1376
Green & indigenous News
124 readers
45 users here now
A community for Green & indigenous news!
founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
1378
1380
1381
1382
Amelia Schafer
ICT
Two senators introduce a bill elevating the Indian Health Services director to assistant secretary for Indian health within the Department of Health and Human Services Tuesday morning.
U.S. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nevada, and Mike Rounds, R-South Dakota, introduced the Stronger Engagement for Indian Health Needs Act with the goal of improving health outcomes in tribal communities. To do this, they proposed an upgrade of IHS’s top position.
Currently, the IHS director position lacks certain authorities critical for the recruitment and retention of doctors, nurses and other essential IHS employees, the press release states.
If those decisions need to be made at present, then the IHS director would need to relay that information to and receive approval from the assistant secretary of health, who does not fall under IHS and doesn’t have the background and training to make those choices, said Sen. Cortez Masto’s office. It can create delays and worse situations.
Senators said that by elevating the position to assistant secretary in HHS would give IHS more authority, especially when it comes to new hires and advocating for health disparities in Indian Country as a whole without going through someone else.
If passed, the assistant secretary for Indian health would report directly to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
IHS has recently struggled with employee retention, especially following the “Fork in the Road” memo allowing for early retirements among government employees.
More than 1,000 IHS employees left the department in 2025 through early retirement offers or voluntary termination, said National Indian Health Board Chief Executive Officer A.C. Locklear, Lumbee during a Senate Committee on Indian Affairs hearing in October.
Early retirements, other cuts slash Indian Health Service workforce
On Jan. 29, IHS announced its largest hiring effort in agency history, aiming to hire more doctors, dentists, administrators, mental health providers and more. The initiative’s immediate focus will be on filling vacancies, a news release said.
Nevada has five IHS clinics and South Dakota has over 10 facilities (including 638 contract facilities).
“The shockingly unequal health outcomes in Indian Country paint a clear picture: our country has failed to live up to our obligation to provide quality health care for Tribal communities,” said Sen. Cortez Masto in a statement. “This bipartisan legislation would be an important step toward giving IHS the tools and authority it needs to ensure everyone has access to excellent, affordable health care.”
The bill is endorsed by the National Congress of American Indians, the National Indian Health Board, the National Council of Urban Indians and the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, the senators said.
Companion legislation has been introduced in the House of Representatives by Reps. Greg Stanton, D-Arizona, and David Joyce, R-Ohio.
The post Senators introduce legislation to promote top IHS position appeared first on ICT.
From ICT via This RSS Feed.
1383
1384
1386
1388
1389
1391
Mark Wagner
Special to ICT
Sara Factor recalls the moment that food company Saucy Spoon reached out to make a licensing deal with her daughter, Peyton “Beans” Factor, a gifted collegiate golfer.
“A complete surprise, shock,” she told ICT. “Followed by, ‘Shut up! No way!’”
The company wanted to negotiate a contract with the young golfer for a Name, Image and Likeness contract, known as an NIL, to sell their product — beans.
Factor, Chickasaw, a rising golf star who committed last year to play Division 1 golf at Manhattan University in New York, caught the attention of the company after influencer Bunkie Perkins began a social media campaign to promote the idea that Factor was a candidate for the growing NIL market for college athletes.
With her talent for golf and a name like Beans, Factor caught the attention of more than a million viewers from Golf Oklahoma to Barstool Sports, TikTok and X, formerly Twitter.
“It was last January,” Sara Factor recounted. “My friend called and said a story that mentioned Beans was getting millions of likes.”
The folks at Saucy Spoon and their ad agency, space150, took notice.
“A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us,” Jilliann DeLawyer, the senior director of marketing for Saucy Spoon, told ICT. “We are all about beans.”
Collegiate golfer Peyton “Beans” Factor, Chickasaw, takes a swingfor the Manhattan University Jaspers golf team as a freshman in September 2025. Credit: Photo courtesy of Manhattan University Athletics Department
The Saucy Spoon parent company, Faribault Foods, includes Saucy Spoons Baked Beans and more than a half-dozen other brands of foods – many of which also include beans. The company, formed by the merger in 2014 of Faribault Foods and Arizona Canning Company, is based in Faribault, Minnesota, with a manufacturing and distribution facility in Tucson, Arizona.
