Thursday, November 17, 2022

19th edition of the SeedBroadcast Journal

 


The 19th edition of the SeedBroadcast agri Cultural Journal has been published as the spring winds arrive and the seeds are being blessed and placed in the earth.  It has been a rugged year dealing with the fluctuations of  the climate  crisis and the divisions that seem to be getting wider between us human beings and our mother earth. However the resurgence of local traditional farming, gardening and food sovereignty is a glint of beauty and hope in these times of dramatic change. 

This issue is dedicated with deep bow of gratitude to all the peoples of the world who are facing the rapid changes to their homelands, with the ongoing fires, floods, hurricanes and erratic weather patterns that are threatening their survival and the survival of their seeds, lands, plants and animals.

"And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis: for if there is one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide. We need, rather, to envision what it might be.” 
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable 

 The printed versions of this edition can be found at your local Co ops, farmers markets and you might even find a surprise in your CSA!  Do look out for them and let us know what you think. 

A digital version is also available to read or download from our journal archive.

Our 20th edition will be published in the Spring of 2023, 

the deadline is March 6th 2023. 

There is information on how to submit in the Journal.

A huge shout out and thank you to all who contributed to this edition: Sharon Stewart,Vincent Waring, Hanna Gonzales Chomenko, Iren Schio, Alicja Lukaslak, Anita Vasquez,Sara Wright, Chris Wells, Mariel Rose Garcia, Melody Joy Overstreet, Emily C-D and John McLeod.

In solidarity and health

SeedBroadcast





Wednesday, September 28, 2022

SeedBroadcast agri-Culture Journal #19: DEADLINE EXTENDED: October 6th.


 

Contribute to the

SeedBroadcast agri-Culture Journal #19

DEADLINE EXTENDED: October 6th 2022


The SeedBroadcast Journal is a bi-annual collection of poetry, inspired thoughts, essays, photographs, drawings, recipes, How-to’s and wisdom gathered together from a national call out to lovers of local food and seeds.  This journal supports collaboration and the sharing of seeds, stories, resources, and inspiration within local communities and between individuals, while also providing pollination through diversified regional, national, and international internet-media networks.


It is also available in print at various locations around New Mexico and internationally.
If you contribute you will receive a stack of printed copies. to distribute in your own locale.

 

Contribute   Participate   Propose


Send us your seed inspired poems, images, photographs, recipes, articles about your work, provocative essays, calls for seed action! 
This year SeedBroadcast is continuing to focus on Seeds, Climate Change and Food Sovereignty
in these upside down times.

The Deadline for the next edition is September 26th 2022

Please send your inquiries, proposals, and contributions to seedbroadcast@gmail.com
Images should be at least 300 dpi, 4" X 6" include captions, a short bio and your mailing address.

 

We are looking forward to receiving your submissions.









Friday, September 9, 2022

SeedBroadcast agri-Culture Journal #19: Deadline

 

Contribute to the

SeedBroadcast agri-Culture Journal #19

DEADLINE September 26th  2022


The SeedBroadcast Journal is a bi-annual collection of poetry, inspired thoughts, essays, photographs, drawings, recipes, How-to’s and wisdom gathered together from a national call out to lovers of local food and seeds.  This journal supports collaboration and the sharing of seeds, stories, resources, and inspiration within local communities and between individuals, while also providing pollination through diversified regional, national, and international internet-media networks.


It is also available in print at various locations around New Mexico and internationally.
If you contribute you will receive a stack of printed copies. to distribute in your own locale.

 

Contribute   Participate   Propose


Send us your seed inspired poems, images, photographs, recipes, articles about your work, provocative essays, calls for seed action! 
This year SeedBroadcast is continuing to focus on Seeds, Climate Change and Food Sovereignty
in these upside down times.

The Deadline for the next edition is September 26th 2022

Please send your inquiries, proposals, and contributions to seedbroadcast@gmail.com
Images should be at least 300 dpi, 4" X 6" include captions, a short bio and your mailing address.

 

We are looking forward to receiving your submissions.









Monday, August 8, 2022

Seeds and Hope at the Smithsonian Folklife X Earth Optimism Festival


During the second half of the Smithsonian Folklife X Earth Optimism Festival on the National Mall in Washington D.C., SeedBroadaster’s, Jeanette Hart-Mann and Kaitlin Bryson, partnered up with Reana Kovalcik of the D.C-based Share A Seed to inspire seedy action, story sharing, art, and mutual aid focused on seeds and community empowerment in the face of environmental crisis. We were invited to this event by the Festival organizers to mobilize the work of SeedBroadcast as socially engaged art focused on the way food and seed sovereignty can catalyze climate action and social justice. We also contributed to the EO Story Stage and public discussions about seeds, art, and traditional ecological knowledge. For our project we decided that the most significant impact we could make was to be in service to local organizations already doing this work and give them a platform to present and connect with people, while sustainably doing what we do best, encouraging people to spend time with seeds wondering, dreaming, and connecting their stories to a nourishing and hopeful future.



