Interview With Bill McDorman

[Noah Evans]: I am noah evans here with bill mcdormand to talk about seed saving and his experience with that?

[Bill McDorman]: Let me tell you a story it's really one of the more profound stories of things that have happened to me. I got a chance to go up to Hopi to second mesa and meet and spend some time it was actually a day with Lee Kawanasani he was director of Hopi cultural center so if you want to go to Hopi and you want to make a recording or a movie or interact with them an official way you have to get permission and you would get it from Lee in his office and so we applied for permission because a friend of mine was filming a movie called seed: the untold story and there's a point where i'm sitting in his house just across from him on his couch when we're filming that and i'm asking Lee about you know his corn and whatever and we've just come in from his field what you don't see is what I was asking him so i'm the director at native seed search at the time and i'm trying to figure out how they grow corn at 5,500 feet at second mesa in an area where like salt bush which is like this weedy bush doesn't even 00:01:00get two feet tall and yet as you saw in the film his corn is three to four to five feet tall and he's getting big blue ears of corn on it. So as a grower i'm going god how do you do this Lee what do you use him for fertilizer and he looked up at me and said well we don't fertilize and I go okay what kind of compost or what are you using he goes oh we don't use any compost here he said well you know once a year hopefully and sometimes it's every two or three years we get a flood and the flood comes out of the Arroyo right over there he pointed and these Hopi fields were placed such that when there was a flood it would come out of the Arroyo and come and flood his field and so it got covered with fresh minerals it's kind of like the Nile and so I thought okay okay that's where he's getting new minerals that makes sense to me a little bit and they were really smart to figure that out but you can't grow corn every year in a place like that 00:02:00and he goes oh no he said this is my grandfather's field i've been in this field every year for 60 years and there's been corn in this field every year and he said we actually Bill we think this goes back a thousand years in this field growing corn every year and i'm going whoa whoa whoa this doesn't make sense you know how do you do this? Well you guys are obviously then irrigating and weeding this thing he goes oh no we don't irrigate and we don't weed we actually he said I have to come out here in May and plant the seeds a foot deep some years push them a foot deep down in the soil because that's where the only moisture is we've had a dry winter and and so well I'll push that there their seeds have been selected over the years that they work at this and it grows up to a foot of soil forms two leaves and then just stops growing and then when the monsoon rains come it grows really really quickly and you get the corn that you saw in the movie it's just this astounding system you know and so i'm going okay. I, I 00:03:00don't know how to do this. Everything i've been taught you know as far as learning and growing about agriculture I this is beyond I could not get this to work so it must be the seeds so you guys must be selecting these seeds so when you bring your corn in Lee and you're getting ready to save some to plant the next year what do you do what are you selecting for you look for big ears, the early ones? What are you doing? He goes oh no we don't select and that's in in the movie he literally reaches down and picks up this little deformed cob you know with two kernels on it goes no these are our children we bring everything in and so i'm going I don't know how to do this I think that was the most profound moment for me in this whole thing it's like I just witnessed magic there's something going on here I don't understand and I'm going to try to find out for the rest of my life i'm going to i'm going to grow corn and I'm going to start with some of their varieties and i'm going to try to figure this out so 00:04:00one of the mysteries maybe is that it turns out that Hopi corn and this is dr Walter Goldstein of the Mandan institute is actually fixing nitrogen that somehow it's learned to evolve over a long period of time a symbiotic relationship with the microbiota in the is what I call it in the soil so that it can actually fix nitrous in and Dr Goldstein would say that would explain how Hopi corn can get so green without any other nitrogen in the summer in the sandy soil that's never been fertilized the corn actually had this trade a long time ago and the Hopi have just kept this alive so, I, you know when I say I don't know how to do this i'm not sure that there won't be a scientific explanation someday I just don't know how to have one now I don't know how to duplicate what's going on so the key moment of my whole adventure especially with the native americans is that we need to be more humble in our industrial agriculture we need to listen and look more about what's going on because obviously 00:05:00somebody's figured something out that we don't know how to do and as we look at the horizon where we will have less water and we may have less access to nitrogen especially as fossil fuels are pinched and we know we're going to run out of phosphorus how are we going to do this you know and we he actually looked at me when we were talking about these big picture things a little bit he goes bill you guys are just too worried about all this he said this is the Hopi prophecy you guys are going to build up this system and it's going to collapse completely it's been written down in Hopi for a thousand years and when it does you're going to starve and you're going to come to us and we're going to give you the corn and you're going to be okay. He said that so why are you so worried and in that story I think there's more than that he was giving me part of that the idea of how to do this and so when I just have finished the story when I was 00:06:00sitting on the couch across from them and they're filming that movie and I had a little bit of time Taggart Siegel who was the producer of the film we didn't have his cameraman there that day so he had to do the filming so I became sort of the warm-up guy you know he handed be this whole list of questions to ask Lee on camera but he said so warm him up ask some questions just make stuff up I need you know to roll film and get everything set so i'm sitting there trying to think here I am in front of this guy who's just blown me away you know I have no idea really how to do what he's doing I have so much reverence for what they're doing it's just so beautiful so I looked at him and I and all I could think of was Lee what is Hopi what does that mean and he looked at me he goes you know that's a good question he said because we never call ourselves Hopi he said Hopi is a philosophy it's a way of living it's a way of being in the world and he went on to talk about it a bit and I won't i'm not sure I could even tell you 00:07:00what he said now but it had to do with humility and listening and service and all those all I could think of when he was saying it is that wow this is like the best of the Christian ideals or the best of the Dao or the best of Buddhism you know it was a high spiritual teaching and he said so when we are Hopi, we, we, we call ourselves Hopi people because we deserve it we're acting that way and then he said something that'll change my life that really put me on the path i'm on. He said we learn how to be Hopi by growing the corn that is our spiritual path and so that's it I never equated gardening with identity let alone deep identity let alone with spiritual growth that way I mean that's pretty amazing for me so that's what i'm doing. I, I went home after that and I 00:08:00said i'm gonna grow corn and try to be Hopi

[Noah Evans]: yeah

[Bill McDorman]: I know what to do now it was really it was really a turning point for m so yeah and I think that philosophy goes through the rocky mountain sea lions just to get back to you as we all grow we're all on our own path and if we're not as efficient at fundraising if we don't have updates to our webpage when we should if we're not as you know if we don't have an office building with artificial lights and everybody operating the way a modern non-profit should well that's why. We think that we're now working on something way more important which is trusting that this whole network of people throughout the Rocky Mountain west can wake up and learn to be Hopi again and have the seeds to do it so.

[Noah Evans]: Do you have any specific or general advice for young people or college kids who are wanting to help out in this seed saving effort?