The company had never considered an NIL sponsorship, but the leadership at Faribault Foods got on board quickly.
“Serendipitous to say the least,” DeLawyer said. “The more we learned about Beans and her family, how delightful they all are, the more we were convinced this was a good partnership.”
While details are private, the multi-year contract between Saucy Spoon and the Factor family is not trivial. When ICT reached the family, Beans was treating her mother with a trip to the Oklahoma-Alabama football playoff.
A true trophy hunter
Factor earned her nickname as a child, her mother said.
“When she was 3 years old, maybe even younger, my grandmother, Sue Burris, babysat her and fed her beans every day,” Sara Factor said. “She had a hearty appetite for beans as a tyke. She became so well-known as Beans that her enrollment papers (which used her first name Peyton) at school would get lost.”
The family welcomed the attention from Saucy Spoon.
“As Native people, we’re often taught, don’t get in the limelight,” Sara Factor said. “A lot of it stems from grandparents from the past. As Native, you’re not supposed to brag about yourself. But the tribes have grown. Before you weren’t Indian. Now you’re Indian. Now it’s ok. And if we don’t root for them, if we don’t cheer for them, who will?”
As her family cheered, Beans racked up wins in golf.
“She is a true trophy hunter,” her mother said.
Lots of driving
For many talented athletes, parental support is critical. There’s little surprise that Beans is not the only Oklahoma state champion in the family.
Her brother, Wyatt Factor – aka Boomer – was an Oklahoma state champion in baseball. Bean’s sister,Taylor, was a two-time Oklahoma state champion in softball. Just above Beans in birth order, Elijah was an Oklahoma state champion in basketball. Beans also has two younger siblings, Elliot, 6, and Goose, 4.
Jimpsey Factor, Bean’s father, remembers a lot of driving. Although there’s a country club in their hometown of Ada, Oklahoma, they would go to a driving range in Norman for golf.
“It was just too expensive,” Jimpsey Factor said. “So we’d go to Norman and she would practice sometimes every other day … We were taking her to Norman from when she was about six.”
Beans began to win tournaments before she had turned 10, and when she got to high school, her dad recalls that she was a key reason that Ada High School adopted golf.
“The golf team was pretty much nonexistent until she got there,” he said. “Maybe one girl, two girls would come out for the team. That’s all they ever had … Now golf is big.”
With Beans aboard, the Ada high school team won the state tournament in her sophomore year. She transferred in her junior year to Sequoyah, where, surprise, the team won the state tournament. In her senior year, she won the Oklahoma statewide individual medal for low score.
Licensing deals
After years of lawsuits and negotiations, the National Collegiate Athletic Association began to allow student athletes to receive money for the use of their name, image and likeness beginning in July 2021.
While there is no reliable count of women with NIL income, the most active NIL deal-makers are most often for women in basketball, softball, soccer, and gymnastics. Combined with the fact that Native American athletes make up less than 1 percent of NCAA Division I athletes, Factor’s NIL in women’s golf is all the more impressive.
Coach Keith Prokop, who oversees the Manhattan Jaspers golf teams for men and women, said that NIL contracts “are definitely a different world than I’m used to with the landscape of coaching golf, which sometimes doesn’t get the flowers it deserves. So I’m happy for them to find a way to shine.”
Members of Manhattan University’s women’s golf team gather after winning first place at the Evann Parker Memorial Tournament in October 2025 at Lake View Country Club, hosted by Mercyhurst University. It was the first win for the team’s first-year. Pictured are, from left, Coach Keith Prokop, Jayden Peters, Maddison Long, Peyton “Beans” Factor, Giana Zinke, Isabella Encinas and Nawel Ben Latief. Not pictured are Edie Nicholson and Arianna Steele. Credit: Courtesy of Manhattan University Athletic Department
DeLawyer, with Saucy Spoon, said the company was careful in reaching out.