The Smithsonian Folklife x Earth Optimism event brings local environmental organizations together with global crafts-people to demonstrate and share sustainable practices, which enable cultural and environmental resiliency. It’s a moment when we can get together to share and celebrate cultural diversity and love for the earth. As Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch says, the focus on “Earth Optimism shows us how to find hope in the face of odds that might seem overwhelming. It reminds us that change happens when we focus on what works—when we collaborate to find solutions and celebrate our successes.” In this, seeds do so much. They give us food, shelter, materials to create with, air, habitat, beauty, life, wonder, and a future filled with more seeds. There is no end to what a seed planted will make in our world. They are simply magic.



This was also the weekend of July 4, so the National mall was packed full of people visiting the Smithsonian Institute, National Monuments, and keen to see the massive fireworks. There was also tension in the air with the ongoing war in Ukraine, global floods, droughts, and heatwaves and the recent Supreme Court decisions overturning of Roe vs Wade and the EPA’s ability to regulate global warming pollution. All of this feels like a heavy burden for each of us to carry. This weight seemed to be wandering through the crowds, giving us pause to wonder how optimism might be part of our futures threatened by yet more chaos and crisis. Many of the people we met seemed to be carrying hope, but woven with threads of grief. 



During the first two days of the festival, we asked visitors to share and record Seed Stories with us. Stacy Karmen and Amanda Lee were both excited to talk about garden projects, seeds saved, and seeds found. You can listen to all the Seed Stories we recorded at the festival, along with Stacy and Amanda's here. Sharing seeds is about sharing stories and what better way to cultivate optimism then mobilizing these together to grow and perform it in action. Here is Reana Kolvacik sharing her Seed Story about Share A Seed and what inspired her to start this project.


We also met Elijah Goodwin and Jack Algiere from Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture who were participating in the festival. We discussed agriculture, food, and making sure to always make space for ecological communities who enable farms and gardens to be resilient and bountiful. Both gladly agreed to share a Seed Story with us.


Over the weekend when the crowds surged we discovered that recording one-on-one Seed Stories was going to be impossible, the noise level and pace of the crowds were not conducive to quietly sitting with people and recording their stories. But, on the other hand problems are always solutions in ecological thinking and this prompted us to take a different approach. We began asking folks for quick sound bites about the relationship between seeds and optimism/seeds and hope with the intention to combine these into a Seed Story about what seeds teach us when we deeply listen to what they share. We combined several of the recordings into a creative remix composition you can listen to below and you can listen to the entire Seeds of Hope recordings here. All of our Seed Story recordings from the festival will be archived at the Smithsonian Institute. Please reach out and let us know what you think the relationship is between Seeds and Hope.


Good wishes to everyone we met. We hope your Seeds and Stories continue to grow. Very special thanks to Reana Kovalcik of Share A Seed. We also want to give a shout out to True Love Seeds, whose African Diaspora Seeds we were sharing at the festival. Check out this incredible farm-based seed company, who are not only growing important seeds, but are also reconnecting us to their stories. And check out their podcast, Seeds and Their People!

Thanks to everyone who recorded their Seed Stories and thoughts on Seeds and Hope with us - Amanda L., Stacey, Berenice, John, Casey, Sarah, Min, Omowale, Carolyn, Thomas, Edward, William, Amanda B, Chris, Allison, Matt, Adrianna, Tomisin, Ahsal, Ada, Connor, Ethan, Carly, Reana, Jack, and Elijah.

Thanks again to the Smithsonian Folklife x Earth Optimism Festival and all the organizers and staff who made this possible. 

Let's keep it Seedy!



Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Seeding Seed Stories: An act of radical love


 Reanimating the Culture that has been lost in Agriculture

 “When you plant a seed in the soil, you're burying a time capsule filled with generations of wisdom and hope for the future. People everywhere have been saving and sharing seeds for generations in order to foster agricultural biodiversity, ensure food availability, and nurture cultural traditions. Today, nearly 98% of all these food crops have gone extinct and one major reason is because many people no longer save seeds. Yet, right now, there is a growing movement connecting community-based seed saving to climate resilience, food justice, and cultural vitality. In this, SeedBroadcast promotes seed saving through creative agri-Culture and Seed Stories.” 


