Faith Morgan, Eric Bee and Florentina Rodriguez stand in Agraria’s hoop house where manifold spring seeds are spouting and waiting to be tucked into the ground for the coming growing season. The trio — or the farm’s current administrative “triumvirate,” as Bee calls them — are heading up Agraria’s latest operational foci: enacting farm-scale permaculture practices, building local ecological knowledge, fostering citizen science and reskilling to preserve traditional practices. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
Agraria sows seeds of hope
- Published: April 12, 2026
Springtime is waxing in Yellow Springs. Treebuds are proudly poking up and ephemerals checker the thawing earth. The days begin to grow long as coats are cast away for the few months ahead.
Energy abounds this time of year, but for some organisms, growth takes time and blooms must be carefully planned.
Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice, a local 128-acre educational farm about a mile west of Yellow Springs, is among those circumspecting organisms — and for good reason.
It’s been three years since the farm’s operations were suspended due to financial and legal precarity from insurmountable payroll and payroll taxes that the farm couldn’t afford. Thirty employees were abruptly furloughed in February 2023, and most agricultural and educational programs ceased altogether.
Since then, growth at Agraria has been slow, steady and measured. This spring is no different, staffers told the News last month.
“We’re still building our capacity,” Eric Bee, operations manager, said. “We’re being careful and intentional with how we use grants, and especially with how we manage our bandwidth — seeing what projects we can and can’t take on.”
“Exactly,” Programs Director Florentina Rodriguez agreed. “We’re trying to regain the trust of the community, of our donors, and prove that we’re not going to stretch ourselves too thin. We’re still doing important work, and the community is invited to help out.”
Bee and Rodriguez — the only two paid staffers at Agraria — said they’re reliant on the goodwill of volunteers and the curious, those who hope to learn new skills and those who want to help feed their neighbors.
To that end, Agraria has narrowed its operational focus to four areas: enacting farm-scale permaculture practices, building local ecological knowledge, fostering citizen science and reskilling to preserve traditional practices.
A recent “potato tasting” at Agraria. (Submitted photo by Faith Morgan)
The next reskilling program will take place Saturday and Sunday, April 25 and 26, when Agraria will host “Making A Home Apothecary: Herbalism as a Community Skill,” wherein workshop organizers will teach pro-health approaches to plant foraging and making herbal remedies. Information and registration on the workshop can be found at agrariacenter.org.
All the while, Agraria is hosting “Seed Saturdays” at the farm every Saturday through the end of May. It’s a recurring event, Bee and Rodriguez said, that touches on all four of the farm’s operational pillars. The educational component, though, is paramount.
“We’ve been growing and breeding plants to do what we want for more than 10,000 years,” Bee said. “But lately, what we want isn’t necessarily good for us. Plants are being bred to be productive and easily shipped, not necessarily healthy and flavorful. So the concept of saving and carefully selecting seeds means we can grow better food for ourselves and the land.”
Seed Saturdays are just that — a casual exchange of produce and flower seeds that are well-tuned to grow and flourish in Yellow Springs’ particular biome. They’re open to the public 10 a.m.–noon, and no one is required to bring their own seeds for exchange — there’s plenty for the taking Rodriguez said.
Programs Director Florentina Rodriguez looks on as volunteer Al Schlueter and some young helpers plant potatoes on a recent Saturday morning. Schlueter aims to grow more than 10,000 pounds of produce this year to donate to local food pantries. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
“So many big seed contract growers and companies — mostly in the Pacific Northwest — tout things like frost resistance, but they don’t necessarily have drought resistance, heat tolerance, humidity tolerance — the kinds of climate struggles we have to deal with out here,” Rodriguez said. “Seed exchanges and swaps can really be a way to gain knowledge about your local ecology — they can be a way to reconnect with your land, your own personal stories.”
Faith Morgan gave a prime example and held aloft a particularly rotund butternut squash.
Morgan is a longtime Agraria volunteer, advisory board member and granddaughter of the late Arthur Morgan, who founded Agraria’s earliest iteration, the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions, in 1940. She was also director of Community Solutions for four years.
“This is Peggy’s butternut,” Morgan said of the squash she cradled.