“We approached Beans directly to see if she was interested in an NIL partnership,” DeLawyer said. “When developing the agreement we had to make sure we were compliant with state and school rules. When Faribault and Beans were both happy with the arrangement, we then submitted it for review/approval from both the NCAA and Manhattan University.”
Above the mean
As Beans Factor is not your average golfer, Saucy Spoon varieties are not your average beans.
“We spent a lot of time talking to consumers about how we could improve baked beans, and the answer was clear: ‘Give me more flavor,’” said DeLawyer. “So we did. We developed flavors like applewood smoked bacon, jalapeño bourbon, sweet hickory, and spicy roasted chipotle. Our newest flavor is Korean style barbeque.”
Parent company, Faribault Foods, which includes Saucy Spoons Baked Beans with more than a half-dozen other food brands, was formed by a merger in 2014 of Faribault Foods and Arizona Canning Company. It is based in Faribault, Minnesota, with a manufacturing and distribution facility in Tucson, Arizona. Products are available in groceries across the U.S. and on Amazon.com.
DeLawyer said that baked beans have been a staple in American cuisine for generations, and that Saucy Spoon’s innovations have introduced new flavors to the grocery aisles and attracted more than a million new households to baked beans.
They are also innovating in the NIL space, and could not pass on an opportunity to have Beans promote their beans.
“We are just happy to have met Beans and her family,” DeLawyer said. “At the same time, we want her to focus on her studies, golfing, and just generally enjoy being at college as much as possible, so we’ll probably shoot footage only once or twice a year.”
Good start
In her first fall season at Manhattan, Factor finished in the top 10 at two tournaments and combined with her teammates to record Manhattan’s first-ever win at the Evann Parker Memorial in October. During that win, the team senior Nawel Ben Latief received support from Beans, who put together a near-perfect second round.
Prokop, the coach, remains impressed by his young team and their desire to learn.
“We are a very young team and a talented team that needs to become wiser in how we approach our play and build confidence,” he said.
Among the team members is Factor’s long-time golf colleague and friend Maddison Long, Navajo and Coeur d’Alene, who is a sophomore at Manhattan. Both developed through programs like the U.S. Golf Association qualifiers, NB3 Elite Golf and Nike’s N7 program. And both appear to be adjusting to big city life.
Their moms told ICT of a shopping trip to midtown. Beans and Long came on a QR code sponsored by the city in Times Square. They clicked on it and, lo and behold, their surprised faces appeared on the towering screen above the New Year’s Eve ball drop. That jumbotron is often called the ‘#1 billboard in the world’ for its visibility.
The Manhattan Lady Jaspers begin the spring season March 8 in Orlando at Orange Tree Country Club.
Mark Wagner is a golf historian and the founding director of the Binienda Center for Civic Engagement at Worcester State University in Massachusetts. His book, “Native Links, the Surprising History of Our First People in Golf,” was published in 2024 and is available from Back Nine Pressand Amazon. He can be reached at markgwagner@charter.net.
The post ‘With a name like Beans’: Chickasaw golfer lands licensing deal appeared first on ICT.
From ICT via This RSS Feed.
1392
The year 2010 was a reckoning for Japan’s economic security.
On September 7, the Chinese fishing trawler Minjinyu 5179 refused an order by Japan’s coast guard to leave disputed waters near the Senkaku Islands, which are known in China as Diaoyu. The vessel then rammed two patrol boats, escalating a decades-long territorial feud.
Japan responded by arresting the captain, Zhan Qixiong, under domestic law, a move Beijing considered an unacceptable assertion of Japanese sovereignty. Amid mounting protests in both countries and the collapse of high-level talks, China cut exports of rare earth elements to Japan, which relied upon its geopolitical adversary for 90 percent of its supply. The move reverberated throughout the global economy as companies like Toyota and Panasonic were left without materials crucial to the production of everything from hybrid cars to personal electronics.
