From Ferry Boat Seeds, I made my way by another ferry to Lopez Island, third largest of the San Juans. My destination was Midnights Farm. Following in the footsteps of friend and baker, Rosy Benson, who visited Lopez several years ago and stayed with Faith and David at their wonderful farm, and with connections to the island via coach Jules from the CREATE course, Lopez seemed a place not to be missed on my travels.
Faith and David have been stewards of the 100 acres of land at Midnights Farm for many years – part of a thriving agricultural community in the San Juan Island chain, they regularly open their home to visitors and other local farmers, bringing their community together to tend and nourish. Nestled amongst woodland and not far from the sea, the land is a patchwork of pasture, cultivated land and water. The Sunday I arrived they were hosting a local farmers gathering, an opportunity for farmers from across the islands to compare notes, share knowledge, and as it turns out, listen to me give an impromptu talk on my travels so far!
A slight detour in my seed journey – Midnights Farm is not a seed farm – they produce vegetables for the San Juan Islands Food Hub & restaurants, and meat from their herd of cows. Alongside the produce, David also runs an amazing composting operation. As a drop off point for the local community, people bring him all of their garden waste and in return he offers beautiful compost for islanders to buy, as well as experimenting with woodchip and biochar. Midnights Farm is a thriving agricultural hub in the middle of the island.
Faith - ‘To tend our community by feeding them and also tend our community by creating a space that holds a place for learning and conversation and friendship and coming together in different ways. To farm, one needs to be continually learning because there are so many different elements from seed soil and animal health and composting and all of those processes, how we best work together, make decisions together, there’s so much to learn and we have to learn every day and that’s one of the beauties of it.’
Always continuing their learning, they have recently started to explore the world of seed, recognising that it is a vital part of the farming narrative, Faith is growing a chard crop on contract for Ferry Boat Seeds this year. Part of their motivation to continuously evolve and diversify what they do at the farm is to bring resilience in the face of ever challenging conditions:
Faith – ‘The climate crisis, how we engage with that, what we can do in terms of adaptation and building resilience in our community is a huge driving force, that drives us to do what we do. It’s the greater overarching lens that we’re always looking through’
A bountiful and restorative place, it was a joy to base myself at Midnights Farm for the week. It was an extra treat to be picking and be eating fresh veggies from a market garden again, and there was something very grounding about helping Faith and the team plant chicory ready for winter salad – likely in sync with my farming community back home. It felt comforting that although thousands of miles away we are all working with our hands in the soil to nurture plants that will nourish us into the winter months.
Beyond Midnights Farm, I spent a few days exploring the island and visiting several other land based businesses. First stop was Still Light Farm. A relatively new farm, Lena and Andrew Jones signed an agricultural ground lease for the 42 acre site with the Lopez Community Land Trust in 2022. The Land Trust was established to support a resilient local food system and healthy local economy, it holds land in perpetuity and offers lifetime leases for those looking to embark on their own farming journey but who may otherwise find significant barriers to accessing that land. It has enabled Lena and Andrew to make a home here, providing a pathway for them to do what they love and feed their local community.
Still Light Farm’s mission is to offer resilient food and seeds to their community using ecological practices that prioritise biodiversity. Strolling around their farm, it was quickly apparent this place was full of life. Dedicated to leaving large areas of the land to habitat, amongst the rows of vegetables there were agroforestry areas, perennial strips and expanses of cover crop left to flower to provide important shelter and food for insects and bird life. They grow carbon rich cover crops, hoping to build organic matter and fungal community in the soil, regularly mowing to generate biomass and allowing cover crops at least two years in their rotation to build soil health. As well as cover crops, Lena uses lots of inoculants, and has an on farm wormery. They work to encourage relationship, in all its forms, and like the fungi they strive to nurture beneath their feet, they weave a complex network that brings soil health, seed and their community together.
