This morning we woke up and Renee Zoske came to the farm to talk to us about crop insurance. The last time someone came to the farm to talk about farm loans, it got a little over my head, so I was hoping that this would be more accessible. It was in fact very accessible and Renee did a great job explaining a concept that we weren’t very familiar with to our group. Something that is important to understand is that farmers don’t pay the entire premium for their crop insurance because a large part of it is subsidized by the government. I had understood why this was the case for small farmers because paying the full premium would be too much of a cost, but I did not understand why the government still subsidized the crop insurance for larger ones like Summit Farms. According to her, the reason is that if the government chose not to subsidize crop insurance for the larger farms, those farm would join together and create their own insurance company, which would take money out of the insurance pool for the small farmers. My impression was that this would raise their premium a lot. This was a good explanation I thought and gave me a better idea of why the government is subsidizing larger farmers.

After lunch, we drove three hours to Decorah to go to Seed Savers Exchange, which was one of the coolest places we have been thus far. It was started by a couple who had been entrusted with some heirloom seeds that had been passed down through generations. The couple realized that they could very well be the only ones with those seeds and did not want to be completely responsible for the continuation of the plant species, just in case something happened, so they decided to start searching for other people who had heirloom seeds so that the different seeds could be exchanged, therefore increasing the likelihood that they would survive. The list of people who had heirloom seeds to exchange grew larger and larger and that is how heirloom seeds came to be. The headquarters of the Seed Savers Exchange were pretty cool, as they kept an extremely large amount of seeds there, growing different rare plants and selling many seeds in its gift shop that I had never seen before. I thought it was really awesome that there were people who were so dedicated to pursuing genetic diversity in a world where the most efficient genes for plants are selected and the rest are just sort of forgotten. A woman named Toby Cain gave us the tour of the property and took us through her personal garden, where she had divided her plants by their country of origin. For all of the countries she had included, she included vegetables from those countries’ traditional diets that have in many  caseknown different types of apple. This is remarkable when you look at the few types of apple that are sols become forgotten. When we went over to look at their apple orchard, we learned that there are 15,000 apple varieties, but only about 12 in a typical grocery store.