Seedkeepers & Living Archivists

This is a category entry, not a single person. The work of seed-saving described in the Land & Science section did not end with the founders — it continues in living institutions and people who steward heirloom seeds, train new growers, and treat the seed itself as the deepest layer of the archive.

Among the keepers of that practice today: Ira Wallace at Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, who has built one of the most important Black-led seed-saving operations in the United States; the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, a network of African-heritage farmers and seedkeepers organizing collectively across the Mid-Atlantic and South; and Truelove Seeds, a farm-based seed company that distributes culturally significant seeds and pays growers a 50% royalty to keep the work in the communities it came from.

Their work is the living end of the same line — Carver, Hamer, the Gullah seed-keepers, the field-edge gardens of the enslaved — carried into the present.