Montana Seeds are Carrying Relationship, Stories, and Knowledge into the Future
“We think about local produce, but we don’t think about the very seed that grows that produce,” says Karl Sutton, founding member of Triple Divide Seeds, a Montana organic seeds cooperative based in Ronan.
“Just buying a packet of seed from anywhere, you don’t know what you’re getting as far as genetics. You’re getting a name, but you don’t know the story of how it’s cared for.”
Like soil, seeds are an often overlooked, yet foundational part of our food system. Without them, we wouldn’t eat. It’s been this way for thousands of years. In recent history, however, we’ve become disconnected from the importance of seeds and the knowledge surrounding them. Across Montana, that’s changing. Farmers, gardeners, and community members are working to restore this vital relationship, rebuild lost knowledge, and reconnect with the stories seeds carry. In doing so, they are sowing a more resilient future.
Karl started Triple Divide Seeds alongside several other seed farmers out of a desire to learn. “We felt that farmers should really understand how to grow seeds. It’s inherent in farming to save your seed.”
You might expect that farmers would already understand how to grow seed crops (crops grown specifically for seed, rather than for food or fiber). And for thousands of years, they did. But in the last 100 years alone, there has been a dramatic shift away from on-farm seed saving. In the 1930s, 99.5% of farmers planted with seed they’d saved. Today, it’s less than 10%.
It took just two generations without seed saving knowledge being passed down for many of today’s farmers to lose the belief that saving seed is even an option. In 1980, changes to US intellectual property laws enabled the patenting of seed genetics. This allowed seed companies to own both the seed they sell and any future seed produced by those seeds. This change in the law has made it illegal to save seed from plants grown from patented seeds.
It also made it lucrative for companies in the agrochemical market (e.g., Monsanto, now Bayer) to enter the seed business, developing high-yielding hybrid and genetically modified seeds that tolerated their herbicides, like RoundupTM (glyphosate). Because these companies own the seed genetics, farmers cannot save seeds for the following year. If you choose to farm with these seeds, you are committing to buying new seeds every year. Today, four multinational companies, Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina (Syngenta Group), and BASF, control over 65% of the global proprietary, or intellectual property (IP)-protected seed sales.
After years of growing seed in harsh Montana conditions, Karl and the other growers of Triple Divide have seen firsthand why saving seed should be prioritized. Seeds accumulate information about their surrounding climate and pressures with each generation. Over time, this results in strong seed that is highly adapted to its microclimate, allowing future offspring to thrive and respond to shifting and diverse sets of pressures. Buying new seed each year prevents this accumulation of knowledge. In an era when we’re increasingly facing disruptive weather disasters like flooding, hail, and drought, saving seeds that know how to cope with these stressors is critical to our food security.
“I think more than ever, we should be saving and selecting and trialing,” says Karl. “The more that you expose these crops to these wild swings in your conditions, and select from the ones that are surviving and enduring, you’re going to have more resiliency in your food supply. Outsourcing the growing of our food and seed to countries and climates dissimilar to
our own means that when they have crop failure, we have shortages of food; and when they coddle their seed, we have plants that can’t survive our weather.”
Without farmers saving seed, the diversity of food crop varieties has dwindled. The most recent study on seed variety loss shows that the US lost 93% of its food crop seed varieties between 1903 and 1983.
KARL’S TIP TO GET STARTED SEED SAVING: “Begin by just picking something you really enjoy. If you’re a gardener, just let some things go. Play with it. That’s part of the fun of it. When [my daughter] was probably five years old, we would take tomatoes and mash them and get seeds out. We did that with watermelons. We spit watermelon seeds. It was fun. We had fun with it.”
Remembering How to Grow
On the opposite side of the state, Sam Azure is also teaching her community about the importance of seed knowledge through the Fort Peck Tribal Seed Library. As one of only a few seed sources in Northeastern Montana, the library provides both Indigenous and non-Indigenous varieties of seed to anyone who wishes to grow them. There’s only one requirement: that the growing season isn’t artificially extended. “You have to grow them out in the ground, you can’t start them early inside, and you can’t extend their season later into the fall by any means,” says Sam, “We just want the seeds to be able to thrive in the natural environment and for them to be able to adapt as the environment changes.”
