Winter in the Willamette Valley is generally mild. But although we don’t always experience piles of snow along our roads, the chilly temperature and lack of sunlight can be more brutal than icy roads or frostbite, especially for crops and farmers.
Most farmers resort to indoor greenhouses to make something of the season, crossing their fingers in hope of a decent crop. However, Sarah Kleeger and Andrew Still, the visionaries behind the Seed Ambassadors Project and Adaptive Seed are helping farmers plant alternative and more resilient crops that are able to withstand those sharp Decembers. 
The Seed Ambassadors Project started in August 2006 when Kleeger and Still made a tour of several European countries, visiting and contacting many “seed stewards” along the way. During their European tour, they collected more than 1,000 variations of seed, as well as sharing some of the Pacific Northwest’s seed bounty with the European seed stewards. Because the climate of Northern Europe resembles that of the Pacific Northwest, the couple’s success at adapting European variations has been successful, but it has taken time.
“For the last three years, we have been growing out seed and evaluating them for how appropriate they are for growing in our conditions and how much we like them,” Kleeger said. 
Encouraging seed diversity takes trial after trial to ensure that macro- and micro-nutrient composition in the soil is suited for the seed, both for growing and for eating. The slightest variation in nitrogen or potassium levels adds new variables into the equation. 
“We have to do all the trials and testing to make sure that they grow well here, and some of them don’t,” Still said.
Another dynamic to their tinkering involves implementing crofts, or smaller farm spaces dedicated to experimenting with highly adaptive hybrid gene pool mixes. 
“We’ve done a lot of that to achieve a really powerful adaptability in the short term,” Still said. “But we haven’t been working that many years, so the seeds that are growing now are just beginning to be adapted to the local environment, and some of them turned out to be very, very well adapted.”
This is good news for farmers looking to extend their growing season into the winter months with more resilient crops suited for the locale. 
Given the relatively mild winters, despite 80 percent of their crop being killed off over December, Kleeger and Still have had great success with winter crops such as kale and winter spinach, whose seeds are indigenous to Europe.
“Winter food production has been quite a big push, and we’ve been finding a lot of the material from outside the U.S. has been very successful because American heirloom or bread material is very sparse or has become extinct,” Still said. “We couldn’t find much of that, so we brought it in.”
In addition to seed preservation and development, the project also incorporates an educational component. The project has put on events targeting growers, as well as consumers. Kleeger and Still have found that both ends of the financial and communal equation need to be brought together to understand the vital roles that seed preservation and evolution have in our communities. Workshops mostly focusing on the “how-to” of seed saving and distribution are offered regularly, in addition to the couple’s efforts in farming and seed development. 
“We’ve made ourselves available to answer questions and sort of coach people through seed-saving,” Kleeger said. 
Background information, fundamentals of seed-saving, planning your garden for seed-saving, the importance of locally adapted varieties, and the importance of varietal choice are topics usually covered, but ultimately, the development of a seed-saving community is the real goal in mind. 
One of the most recent additions to their project has been a collaboration with Corvallis-based seeder and Sunbow Farm owner Harry MacCormack in his Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project. After success with harvesting early season dry beans, a variety that isn’t particularly popular to grow in the Willamette, Still and Kleeger decided to join MacCormack in his activism. 
“That’s part of the reason we got involved with the bean and grain project and why we started the bean and grain CSA, because we want to get these rare varieties of dry beans more popular,” Still said.
The more popular varieties consist of longer season beans that aren’t grown with much success.
“We want to prove that we can grow really good grains and beans in the Willamette Valley, and I think we’re in the process of that,” Still said.

[email protected]