A Vacation Postcard, Part 3: Luther College and Seed Savers Exchange

Visitors can walk through the farm at Seed Savers Exchange, where horticulturalists hope to preserve some 25,000 heirloom varieties.

You’ve got to like a college president who warmly welcomes an unanticipated guest in his office—especially an unshaven one wearing dirty jeans and muddy work boots.

Richard L. Torgerson, president of Luther College, in Decorah, Iowa, was all smiles when I popped into his office last week, the final stop on a sustainability-oriented tour of the Midwest. After hitting Saint John’s University, in central Minnesota, and Growing Power, a community food center in Milwaukee, my friend Arthur Morgan and I bade farewell to our traveling companion, Joe Hamilton, and had driven through southwestern Wisconsin to reach Iowa.

For a small, out-of-the-way college, Luther has gotten a lot of attention recently for its sustainability efforts. Mr. Torgerson’s office overlooks a patch on the campus green where the college plans to erect a large wind turbine. Although colleges were having trouble acquiring turbines for one-off projects some years ago, he explained that the rough economy had made turbine companies more than happy to accommodate colleges like Luther.

We also met with Kevin Ellingson, Luther’s locksmith and preventive-maintenance mechanic, who showed us his biodiesel reactor, made from an old electric water heater, a few steel pipes, and some showerheads. With used fryer oil, Mr. Ellingson will provide some 1,500 gallons of biodiesel to fuel the campus lawn equipment this year. The biodiesel production, which started as a student project in an environmental-studies class, has proven to be quite economical. Mr. Ellingson estimates that it costs 60 to 80 cents a gallon, not counting the modest labor he has to put into producing it. In the past four years, there have been no breakdowns caused by the biodiesel in the lawn equipment, which did not have to be modified to burn the biofuel. (See the video on this page.)

We went to Decorah mainly to tour Seed Savers Exchange, a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving heirloom varieties of food crops and flowers.

Monocultures dominate large-scale agricultural production, and plant varieties are often chosen for their ability to produce food that has a long shelf life or looks appealing in the store. Many varieties that produce unusual-looking or fragile fruits and vegetables have largely disappeared—even those that are tastier than the supermarket versions.

Gary Paul Nabhan, an environmental author and agriculturalist from the University of Arizona, has pointed out that we may need heirloom varieties in the future to help cope with emerging diseases and climate change. (To read more about the topic, see this Chronicle article about heirloom foods at Emory University, and this story about a revival of Maryland’s rare and beautiful fish pepper. Mr. Nabhan has written books about the topic as well.)

Seed Savers has formed partnerships with some colleges (the University of Wisconsin, for example, on some potato varieties). But much of the work in preserving seeds happens right here in Decorah, in gardening plots around the organization’s 890-acre farm. Seed Savers is the largest nongovernmental seed bank in the United States, preserving 25,000 varieties.

Arthur and I, both of us avid vegetable gardeners, expected to see a banquet of garden-fresh food everywhere. We saw a lot of food, all right, but most of it was rotting. It turns out that seeds are most viable when taken from overripe and rotting fruits. So Seed Savers lets its food sit around and get moldy before it harvests the seeds. For Arthur, who spends a lot of time and energy transporting surplus vegetables to bread lines in Baltimore, it was hard to see all of this “wasted” food, even if it was being wasted for a good reason.

Before we left, we stopped at the Seed Savers orchard, where we saw apple varieties we had never seen before. There were rows of grapevines as well, with fruits large and small, from blond-green to black-purple. I tried a grape or two while walking through the vines—they could be chalky-sweet or subtly sour or even taste like ripe pears. They could remind you of all the flavor possible in life. It was a sweet way to end a long trip.

Corn—could it be a variety of popcorn?—was drying on racks in a greenhouse on the Seed Savers farm.