It wasn’t long before Japan gave in and let Qixiong go. The crisis, which garnered worldwide attention, became a catalyst for Japan’s push to secure a reliable supply of critical minerals. “That was the turning point,” said Takahiro Kamisuna, a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
Fifteen years later, that reckoning has only deepened.
China still provides 60 percent of Japan’s critical minerals, a reliance that has grown riskier as Beijing asserts its position as the world’s dominant supplier. Last month, Japan took a bold step to break that dependence when it launched a five-week deep-sea mining test off Minamitorishima Island. A crew of 130 researchers aboard the Chikyu — Japanese for “earth” — will use what is essentially a robotic vacuum cleaner to collect mud from a depth of 6,000 meters, marking the world’s first attempt at prolonged collection of minerals from great depths.
Read Next
A guide to the 4 minerals shaping the world’s energy future
Seabed mud off the coast of that uninhabited island, which sits 1,180 miles southeast of Tokyo, is rich in rare earths like neodymium and yttrium — distinct from the potato-shaped polymetallic nodules often associated with marine extraction. Such materials are essential for electric vehicles, solar panels, advanced weapons systems, and other technology.
The expedition, which is expected to end February 14, is being led by the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology, which did not respond to a request for comment. It comes three months after the country signed an agreement with the United States to collaborate on securing a supply of critical minerals. It also propels Japan to the forefront of a growing debate over how far nations should go to secure these materials. Deep-sea mining “is not a new thing,” Kamisuna said, “it’s just gaining more attention mainly because of geopolitical tensions.”
The trawler incident highlighted a vulnerability that successive governments vowed to alleviate. Many criticized then-prime minister Naoto Kan of the country’s center-left party for capitulating to China, but he pledged to never again let Japan’s industrial future hinge on a single supplier. His successor, Shinzo Abe of the center-right party, was more aggressive and saw critical minerals as not just an economic issue, but a matter of national security that must be addressed even if it meant exploiting the deep sea.
Establishing a domestic supply could help Japan reach its goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, a high priority for Yoshihide Suga, who succeeded Abe. Although Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, an Abe protégé who assumed office late last year, supports the 2050 timeline, she has said the transition must not risk Japan’s industrial competitiveness and energy stability.
Takaichi has proposed slashing subsidies for large-scale solar projects or batteries, largely because so much of that technology is imported from China. Instead, she has hailed nuclear power as the path toward carbon neutrality. With the mining experiment unfolding in the Pacific, Takaichi hopes to secure a strategic reserve of minerals to protect key industries.
But Japan doesn’t face an either-or choice, said Jane Nakano, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “Energy security and energy transition are closely tied,” she said.
Read Next
What changed for deep-sea mining in 2025? Everything.
“To me, it’s much more about the pace, not so much the direction,” said Nakano, who has worked for the U.S. Department of Energy and for the energy attaché at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. “I don’t find Takaichi’s way of framing this dual challenge — energy security and decarbonization — unique to Japan. A lot of G7 countries are starting to recalibrate again, so they do have to think about international competitiveness. Direction-wise, [Japan] is just aligning itself with the political establishment and the industry.”
Unlike China, Japan lacks the sedimentary geology associated with rare earth deposits, requiring it to look toward the waters within its exclusive economic zones. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Japan has the right to exploit the resources within 200 nautical miles of its coastline, which includes the atoll island of Minamitorishima.
Although the minerals to be found there lie nearly 20,000 feet beneath the surface, proponents of digging them up argue the challenge of extracting them and the cost of refining them is justified by mounting geopolitical tension. With Takaichi’s recent political jabs at Beijing, China has begun choking off its exports to Japan. Nakano said Japanese officials seem “confident” in the outcome of the experiment. “They’ve determined that it merits to have this demonstration of technologies and equipment this time around,” she said.
Japan’s foray into deep-sea mining comes amid mounting concern about the ecological cost of such technology. Scientists and environmental groups warn that marine extraction is racing ahead of our understanding of the impacted ecosystems. They are particularly concerned about sediment plumes, noise and light pollution, and damage to habitats and food webs, noting that scars left by equipment could render the seafloor uninhabitable for decades, even centuries.