She referred to Peg Champney, a beloved local resident who died in 2019. Champney was a lifelong gardener who, over the course of several decades, bred a squash to her liking — one that, after so many years of guided selection, would grow well in Yellow Springs (particularly The Vale, where she lived), be the right kind of sweetness she and her husband, Ken, preferred, and have the right structure to prevent early rotting.
Peggy’s butternut seeds are among the many dozens available for exchange or taking at Seed Saturdays.
“So, this is all about taking seeds, trying them and experimenting — citizen science,” Morgan said. “And we’re not just passing seeds out, but we’re teaching people how to grow them, too.”
Seed saving and exchanges are among Agraria’s top priorities for the moment. Here, Rodriguez shows off some of her favorites: Abstract stripes encase the seeds of old Anatolian, red-flesh watermelons. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
For now, that’s the prerogative of Agraria — seed saving and proliferation.
According to Bee, Rodriguez and Morgan — Agraria’s present intellectual “triumvirate,” as Bee refers to them — turning Agraria into the local repository for seeds is a sustainable approach to meeting current and future local agricultural needs. It’s a way to bring people to the farm, think about the locale and its attendant ecology more critically and, ultimately, commune with one another in an increasingly disjointed food system.
But Agraria’s not only growing crops for seed preservation — a more immediate need is being met, largely thanks to volunteer and villager Al Schlueter’s green thumbs. Last year, he grew 10,000 pounds worth of produce on Agraria property, the vast majority of which he donated to the Yellow Springs Food Pantry.
Schlueter said he has similar plans for this year. As of press time, he had long and impressive rows of garlic, potatoes and leafy greens in the ground — likely all going to a local hungry belly in the near future, he said.
“This kind of giving and sharing is in the spirit of Yellow Springs, I think,” Schlueter told the News. “People who go to the pantry deserve more than just boxed and canned food. People really like what I drop off. They come and give me a big hug sometimes.”
Though Agraria has only 12 tillable acres on its 128-acre property, according to the triumvirate, they’re keeping true to the longtime mission of Agraria to regenerate the farm’s soil — perhaps in the interest of future growth.
Last fall, Agraria hosted its first cattle drive, featuring the educational farm’s bovine neighbors from across Dayton-Yellow Springs Road. The cattle belong to Yellow Springs Provisions — a burgeoning 185-acre farm on the former Welch property — and the Coppock and DeLacey families. Agraria is partnering with those farmers to implement a rotational grazing program, thereby regenerating the natural quality of the soil below the farms. (Photo by Love’Yah Stewart, THKLUVLTR)
Recently, Agraria has partnered with the new farming enterprise across the road. On the north side of Dayton-Yellow Springs Road is Yellow Springs Provisions, a burgeoning farm that recently took charge of a 185-acre property and, on it, placed a conservation easement, rendering it agricultural in perpetuity.
As the News previously reported, the DeLacey and Coppock families bought the land at the end of 2025 with the intention of raising grass-fed, grass-finished cattle and other livestock and crops on the land.
“And we’re letting them rotationally graze on our land,” Rodriguez said. “By moving these cows around, having pasture-based ruminants on the land helps the soil in a lot of different ways, sequestering carbon and mimicking the natural soil that had been built here in the first place.”
“This is called flash grazing,” Bee said of the neighboring cows’ occasional presence on Agraria land. “It’s an important regenerative practice that harkens back to when bison and other animals roamed around in giant herds, eating, grazing, pooping, stamping on the poop and moving along.”
Presently, the rotational herd is up to 24, but that number is poised to go up: calving season is here. One was already born March 17.
“What a great partnership this is,” Bee said.
“Doing anything alone by ourselves is not the way to go,” Rodriguez said. “We just don’t have the bandwidth. But we’d love to do more in partnership with others. Maybe someone wants to grow something they hadn’t before. Maybe someone wants to start a seed collective. We have the space and, in some cases, the resources.”
She continued: “Local partnerships spread out the risk and multiply the rewards. Stop by some day and see what we’re doing.”
To learn more about Agraria’s upcoming programs and volunteer opportunities, see the News’ “At Agraria” column or visit the nonprofit’s website at http://www.agrariacenter.org
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