Seeds that can adapt to their environment are seeds that can be relied upon as a food source. “It’s more about reacclimating seeds to our climate…these beans remember how to grow here because they have such a long memory inside of them. And so we are just reintroducing them to the climate as it exists in the Northern Plains today, which we know is different than 100 years ago when these beans were also grown here.”
The need to reintroduce Indigenous seeds to their environment is not a result of the patenting changes in the ’80s. Seed saving has always been a vital practice for Indigenous peoples. But when European settlers forcibly separated them from their ancestral lands through harmful policies like the Indian Removal Act in the 1830s, they also separated them from their seeds and the knowledge surrounding them. Some varieties of seeds became endangered or were lost entirely. Through careful stewardship of cultural knowledge and the sharing of stories between generations, many seeds have been revived,
becoming symbols of sovereignty and resilience.
Sam’s desire for her community members to be able to feed themselves again with their ancestral foods is what led her to start the seed library. “I really wanted to make these types of seeds accessible, [their] story more well-known, and also to introduce [them] more as a food source for us. Not in a commercial sense, really, but in the sense that people could grow it in their own gardens and be able to feed it to families.”
Sam has spent considerable time identifying, researching, and locating varieties of corn, beans, squash, and other seeds that were traditionally grown in Fort Peck’s regional climate. Along the way, she’s collected not only seed, but the stories, histories, and relationships that come with them. Now, the Fort Peck Tribal Seed Library can help distribute traditional seed bundles to elders in communities across the reservation and host workshops on preparing traditional foods from the produce they grow, allowing people to taste food that has been grown in the region for generations.
SAM’S TIP TO GET STARTED SEED SAVING: “Grow the seed and save the seed that you love the most…because it is an additional kind of labor of love in the garden. Gardening is already a labor of love, but going the extra step of being your own source of the seed as well requires additional work at the end of a work-heavy season.”
Programs and Initiatives Around the State
Beyond Karl and Sam, many businesses and organizations around Montana hold seed stewardship as foundational to a resilient food future. Community seed swaps are becoming increasingly common and are often paired with classes and resources surrounding seed saving. The efforts selected below are taking steps to rebuild seed diversity and keep varieties alive and accessible:
MONTANA INDIGENOUS FOOD SYSTEMS INITIATIVE
The Montana Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative (MIFSI) is a nonprofit, intertribal collaboration of Indigenous young professionals and elder-mentors committed to working as relatives to build shared capacity for Indigenous food sovereignty. As part of this effort, MIFSI grows ancestral vegetables for seed production through the Ancestral Seed Cooperative. In collaboration with the Buffalo Nations Food System Initiative, MIFSI distributes over 200 seed bundles containing organic, non-GMO, and ancestral seeds to family and community gardens in all seven Montana reservations and in Montana Indian urban centers to increase household and community food sovereignty.
FREE THE SEEDS
Free the Seeds is an annual event put on by Land to Hand in Kalispell on the first Saturday in March. In 2025, at their 10th-anniversary celebration, approximately 18,000 seed packets (nearly $72,000 worth of seed) were distributed for free to new and seasoned gardeners alike. Many of these seeds were grown and donated by community members, after which they were cleaned and packed by a team of volunteers. The event also offers workshops, speakers, training, and other fun and educational, seed and garden-related opportunities. Seeds can be donated to Free the Seeds year-round at the Columbia Falls Seed Library.
MONTANA SEED LIBRARIES
There are approximately 16 seed libraries located across Montana. Seed libraries are usually housed in public libraries and follow the same principle of “borrowing,” believing that seeds should be free and accessible to everyone. Seeds are made available to “borrow” by community members with the understanding that once the crop is harvested, some of the seed is ideally saved and returned to the seed library for others to use. These initiatives provide a vital resource towards improving access to fresh produce and increasing food security. They also aim to support local food systems, promote biodiversity, and provide free, sustainable gardening resources across Montana.
Save your own seed! While seed saving may seem like a daunting task, it’s actually simple! Try it for yourself using the Seed Saving Guide on page 80!
FIND MORE STORIES LIKE THIS ONE IN OUR LOCAL FOOD GUIDE!
Written by:
EMILEE WOOD