 It was in December 2021 that, out of the blue, SeedBroadcast received an email from the Smithsonian asking if we might be interested in being part of their Earth Optimism event scheduled for June 2022. This event is an important component of the extremely popular Folk Life Festival which had been on a hiatus since the beginning of the Covid pandemic. This year’s return was to focus on “changing the conversation to spotlight the bright ideas, successful solutions, and passionate people working to protect our planet”. We were honored by this invite but it evoked many questions for us to ponder. 
 
The event would take us away from our fields at a time when the seeds we planted last autumn, and this spring needed careful tending. 

 How could we make a difference during a huge event when there are many distractions?

 How might we engage the public in a sincere way to animate a shift in consciousness? 

 Would we have enough of a positive impact to justify flying to Washington? 

 We seriously debated these critical questions before making the decision to take up the challenge. By accepting this challenge, we reckoned the questions might be answered.
Throughout the winter and spring, we collaborated with the curatorial team at the Smithsonian. Through endless emails and many zoom calls we began to imagine an accessible interactive installation, including text, images, seeds, the animation of seed stories and making sure there was pertinent information on seed saving and food sovereignty strategies.



This installation would be installed on the Mall outside the Natural History Museum and between the  Capital and the Washington Monument, as part of the Community Solutions area of Earth Optimism. We designed, redesigned, planned and engaged with our seed savers network attempting to find local partners, and eventually we packed boxes full of SeedBroadcast Journals, seeds, baskets and various tools for the installation.

 A few weeks before we were to head to Washington, New Mexico (the home of SeedBroadcast) burst into flames with the largest fire ever recorded, over 600,000 areas of ancestral homelands, ranches and farms went up in smoke. There were many evacuations, and hearts were broken to see the lands that have been part of the family for generations charred and blackened. Many left with few processions, but the essential bundle of seeds was not forgotten. The heat, the dry winds and ongoing drought hit us all hard, so it was difficult to muster up any kind of optimism with red tinged clouds of smoke overhead and diminishing water for the sprouting seeds in our fields.

CLIMATE CHANGE, CLIMATE, CLIMATE CHAOS. 

How to hold the faith. Hold the seed. 

Two days before leaving the rains came, the big monsoon rains and our hearts rejoiced. 
Hope returns, the seeds will survive, the seeds sharing their resilience. 

 SeedBroadcast is a collective and we believe in collaboration, as in the world of seeds and plants, diversity and symbiotic partnerships make for a more resilient and nourishing crop. So, we foraged our way through the network of seed savers and landed on a call with Nate Kleinman of the Experimental Farm Network, who put us in touch with the mover and shaker Bonnetta Adeeb of Ujamma Cooperative Farming Alliance and Steam Onward.  Our seeds bring the right people together. 

Bonnetta Adeeb, Chrissie Orr and David Gallegos holding a seed story conversation on the Earth Optimism stage.
                                   

Bonnetta joined us for the first week of the event and brought her local wisdom and seeds into the mix. Not only is Bonnetta an activist for food sovereignty and an advocate for BIPOC youth,  she is also an engaging storyteller. 

 During our time on the Mall we swopped seed stories with hundreds of visitors, we passionately discussed the importance of saving seeds and food sovereignty, we shared information, handed out free seeds, thanks to Steam Onward, and our SeedBroadcast agri-Culture Journal was quickly dispersed, under arms and into bags to be appreciated later.
In the midst of this huge event the beauty of the seeds, the sound of them spilling from hands evoked a momentary quiet, a slowing down to breathe, a rare intimacy. As children and adults plunged their hands deep into the baskets of seeds, stories emerged, and conversations began between strangers, relevant ideas were shared and discussed. Many of our visitors had never thought to save their seeds,  this was anew idea, so we talked and shared information with the hope that a radical change would ripple outward from the heart of the seeds, the exchange of words and an intimate connection. 

 Being with the seeds and honoring them is an act of radical love. Can this spill out into how we humans engage with each other and the natural world? It’s time for hope and action and reconnection.

Seed Intimacy

To hear some of the seed stories that were shared with us, click on the names, thank you  Ethan Swiggart, Ada, Connor Rice and Carly Borgmeier.

SeedBroadcast recording Connor Rice

Thank you to David Gallegos and Kaitlyn Bryson  and Reana Kovalcik from Share a Seed and Slow Food DC who joined with SeedBroadcast for this event. 
Please check out Ujamma Cooperative Farming Alliance and Steam Onward as they these are incredible organizations doing extremely important work. 


Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Earth Optimism/ What Stories Will Your Seeds Share?



When you plant a seed in the soil, you're burying a time capsule filled with generations of wisdom and hope for the future. People, in diverse areas of our mother earth, have been saving and sharing seeds for generations in order to foster agricultural diversity, ensure food availability and nurture cultural traditions. Today, nearly 98% of all these food crops have gone extinct and one major reason is because many people no longer save seeds. Yet, right now, there is a growing movement connecting community-based seed saving to climate resilience, food justice, and cultural vitality. 