It was through connection to their local community that Lena acquired a nursery business from a local couple looking to retire, and for the past year she has been growing vegetable starts for sale in various stores across the island. Inheriting the business has provided an important income stream whilst they get to know the land here, and provides an exciting opportunity for Lena to run variety trials, slowly introducing more locally adapted and OP varieties to their collection. As well as the nursery business – and realising they needed to quickly find their niche on this small island - Lena and Andrew chose to focus on growing storage crops. This harmoniously linked with their interest in seed, and they have established a successful dry bean CSA scheme. They currently aim to grow between 800-1000lbs of drying beans each year, offering two shares for members to pick up throughout winter months. They grow endless varieties, and it was exciting to see these being produced on scale at their farm. As we walked alongside the rows of beans, Andrew shared the stories behind each one – there was Brighstone, an heirloom said to be found in a shipwreck off the coast of the Isle of Wight in the 1800s, and more recent cultivars developed by UC Davis specifically for high yields in organic systems.
Beyond the beans, Lena has also been experimenting with growing populations, seeing their value in bringing resilience to their farm, she regularly trials heterogenous varieties particularly if she is able to source them from neighbouring islands.
‘We live in this really really specific climate, this island that is essentially in a rain shadow, and we have pretty difficult soils and we only have rain for half of the year, and our access is limited. And so the potential for adaptation here I think is really rich, for making crops that grow much better specifically on the San Juan islands.’
It was inspiring to see how Lena and Andrew are so sensitively integrating into their new landscape, both in how they tend the land and also in the crops they offer to nourish their local community. Seed was very much at the heart of their business, whether it be to be for direct eating or saved and shared for years to come.
‘My relationship with seed is – there’s two parts to it, first part is I really enjoy working with it and the diversity brings so much interest into that. The seeds can be so beautiful, the plants themselves can be so beautiful, we get to spend so much time with them when we’re growing them for seed so we get to learn with that plant in a much deeper way that you would do if growing it say for lettuce, and you’re cutting it and eating it. I love the beauty of the seeds, the way they all look different in your hand, the way they grow differently. The plants then come out different from that, you get to observe them and walk through them and you can really pull different traits out. But then I also think the diversity is really important, right now in particular, because without it we start to be so limited in our food selection and we start to lose this experience of being able to save the seeds from the crops that we grow, we lose the ability to adapt the seed to where we live.’
Continuing to seek seed stories on the island, my next stop was Barn Owl Bakery, to meet Sage Dilts and Nathan Hodges. Nathan and Sage’s story is intertwined with Midnights Farm (they were their incubator site until they moved to their current land several years ago), and much like Midnights and Still Light Farm, their business seems to be co-created by the community that supports them. Barn Owl Bakery is a farm-to-table business - a craft bakery and grain farm with tradition and flavour at their core. Fresh baked breads, pasties, cookies and crackers are available at their bakery farmstand Thursday-Saturday, with fresh bread coming out of the oven at 3.30pm just in time for tea.
When Sage and Nathan moved to the Lopez in the early 2010s, the Community Land Trust were looking at developing a staple crop seed base on the island and had begun sourcing heirloom and heritage grains for farmers to trial. Their participation in these trials introduced Sage and Nathan to the idea of heritage and heirloom grains and the difference between these and modern varieties. Inspired by the diversity they saw, in 2013 they embarked on a journey of educating themselves in wheat varieties, opening a whole world of possibility. As bakers, they soon realised that access to these grains was a problem, they couldn’t just order 5000lbs of an heirloom wheat flour, so they made the decision to start growing some. In 2014 they planted their first seed, and the rest, as they say, is history. Barn Owl Bakery is now a thriving island business, with queues forming daily of people patiently waiting to buy a loaf of their nourishing bread or a tasty pastry treat.
The bakery has always been at the heart of their business, grain farming is secondary to the bread and with no official budget for grain growing they work within these constraints. But it has been a deliberate choice to grow and use these heritage varieties. As they explained, the process informs the product:
Sage - ‘If you wanted to have a bakery that didn’t have any relationship to the landscape at all then yes you could just have non-organic grain, but when you understand how much the landscape is impacted by wheat growing practices and then how people can’t eat bread. The whole picture has to be there. You have to reduce the nitrogen load on the soil and the water system, you have to reduce the nitrogen load so you’re not amping up your gluten levels and making it indigestible for people. You amp up that gluten so the bread can go through an industrial process. You don’t use an industrial process so you don’t need that. But then you have to stay at a certain scale because the bread has to be worked by hand. We couldn’t do what we’re doing if the wheat was anonymous and that part didn’t matter. I don’t think the whole picture would be compelling enough to our community and I don’t think it would be compelling enough to us, just to make bread for breads sake. It’s not as interesting, it’s not alive. It has to be coherent, the whole conversation has to be coherent.’