“A tiny little nudge, and the whole seafloor is disturbed,” said Travis Washburn, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. He studies deep-sea environments and human impacts on marine ecosystems, and he has analyzed the waters around Minamitorishima Island and represented Japan at International Seabed Authority workshops. He believes that mining rare earths from mud could have the same impact as mining nodules. “I think that they’re both pretty much going to destroy the habitat directly affected.”
Government officials insist the ecological impacts will be closely monitored. But assessing them could be difficult, because the seafloor around the island, home to sea cucumbers, sponges, corals, and potentially rare endemic species — remains the subject of intense study. Scientists fear these ecosystems may be permanently altered before anyone assesses them. As with many extractive industries, Washburn noted, technology is often deployed before anyone fully understands its environmental impacts.
Shigeru Tanaka, deputy director general of the Pacific Asia Resource Center, is an outspoken critic of deep-sea mining. He argues that the industry as a whole disregards international law and that exploiting the seafloor will harm fisheries and trample upon the rights of Pacific Islanders who consider the sea as sacred. (The Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands have raised such concerns in opposing Trump administration plans to open the waters there to mining.) He also believes that some of the experts involved in Japan’s project “are not really taking seriously the risks to the environment and how irreversible it may be.”
Even some government officials have expressed concern. Yoshihito Doi of the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy has said Japan should mine only “if we can establish a robust system that properly takes environmental impacts into account.”
A geologist inspects a bucket of polymetallic nodules, misshapen black globes encrusted with metals like cobalt, nickel, and manganese, collected by the research vessel MV Anuanua Moana from near the Cook Islands.
William West / AFP via Getty Images
It remains unclear what exactly is unfolding beneath the waves during this current test, but based upon his experience working with the Japanese government on similar research, Washburn said the top priority will be assessing whether the technology works. Researchers also will monitor how much material the system can hold and if the machinery can keep the sea mud contained without releasing a massive sediment plume on the seafloor or in the water column.
If Japan can successfully deploy a 6,000-meter pipe that can suck up 35 metric tons of mud under extreme pressure — about 8,700 pounds per square inch, or 600 times the pressure at sea level — government officials say a broader trial, which may include polymetallic nodules, could begin in February 2027.
One longer-term goal is to develop what’s called “hybrid mining.” Because deep-sea polymetallic nodules sit atop the rare-earth mud around Minamitorishima Island, researchers are exploring whether both could be collected and separated in a single operation.
Kamisuna said Japan faces another challenge: The energy needed to acquire and refine a stockpile. “If we want to create a sufficient reserve for rare earth [minerals], either using domestic or export, a large amount of electricity is required,” he said. “And the question is, What are we going to use, liquified natural gas or coal? What is the environmental cost?”
Using more environmentally friendly methods of extraction and processing can be expensive, he said — which is one reason many countries turn to China as a cheaper option.
For now, Japan’s deep-sea mining experiment seems to have drawn little public opposition at home, unlike in the United States and Australia where environmental activists and Indigenous communities have pushed back against such operations, particularly around the Pacific Islands. In the meantime, the country’s test moves forward, even as the implications of success, and questions about its long-term impact, remain unresolved.
“We are not prepared,” Tanaka said. “My personal take is that by the time we are ready, when the technology and the science is set, I really do not think there would be a demand for it.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Japan’s unprecedented project could test the limits of deep-sea mining on Feb 3, 2026.
From Grist via This RSS Feed.
1393
1394
Article Summary
• Conflict has long threatened the survival of traditional Palestinian crops, and Israeli attacks since 2023 have destroyed nearly all the farmland in Gaza.
• The West Bank-based Palestine Heritage Seed Library collects and distributes Palestinian seeds for cultivation.
• In 2024, the Library created a U.S. network of growers called the Seed Protectors Project, based in the Hudson Valley of New York.
At City Green Farm Eco-Center, in Clifton, New Jersey, giant 9-foot-tall stalks of okra produce bushels of succulent, fuzzy green pods, ideal for soups and stews. This variety of okra, Bamyeh Falastinia, is native to what is now the West Bank, and for centuries, it has been a staple in Palestinian kitchens.
