’s not easy to find the stories. There are some people who have been doing this work for a lot longer than I have and have already uncovered many of these stories. Some of my mentors in the field, some other farmers and seed specialists, are willing to share their stories and that’s a good place to start. There are other seeds that I’ve tracked down. I like to read books by food historians to see if they mention a variety. Or maybe they mention characteristics and traits that I’m looking out for, and I try to track something down and see if anyone has that seed.
Sometimes, there will be seeds in really obscure places—there’s a small packet of seeds someone found in their grandmother’s basement and now they’re selling it on Etsy. There are also amazing places like seed swaps where you can find them. I’m mostly relying on this network of seed savers and storytellers who track them down. I’m just hoping to keep them alive, let more people know about them, and to curate this catalog. This way, people from the African diaspora know they can find seeds with stories that tie them to these plants.
Are there any seeds that you’ve worked with that have been personally meaningful to you?
The first crop I ever grew was the green-striped squash. I had just seen it in a regular seed catalog, but I was interested in it particularly because I had read on [agricultural technologist] Mike Tweedy’s blog that it was of importance to African Americans in the Carolinas, particularly North Carolina. That’s something I didn’t know—even though it was a commercially available squash that you could certainly find in many heirloom seed catalogs, they didn’t tell me that story or that connection. I have family from North Carolina, so I thought maybe this would be a good one for me to grow as my first seed saving project.
A year later, I found out that it was, in fact, the exact variety of squash that my grandmother and her siblings grew up eating. I only found this out because I spoke to some relatives at my grandmother’s funeral. She used to be one of the best chefs in the family and made a lot of great food. And because the squash was so distinctive in its appearance and taste, all it took was for my great-aunt to mention the squash and for me to show her a picture of the ones that I was growing for her to recognize it as the squash from her childhood that she hadn’t encountered since.
That was a big moment for me in my seed saving journey. It was the realization that connections to those plants that are important to us are already being lost. And I’m doing my best to help find them again and to help others find them as well.
You are very focused on small-scale sustainable farming practices. Why is this so important in the seed industry?
The seed industry is enormous, and it’s dominated by a very small number of top players. Small seed companies like mine serve a different farmer. We serve a different grower. Our seeds aren’t necessarily the same varieties you would grow on massive acreages, but they’re really special, delicious, wonderful plants.
Farmers who care about those things, who care about growing seeds that are local instead of in a different country where those seeds aren’t adapted to the growing conditions that we have, seeds that are culturally important, seeds that will grow really flavorful and nutritious plants, want seeds that thrive under sustainable farming conditions. We don’t use any commercial chemicals for either fertilizer or pest management. We make our own fertilizers from fish guts and plant materials. We minimize tilling as much as possible and save the soil. It’s a different type of agriculture and the agricultural future that I’d like to help be a part of and create.
Sistah Seeds participates in The Seed Farm’s plant sale and holds grower workshops at the farm. You can find her seeds and learn more at sistahseeds.com.
