For thousands of years, farmers saved their own seeds to plant their crops. It’s a simple process: plant seeds in the spring, nurture those plants in the summer, harvest those crops in the fall and from them, collect next season’s seeds to store for the winter. Repeat.

Until the 20th century, America had a long history of openly saving, collecting and sharing seeds. In the early 1800s, the federal government even encouraged the collection of seeds from around the globe. By mid-century, the U.S. Patent Office’s agriculture division was not only collecting them, but also distributing free seeds, and in its early years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (founded in 1862) spent a third of its budget collecting and distributing seeds to farmers (www.centerforfoodsafety.org/issues/303/seeds/history-of-us-seed-development-and-patent-regimes#). But by 1924, distribution of free public seeds was halted after years of lobbying by private seed companies (www.seedmatters.org/). After World War II, consolidation of the domestic seed industry began in earnest. Today, five seed companies control 60% of the global seed market.

Recent years have seen renewed interest in saving seeds by backyard gardeners and farmers who run small-scale vegetable operations. People save seeds for a variety of reasons. Some do it to have more control over the food they eat, by growing it themselves to avoid genetically modified produce, for example. Others do it to become more self-reliant by sourcing more of their own food and to enhance their own food security. Still others do it to foster plant biodiversity by preserving traditional local plant varieties. (It’s worth noting that local plant varieties are often hardier—performing better and surviving better because they have acclimated to that locality’s specific climate and soil.) Still others save seeds to avoid participating in an industrial agricultural system that sees seeds patented by top companies that work hand-in-hand with corporate herbicide and pesticide corporations to control America’s industrial agriculture, aka Big Ag. Make no mistake, the seed business is big business; the U.S. market is estimated to be a $12 billion industry (www.verdantpartners.com/battle-for-bags-competition-for-your-seed-business-is-fierce/).

As larger numbers of ordinary citizens have begun saving seeds for themselves, or swapping them with friends and neighbors, seed library projects have taken off, too. There are approximately 300 seed libraries in the U.S. today, and all of them are paying attention to what happened at a local library in Mechanicsburg, PA (population 8,900). There, the Simpson Public Library launched a seed-sharing project, only to run afoul of Pennsylvania’s Seed Act of 2004.

The project worked this way: gardeners could “check out” a packet of seeds from the library in the spring, plant that vegetable, harvest its seeds in the fall, and then donate the next generation of seeds back to the seed library. Sixty people signed up to participate after the project was launched on Earth Day 2014. Imagine everyone’s surprise when the library received a letter in June warning that anyone dropping off seeds had to purchase a seed license, leave their name and address on the labeled seed packet, and keep samples and records open for public inspection for two years. Further, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture (PDA) told the library it could continue to “host” seed swapping events for private individuals, but could not continue its seed “lending library” unless seed germination was verified for each seed packet and additional information was provided under rules established by the Association of Official Seed Analysts (www.cumberlandcountylibraries.org/?q=SIM_SeedLibrary).

Seed savers around the country were outraged. Clearly PDA’s mission is different from seed savers. In the commercial marketplace, there are reasons to have rules for those who sell and distribute seeds as a commodity. In fact, every state has such rules requiring seed companies to be licensed, test seeds and properly label them so that when a farmer plants 5,000 seeds, he is essentially guaranteed a crop of what he believed he planted. In step with these laws, we believe the rationale for PA’s 2004 Seed Act was clearly to protect commerce.

Following the flap over its crackdown on the Simpson Library’s seed collection, in July PDA released a protocol for how seed libraries must operate. The result is that the library cannot distribute home-grown seeds.

We believe that requiring a group of backyard gardeners and community seed libraries to comply with the same rules as commercial seed sellers is ridiculous. In fact we salute gardeners who have found practical benefit in seed saving and we respect those who have sought to make both an environmental and a political statement about reclaiming our food system from Big Ag and Big Food. We believe it is dangerous to rely on a smaller and smaller number of corporations that control our food and produce less and less biodiversity in the crops we eat.

We argue that small seed exchanges in local communities should be protected under the law to allow them to operate freely and openly as farmers and gardeners did for thousands of years. Finally, we believe there should be exemptions for small-scale seed producers and startup seed companies to support the economic activity of such entrepreneurs.

In short, exchanging seeds ought not to be a crime.

[Editor’s note: in The River Reporter’s recent special supplement, Our Country Home, you can read an article about how to save seeds, “The Joy of Seed Saving” by Adrianne Picciano (www.riverreporter.com/ourcountryhome/4302/2014/08/27/joy-seed-saving).]