In this, SeedBroadcast promotes seed saving through agri-Culture and Seed Stories.

SeedBroadcast is honored to be invited to Earth Optimism as part of the Smithsonian's Folk Life Festival. We will be sharing our passion for animating community dialogue and action around Food Sovereignty through the caring and nurturing of our traditional seeds.

SeedBroadcast was initiated by Jeanette Hart-Mann and Chrissie Orr in 2001. Jeanette and Chrissie will be joined by Kaitlyn Bryson, who works in the area of art, mycology and environmental justice, and David Gallegos, an aids and environmental/ social justice activist.

We invite you to join us for a participatory sharing of seed stories and surprise actions.

 We want to thank Nate Kleinman Co-Founder of the The Experimental Farm Network, Bonnetta Adeeb of Ujaama Cooperative Farming Alliance and Steam Onward, and Reana Kovalcik of Share a Seed for sharing their wisdom and for collaborating with us to unsure that our actions are resilient and change-making.

July 2nd and 3rd: Reana will be joining us to activate a Planting Station and a Seed Swop.

June 24th 1pm-2pm: SeedBroadcast will be in Seed Story / Seed Saving dialogue with surprise guests

July 3rd 2pm-3pm: SeedBroadcast will be in Seed Story / Seed Saving dialogue with Kaitlyn Bryson and Reana Kovalcik.

Festival Dates: June 22-June 27 and June 30-July 4

Location: On the National Mall between Seventh Street and 12th Street

Daytime Programming: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. View daily schedule

Evening Programming: Starts shortly after daytime programming ends, typically 6:30 p.m. View evening events schedule


We look forward to seeing you there.




Tuesday, April 5, 2022

SeedBroadcast Journal #18

 



The 18th edition of the SeedBroadcast agri Cultural Journal has been published as the spring winds arrive and the seeds are being blessed and placed in the earth.  It has been a rugged year dealing with the fluctuations of  the climate  crisis and the divisions that seem to be getting wider between us human beings and our mother earth. However the resurgence of local traditional farming, gardening and food sovereignty is a glint of beauty and hope in these times of dramatic change. 

This edition is dedicated to all the indigenous farmers around the world that are striving to keep the seeds of their cultures alive and thriving.

We take a deep bow of gratitude as this ancestral wisdom is vital for our seeds and for mother earth.

 

The printed versions of this edition can be found at your local Co ops, farmers markets and you might even find a surprise in your CSA!  Do look out for them and let us know what you think. 

A digital version is also available to read or download from our journal archive.

Our 19th edition will be published in the Autumn of 2022, 

the deadline is September 26th 2022. 

There is information on how to submit in the Journal.

A huge shout out and thank you to all who contributed to this edition: Margaret LeJeune, Liz Mueller, Meredith Taylor, Iren Schio, Anita Vasquez (Gracious Raven), Guy Veale, Lorna Tychostup, Susan Hoenig, Seth Hamilton, Sara Wright and the Nomad MFA students: Roberta Trentin, Katie grove, Alyesha Ghani, Mauricio Vargas, Arnethia Douglass, Julie Chen, Kathryn Cooke, Monica Kapoor, teal Gardner, Sarah C. Rutherford, Rebecca Schultz, Justin Moore, Morgan Kulas, Natalie Stopka,

In solidarity and health

SeedBroadcast

Wednesday, January 26, 2022

SeedBroadcast agri-Culture Journal # 18

 

Contribute to the

SeedBroadcast agri-Culture Journal #18

DEADLINE March 1st 2022



The SeedBroadcast Journal is a bi-annual collection of poetry, inspired thoughts, essays, photographs, drawings, recipes, How-to’s and wisdom gathered together from a national call out to lovers of local food and seeds.  This journal supports collaboration and the sharing of seeds, stories, resources, and inspiration within local communities and between individuals, while also providing pollination through diversified regional, national, and international internet-media networks.


It is also available in print at various locations around New Mexico and internationally.
If you contribute you will receive a stack of printed copies. to distribute in your own locale.

 

Contribute   Participate   Propose


Send us your seed inspired poems, images, photographs, recipes, articles about your work, provocative essays, calls for seed action! 
This year SeedBroadcast is continuing to focus on Seeds, Climate Change and Food Sovereignty
in these upside down times.

The Deadline for the next edition is March 1st 2022

Please send your inquiries, proposals, and contributions to seedbroadcast@gmail.com
Images should be at least 300 dpi, 4" X 6" include captions, a short bio and your mailing address.

 

We are looking forward to receiving your submissions.