Growth market

Bertie seed sellers support Indigenous culture with every kernel.

Frank “Fix” Cain and Beth Roach stand behind the counter of Bertie County Seeds in Colerain. (Photo by Daniel Pullen)

By Corinne Saunders

Edited by Matt Walker

Editor’s Note: A version of this article originally appeared in the spring issue (Issue 15.1) of Outer Banks Milepost, currently on newsstands; find a list of distribution points by clicking here: https://www.outerbanksmilepost.com/outposts/.

Dilapidated brick storefronts. Empty sidewalks. Quiet streets. Even at high noon, downtown Colerain can feel like a ghost town. But Bertie County Seeds is brimming with life. In the back, two ladies bustle between shelves, sorting colorful packets to mail nationwide. Out front, Beth Roach fires up the coffee machine while her partner, Frank “Fix” Cain, starts organizing a cart stacked with black bins and deep history.

“Some of these seeds are thousands of years old,” Cain says. He shuffles through manila and plastic envelopes scrawled with names like “Grandpa Bean” and “Teaching Drum.” “The fact that they are still here despite…hundreds of years of colonization and removal and intentional degradation and everything like that is powerful in itself.”

The couple is on a mission to reconnect Indigenous communities of North Carolina, Virginia and beyond with their ancestral seeds and cultural practices. A mission that sparked nine years ago when Roach and Cain first began dating.

Roach hails from Surry, Virginia, and is vice chair of the Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia’s Tribal Council; she also works as the national water conservation campaign manager for the Sierra Club. Cain is a Tuscarora “seedkeeper” whose passion for preserving and promoting Indigenous ways blossomed from childhood memories of helping his great-aunts grow things near the Neuse River, “planting and harvesting corn and these interesting beans that you just don’t see anywhere else.”

In 2018, they co-founded the Alliance of Native Seedkeepers to help preserve endangered ancestral seeds and connect coastal tribes to their agricultural roots. Pretty soon, they realized they could fund their cause by selling organic, heirloom and already-commercialized seeds to the wider public, while promoting sharing Indigenous history and using practices that put the planet over process. Things like eco-friendly packing and promoting environmental awareness.

“Some of these seeds are thousands of years old.”

— Frank “Fix” Cain

“How do we help people understand their connection to our seeds and our agriculture, then, also, these current threats that are impacting our rivers and our lands?” muses Roach. She established the Tribal Coastal Resilience Connections Program, which brings together tribal communities to address climate challenges and is now part of the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership.

In 2020, they began working a microfarm on the Cashie River—close to Cain’s Eastern NC roots and a short drive to Roach’s beloved Outer Banks beaches—after launching a small website at the end of 2019, with plans to slowly grow the business.

Then COVID-19 happened.

“All of a sudden, we just saw a huge influx of orders,” Cain recalls. “We went from a few hundred followers on social media to tens of thousands of followers in, like, probably a week or two.”

Today, Bertie County Seeds ships up to 606 different varieties of organic heirloom and hard-to-find seeds to homes and small growers around country.

But the focus remains on preserving ancestral seeds that aren’t for sale. Seeds they only offer to Indigenous groups and farms—and as a result, receive rare seed donations in return.

“We get things in the mail from people that are excited about [our work],” Cain says. “They know that we are a repository for these stories.”

As a result, they now warehouse 5,000 to 6,000 types of ancestral seeds.

But even when they can’t sell the actual seeds, they gladly share their stories, from crops that once helped tribes predict rainy seasons or dry seasons, to seeds that map tribes’ long-term movements.

“You can trace the migration of our people through corn seeds,” Cain says. “That lines up with our oral histories through seed traits that you find.”

There are also tales of hardy vegetables such as Tuscora white flour corn—“a really beautiful, long, skinny corn that’s been from North Carolina for over 4,000 years”—and legumes that come with troubled histories, such as the “Seneca cornstalk bean,” which is often sold commercially as the “Mayflower bean.”

Popular myth says these red-and-white speckled kernels came “across the pond” with the pilgrims. In truth, they’ve existed in traditional Indigenous agriculture and stories for centuries, long predating the colonization of North America, which is why Bertie County Seeds only sells them under their original name.

“It’s like regaining control over the narrative,” Cain says.

It’s not the only example. In fact, the website never misses an opportunity to share tribal history. The product page for “Cherokee Dr. Wyche’s Yellow Beefsteak Tomato” says it was “preserved by Dr. John Wyche” with “a remarkable legacy of Indigenous care,” while the “Cherokee Candy Roaster” squash is a “traditional variety maintained by Cherokee seedkeepers for generations.”  

At the same, all that Indigenous knowledge allows them to organize seeds around different climes, buyers and markets. Currently, they’re building an Outer Banks Collection that features wild, edible beans, a wild cabbage variety, yaupon holly and a specific variety of native ground cherries that Cain says “only grows along the dunes in North Carolina” and are “some of the most delicious ground cherries that I’ve ever had.”

“There’s like a whole Outer Banks collection that that nobody else has ever focused on,” Cain explains. “We are because we’ve had this ancestral connection to this area…that goes back thousands of years.”

At the same time, the couple stays focused on the future, with plans to one day publicly offer 1,200 varieties of flower, vegetable and herb seeds—nearly double the current stock.

That’s a lot of growth. So, last year, they purchased the Colerain storefront and stocked it with shelves and a six-figure sorting machine to keep online sales moving. Out front, the plan’s to sell packets to beachbound traffic—and maybe a few T-shirts. The grand opening is planned for March 21, but they’ve already been serving customers for months, especially on “Free Coffee Wednesdays.” That’s when a stream of “old-timers” come in to buy seeds — and go home with some kernels of wisdom they never considered.

“They tell us some of the most amazing stories of them growing up here and the growing that they do,” says Roach. “It gives us a huge opportunity to educate about the Indigenous history and culture here as well.”

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