The plants’ true treasure, though, is its seeds—and in 2024, the City Green plants produced more than 9,000. At a time when conflict in the Middle East has destroyed Palestinian farmland and foodways, these seeds have become a beacon of hope for many.
Seeds are vessels of memory that carry the traditions of the people who grow, cook, and share the food.
City Green is part of a grassroots network of growers in the U.S. who are cultivating ancient Palestinian crops as part of the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library (PHSL) Seed Protectors Project. Currently, approximately 40 growers and organizations in the U.S. work as seed protectors, including the Experimental Farm Network (EFN) in Pennsylvania, the Hudson Valley Farm Hub in New York, the Organic Seed Alliance in Washington State, the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, and Truelove Seeds.
While growing varieties of okra, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, herbs, and collard greens that have been grown in Palestine for centuries, these groups are also preserving Palestinian culture.
In her book Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers, anthropologist Virginia Nazarea describes seeds as not only of critical importance to the preservation of crop diversity but also to the safeguarding of cultural knowledge. In this way, seeds are vessels of memory that carry the traditions of the people who grow, cook, and share the food, embodying both communal identity as well as agricultural value.
This is something the leaders at City Green understand. “We try to grow a lot of culturally relevant food at City Green,” says farm director Henry Anderson. “There’s a lot of Palestinian people here in Paterson and Clifton, and so we just want to keep preserving those cultures as much as we can.”
The Founding of the Seed Protectors
Seed protector Lana Mustafa (left) and PHSL Program Director Melina Roise (right) with towering Bamyeh Falastinia okra plants. (Photo credit: Nicole Vascimini)
The warm, dry climate of the West Bank and Gaza has for centuries supported unique varieties of wheat, barley, chickpeas, olives, lentils, and a diverse range of vegetables. Both regions belong to the Fertile Crescent, the area in the Middle East that was the birthplace of agriculture.
Protecting both cultural identity and crop varieties is what inspired Vivien Sansour, an advocate for seed conservation, to establish the PHSL in the West Bank town of Battir in 2014. Unlike a seed bank or vault, which sequesters seeds for safekeeping, the goal of a seed library is to keep crops active and growing. Growers borrow seeds from the library and then propagate, harvest, and resow them—as well as return a portion back to the library to be shared with more growers. For almost a decade, the PHSL worked in the West Bank, lending seeds and preserving culture.
But, as conflict in the region caused conditions to deteriorate, the work of the PHSL was also jeopardized. Since 2023, bombing and ground assaults into Gaza by Israeli forces have left only 1.5 percent of the farmland in Gaza undamaged and accessible to cultivation, according to a United Nations report released in August 2025.
To be able to continue the work of preserving seeds and culture, the PHSL launched the Seed Protectors Project in 2024. Its goal is to get Palestinian heirloom seeds into the hands of “trusted friends, both Palestinian and non-Palestinian, who live in safety and security elsewhere in the world”—though primarily the United States.
“It really started from conversations that our team was having around our responsibilities as seed keepers right now,” says Melina Roise, program director for the PHSL.
At Saboon Maazeh farm at the Chester Agricultural Center in New York, seed protectors for the PHSL harvest crops for seeds. (Photo credit: Melina Roise)
How the Network Works
Regulations from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) limit the import of seeds to protect American agriculture from disease and insect infestation. This has meant that the PHSL has had to rely on the Palestinian diaspora in the U.S. for seeds.
“We have re-formed the seed library in the U.S.,” Roise says, “by people gifting us seeds, mostly passed down from their grandmothers and mothers.”
Seeds are shared with growers who have the experience and the available land to scale seed production. Once harvested, growers share seeds with other growers within their networks to resow and keep safe.
“The seed library does not currently have a permanent home in the U.S.,” Roise says. “Seeds are kept in various places, with farmers, at our homes, and at a small office we have in the Hudson Valley. Our dream is to have a farm in the future with a public seed library, but we are still in the process.”