In their fields, they grow only standard height, traditionally bred grains. As Nathan put it, those with ‘no glassware involved’ in their creation. They source grains from seed banks, often starting with 5g packets, and spend time trialling what grows well on Lopez Island.
Nathan – ‘first year out of seed banks, seeds are always really grumpy’
So they don’t make any decisions in that first season. Instead they save and grow them out again, and then start to make selections. There are obviously ones that won’t work in their system succumbing to diseases or exhibiting poor vigour.
Nathan - ‘But some, some we’re like, woah who are you?’
With the best selected, they carry on the seed expansion process until they have enough to test bake. Grinding up a pound and a half of each variety, they run it all through the same process to compare performance – at this point it’s about baking quality and flavour. They weigh up the agronomic and baking characteristics: if it performs well in the bakery and in the field then they continue to grow and bulk out the seed stock.
Sage - ‘We’re growing out seed you can’t find. A lot of varieties we’re growing we bought in little packets and we spent at least 5 years just getting it up to quantity, as there’s no one here who has the seed that we want. And it’s now adapted to our area.’
Nathan - ‘We feel like there’s value in keeping these grains alive both as a genetic resource but also because we think they have real potential in our community.’
Nathan explained how these heritage grains have potentially deeper root systems, higher nutrition, and they can exhibit drought tolerance. It’s a commitment, and can be a long process liberating these varieties from their frozen status in a seed bank, but the benefits can be exponential.
Nathan - ‘I’m interested in the unbroken chain of experiences that is contained in the seed, the genomics. Wheat has an enormous genome, it’s huge compared to humans, and then there’s epigenetics…they carry a lot of information with them so when we plant out a seed it has this unbroken chain back thousands of years in agricultural systems…We think of it as leveraging the experience and wisdom of that grain into what we’re doing.’
They also have a current interest in landrace and population grains for those very reasons.
‘I think evolutionary populations are really cool, there’s research that shows they yield equivalent to genetically uniform modern varieties, and that’s awesome, you know, why not? It makes some much sense. Horizontal resistance, adaptability, the climate is so variable on this island year to year, if I have a lot of different diversity in my fields I can count on something every year versus if I have put all my eggs in one basket. It’s really only a matter of time before some pest or disease or climate event occurs. I do think the rate at which new varieties are getting developed is pretty similar to the rate at which the evolutionary pressures on the grains themselves are happening. I have nothing against wheat breeders! I think it’s great, they’re so excited about what they’re doing and their heart seems to be in the right place. But then there’s the whole intellectual property piece of it, patenting, PVP varieties that I understand from a logical place but I’m not interested in participating in that system’
Nathan described himself as a ‘both/and person’, making space for both stable varieties and heterogenous mixes in their fields.
‘There’s such a fluidity to seed, I’m always a little bit uncomfortable with the language around seed purity or seed genetics. I grant maybe more agency than I should to my seeds, but you know, they’re wild beings. They’re going to evolve, they’re going to adapt, they’re going to think things through. They’ve got an agenda. And they mix, they just always mix. You can’t keep them not mixing because they get stuck in equipment and boots and birds pick them up and drop them. We walk through every field and there’s going to be off-types. There are certainly varieties where I’m attached to them as varieties, as individuals, so I guess I do put effort into cleaning out the combine between harvests. And I would never think about mixing them up until I have grown them for a while and got to know them.’
Aspiring to know each variety intimately feels important. Many of the conversations I have been having lately circle back to relationship. The relationship the seed has with the soil and living communities it grows amongst, the relationship those plants have with the human that tends them, the relationship of that seed beyond the farm as it is shared, perhaps transformed into something delicious to eat.
I had a glimpse into how these relationships can contribute towards a robust local food system during my week on Lopez. A small island, with a lot of heart.