Harry Hayman on the Iowa Farm Guarding Philadelphia's Seed Supply

A seed does not announce what it is worth. It sits in a paper envelope on a shelf, unlabeled as far as any stranger can tell, and either somebody plants it next spring or its story quietly ends. That small fact sits underneath a much louder one. Four companies now sell about half the seed planted on the planet, and Harry Hayman, the Philadelphia entrepreneur and food justice advocate who founded the Feed Philly Coalition, has started putting that fact in the same conversation as the ideas that anchor his own work: local procurement, food access and regional resilience.

Roughly a thousand miles west, in Winneshiek County, Iowa, that envelope problem already has a working answer. Nine hundred acres of open ground near Decorah hold roughly twenty thousand varieties of vegetables, flowers and grain that a commercial seed catalog would never bother to stock. The organization that keeps them alive started with two seeds and a promise kept by two young newlyweds who had no idea what they were building.

A Morning Glory and a Tomato From Bavaria

In 1975, an Iowa woman named Diane Ott Whealy and her husband Kent Whealy received two packets of seed from her dying grandfather, a man everyone in the family called Grandpa Ott. One was a morning glory, the other a tomato that would later be named German Pink. Grandpa Ott’s own parents had carried those seeds across the Atlantic in 1884, when they left Bavaria for a new life in Iowa, and the family had replanted them every summer since, four generations running, without ever writing the practice down as anything special.

Diane and Kent understood something uncomfortable almost immediately: if nobody grew those seeds out that year, they would not simply become rare. They would be gone. So they planted them, and then they went looking for other families holding the same kind of quiet inheritance in kitchen drawers and root cellars across the country. Thirty gardeners showed up to the first swap that same year, trading a six page list of seed. According to Seed Savers Exchange’s own account of its history, that swap grew into Heritage Farm, an 890 acre headquarters in Winneshiek County that now holds close to 20,000 open pollinated varieties and calls itself the nation’s largest nongovernmental seed bank of its kind.

The Only Gene Bank That Has Never Missed a Year

The word bank is not a metaphor here. In 2008, Norway opened the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a facility built into a mountainside on an Arctic archipelago as a partnership between the Norwegian government, the Nordic Genetic Resource Center and the Crop Trust. Its purpose is blunt: if a war, a drought, a funding collapse or a natural disaster wipes out a seed collection anywhere in the world, Svalbard holds a duplicate that can restart it. The vault now stores more than 1.3 million samples from nearly every country on earth.

Seed Savers Exchange makes one claim about its own relationship to that vault, and it is a specific one. As of 2024, the organization states, it is the only gene bank anywhere in the world that has sent a backup deposit to Svalbard every single year since the vault opened. Not a national program with a standing budget line. A nonprofit farm in rural Iowa, shipping a crate north on schedule, year after year, without a gap.

Four Companies, Half the World’s Seed

Set that continuity against the rest of the industry. GRAIN, a research group that tracks corporate concentration in farming, published an updated count of the commercial seed sector in 2026. Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta and BASF together account for half of the global commercial seed market, the report found, and Bayer alone accounts for roughly a fifth of it. The same four firms control 56 percent of the pesticide market, and the top ten seed companies combined control 63 percent of seed sales worldwide.

Concentration at that scale is not a scandal in the tabloid sense. It is closer to a set of business incentives working exactly as designed. A seed company built around patented, licensed genetics has every reason to breed for the crops that pay royalties at continental scale, corn, soybeans, cotton, and comparatively little reason to keep a regional squash or a neighborhood’s favorite pepper in circulation. Nobody built that outcome out of malice. It is simply what a market optimized for scale tends to discard, and what it discards does not always come back.

Harry Hayman and the Most Upstream Piece of a Food System

Harry Hayman has spent years thinking about Philadelphia’s food economy the way an engineer thinks about the pipes running under a street, invisible until something breaks. He describes seed in exactly those terms. Seed, he says, is “the most upstream piece of a food system,” the layer that everything else, local procurement, food access, a neighborhood’s ability to feed itself in a bad year, quietly depends on without most people ever noticing.

That framing is why a farm in Iowa belongs in a Philadelphia conversation at all. Every partnership the Feed Philly Coalition builds with a hospital, a university or a local business toward a steadier food distribution program assumes that a grower somewhere can get their hands on seed worth planting in the first place. Take that assumption away and the rest of the argument about local food systems has nothing underneath it. Harry Hayman treats that as the quiet, structural fact worth saying out loud rather than the kind of detail that gets skipped past on the way to a more dramatic headline.

What Philadelphia Is Already Doing With Its Own Seed

Philadelphia is not starting this conversation from zero. Truelove Seeds, a farm based seed company headquartered in the city, works with more than fifty small scale growers who supply culturally important, open pollinated varieties and share a cut of every sale back to the farmer who grew it. Its Philadelphia Collection exists specifically to keep varieties tied to the city’s own agricultural history in circulation rather than letting them lapse.

A few miles down the Schuylkill, Bartram’s Garden, founded in 1728 and counted as the country’s oldest surviving botanic garden by a Philadelphia Inquirer roundup of local heirloom seed sources, still sells seed from its own beds through its gift shop, including varieties like the Plait de Haiti tomato and the Willings Barbados pepper. The Free Library of Philadelphia runs seed libraries out of its Parkway Central and Lucien E. Blackwell Regional branches, where residents borrow seed the way they would borrow a book and are asked only to save some back at harvest for the next patron. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society backs more than 200 community gardens, urban farms and grow spaces across the city with soil, tools and training. And the city’s own Food Policy Advisory Council, housed inside the Office of Sustainability, lists an Urban Agriculture subcommittee, alongside one for Good Food Procurement, built around exactly this kind of question.

None of these efforts individually rival a nine hundred acre seed farm in Iowa, and none of them are trying to. Taken together, though, they are a city quietly answering the same question Heritage Farm answered in 1975: who decides what gets grown here, and what happens to a variety if the market has no use for it.

The Question Harry Hayman Keeps Returning To

A grocery store shelf carries the illusion that food simply exists, stocked and restocked without an origin story. A seed catalog does not offer that illusion. Every variety in it either survived because someone chose to keep growing it or it did not survive at all, and that choice was made by somebody, somewhere, often a person nobody outside their own kitchen ever thanked for it.

Harry Hayman keeps returning to a version of the same question when he talks about Philadelphia’s food future: what would it actually take for a region to hold onto its own seed, its own growers, its own varieties, instead of renting all of it from four companies that answer to shareholders a long way from any Philadelphia kitchen. Winneshiek County offers one kind of answer, built on 890 acres and fifty years of stubbornness. Philadelphia, with its seed libraries, its community gardens and a coalition turning hospitals, universities and local businesses into partners in steadier food distribution, is quietly assembling pieces of another one.