Some of the seeds grown by the Seed Protectors Project are also available to the general public through seed sales. TrueLove Seeds, for example, sells Palestinian seeds grown by U.S. seed protectors, including the okra grown at City Green.
Lana Mustafa, an American Palestinian living in Clifton, New Jersey, has been stewarding the okra seeds for the last 10 years and is now part of the Seed Protectors Project. Needing more land to scale up okra production for the PHSL, she reached out to City Green, and it’s her seeds that now tower above the landscape at the Eco-Center. For her, saving the okra seeds is much more than a hobby. “It’s our duty and responsibility as humans and as individuals to protect what needs protection,” she says.
It’s a belief shared by others involved with the PHSL. “As an American and as a Jew,” says Nate Kleinman, founder of the Experimental Farm Network, “I believe that we have a really important role to play in working to solve the ongoing, really terrible situation of Palestine and the Palestinian people. Working to preserve seeds is just one piece of the puzzle, as they are such an important conveyor of culture and memory.”
As part of their efforts to preserve crops vital to the agriculture and culture of war-torn regions, the Experimental Farm Network (EFN) grows and saves seeds from Ukrainian cucumbers. (Photo credit: Nate Kleinman)
The Benefits—and Challenges—of Growing Non-Native Crops in U.S. Soil
The PHSL and its seed protectors are not the only organization working to preserve seeds from areas ripped apart by conflict. The Iraqi Seed Collective, a U.S.-based network, distributes heirloom Iraqi vegetable seeds to members of the Iraqi diaspora in the U.S., and the Ukrainian Heritage Seed Network has distributed heritage seeds to more than 2,000 farmers, both in Ukraine and around the world.
The EFN has played a role in some of these efforts. It has grown soybeans and sunflowers from Ukrainian seeds it has requested from the USDA, as well as from other regions facing extreme challenges, such as South Sudan and Afghanistan.
“We have made it a focus on growing seed from threatened communities where the traditional agricultural systems and foodways are under threat, whether by war or climate change, sea level rise, or outmigration due to poverty and other factors,” says Kleinman.
He believes that, along with culture preservation, Palestinian seeds may hold clues to future crop production and even global food security. Traditional Palestinian agriculture has long relied on ba’al crops, sometimes referred to as rainfed crops, which grow using only the moisture retained in the soil during the winter months. This has produced crops that are able to adapt to hot and dry conditions, something increasingly common in North America due to climate change.
“We have to do a much better job of preserving seeds from around the world and especially preserving varieties that can stand up to the extreme climatic forces that are coming our way,” Kleinman says.
There are, of course, challenges when growing seeds attuned to a Middle Eastern climate in unfamiliar soils. Jennifer Williams of Wild Dream Farms on Vashon Island in Washington State’s Puget Sound grows vegetables for the Seed Protectors Project. She was recruited by Kleinman to work on brassicas like cauliflower and cabbage.
“These brassica crops are very difficult to grow for seed on the East Coast because of pest pressure primarily,” Kleinman says. Cabbage worms and aphids can devastate them, and the Pacific Northwest offers more favorable conditions. Williams often receives advice during monthly calls with other seed protectors, advising her not to water the plant once established. This helps mimic the arid conditions of the Middle East.
Even so, Williams admits, a plant grown in the wet climate of the Pacific Northwest, no matter how carefully curated, does not taste the same as one grown in the dry soils of Palestine. “The cauliflower wasn’t the same flavor,” she says. “At least I can harvest the seed, with the idea being that they will go back to Palestine when the opportunity arises.”
It’s this hope and the connection these crops give to Palestinians around the world that makes the work at City Green take on a deeper meaning. The fall of 2025 was wetter than the previous year in Clifton, and some of the okra pods didn’t dry as well, resulting in fewer seeds. This, though, has not dampened spirits, especially for Mustafa, who sees the okra as more than just a plant.
“It’s an opportunity for me to stay connected to my identity as a Palestinian,” she says.
The post The US Farmers Saving Palestinian Seeds appeared first on Civil Eats.
From Civil Eats via This RSS Feed.
1396
1397
1398
1399