Old-fashioned fun with a heapin’ helpin’ of purpose

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds’ Spring Planting Festival showcases Ozark Mountain hospitality, crafts, old-world germplasm and one of the country’s youngest, and most successful, seedsmen.

By Dan Sullivan

If you ever have to travel by car from Springfield to Ava in Missouri, you’d best be advised not to follow Mapquest. Especially in the dark. Unless you like roller coasters.

Ava is home to just about every fast-food restaurant under the Ozark Mountain sun and a Super 8 Motel that appears to be the accommodation of choice for farmers, gardeners, artisans and performers migrating from as far away as Australia to an annual garden show a few miles down the road in Mansfield. Well, not quite Mansfield. Bakersville.

You won’t find this Bakersville on in the Rand McNally Road Atlas, though. The Bakersville Pioneer Village—which favors the movie set of an old Western with its mercantile store, jail, apothecary and other such period accoutrements—is another idea sprung forth into the physical realm like an emerging seedling from the fertile imagination of Jeremiath “Jere” Gettle. Jere was home schooled, and obsessed with unusual varieties of vegetables and fruits since he could first turn the pages of colorful garden catalogs and point at and coo over the images. Just 27, Jere Gettle has built Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds into what is fast becoming one of the most successful seed businesses still in private hands.

While Gettle scours the planet seeking out, making commercially available and essentially preserving old-time, open-pollinated, GMO-free varieties of produce, herbs and flowers, most of the seed industry is going in the other direction. With the purchase of Seminis for $1 billion in 2005, St. Louis based Monsanto is now the largest seed company in the world. Hybrid varieties with broad-spectrum survivability have become favorites of the corporate seed business, with heirlooms varieties—many of them holding strong regional adaptability to fighting pests and diseases, and to particular climates—largely falling to the wayside.

But Jere Gettle, with his parents as his mentors, has always marched to his own particular drummer. Difficult to categorize and fiercely independent, Jim and Debbie Gettle met and married in Klamath Falls, Oregon, moving eastward first to eastern Oregon then to Idaho then to Montana and finally to Missouri in search of affordable farmland, friendly home-schooling laws, reasonable taxes and good people. Jere was 12 when the family arrived at their new Ozark Mountain home.

Jim and Debbie Gettle, middle and at right, listen as another Spring Planting Festival attendee shares a story. While they've enjoyed watching their son's success, they've built a home just over the nearby Gasconade River to also enjoy the quiet life that suits them best.

“I’ve pretty much always been a hardscrabble farmer,” Jim Gettle says from his perch on a hay bale near one of three performance stages, his own voice backdropped by gospel harmonies. “I tried some of the other stuff, but I couldn’t stand it.” Currently Jim Gettle grazes cattle on lush bottomland at the Lick Fork of the Gasconade River and watches with amazement and amusement as his son’s seed business grows and grows.

“We’ve always believed in making our kids go on their own,” the elder Gettle says. “We’ve seen too much given to kids…and it makes nothin’ out of ‘em.”

What Jere and his sibling—a sister now back in Montana raising a family 2 miles from any neighbor—were given was plenty of room to explore.

“When he was a little guy we gave him his own plot and let him plant what he wanted in it,” the elder Gettle says, recalling lemon squashes, yellow pear tomatoes and other visually appealing produce. “You don’t know what’s going on in a kid’s mind.”

Neighbor David Kaiser, who settled in the area just about the same time as the Gettles—and whose 21-year-old son Andrew now helps Jere run the seed business and manage festivals—offers some insight.

“I remember Jere asking me if I wanted to walk down and see his garden and I said ‘sure.’ This was before I knew he was a non-traditional kid, and I thought I was going to see a regular garden with red tomatoes and such, and here it is all full of all these different colors and shapes and tastes.”

Kaiser recalls Jere unfolding his intentions to save seeds, package them up and sell them through the mail in a catalog like the ones that had so enthralled him as a toddler.

“I’m thinking ‘well that might be a nice hobby,’ but I just didn’t see the business in it. Even down the line I’ve had these thoughts—and I didn’t want to throw cold water. But Jere proved me wrong and he proved a lot of other folks wrong.”

Bakersville

It’s Day One of the two-day Spring Planting Festival—the first of a pair of farming and gardening, handicraft and old-time music extravaganzas held at Baker Creek during the growing season—and I’ve made the mistake of getting a bit of a late start. This time Mapquest’s advice is reasonable, but I’m unprepared for the mile-long line of cars creeping at a snail’s pace just past where the pavement ends. About 45 minutes later I see what the holdup is: Southern hospitality. One of the 30 to 40 locals Jere Gettle employs during the busy season (December to April) is stopping each individual car, extending a personal and deliberate greeting and offering parking instructions. Sometimes a conversation ensues. It’s “hillbilly time,” and these gentle and friendly folk pride themselves on not being in a hurry.

Jere, Sasha and Emilee Gettle take a breather toward the end of Day 1 of the Spring Planting Festival, which in 2008 brought a record crowd of about 6,000 to Bakersville Pioneer Village.

Up the road a piece but closing the distance between us ambles the lithe frame of Gene Autry? Roy Rogers? No, that would be Jere Gettle, decked out in signature vintage Western wear, bright yellow (with brown accents) from head to toe. With 6,000 attendees on the first day, this is the biggest festival to date, and Jere offers his greeter some advice on managing the influx of traffic.

Bakersville consists of Jim and Debbie Gettle’s original home—with some modest improvements—the seed store Jere was encouraged to build when his business began to take over the house, a mercantile (where one can purchase some spiffy duds to go along with the pioneer theme, among an assortment of other curious items) an adjacent and well-stocked apothecary, a beautiful post-and-beam barn adorned with an impressive collection of antique tools, performance stages and other various outbuildings, each harkening back to an era when heirlooms ruled the world.

From the colorful, quirky characters—both guests and hosts—wandering around the place to the graffiti-like artwork and humorous signage in the bathrooms, the whole place is a swirling amalgam of 21st century avant-garde entrepreneur meets Old Wild West.

It’s no coincidence that Branson and the Silver Dollar City amusement park are so close by and share a little bit of that Ozark Mountain kitsch (on this particular day, Jere is even employing a handful of Silver Dollar City entertainers to help work the crowd—one of them doing double duty hawking his farm products). But Bakersville has something more to offer that is not all glitter and gold.

Business is booming here at a time when the world is seeing an unprecedented renaissance in local and organic agriculture, and waking up to the fact that real food security just might begin in one’s own back yard.

“People are getting tired of all that plastic and tin and they want to go back to where there’s some meaning in life, at least I think so,” Jim Gettle offers, surveying the festival frenzy around him. “And that’s what you’re seeing here.”

Ma & Pa Gettle

Jere and Emilee Gettle’s paths first crossed a few years back when, as part of her parents’ ministry outreach, Emilee interviewed Jere for an online story she was writing about home-schooling families starting their own businesses. The couple and the two families discovered they held much in common so began spending time together, and Jere and Emilee eventually tied the knot. On May 5, 2008, their 7-month-old daughter, Sasha, got her first wide-eyed glimpse of Bakersville at full tilt.

And while Jim and Debbie Gettle have watched the festivals take off like forgotten zucchini over the years, they are still sort of shaking their heads.

“We’re quiet people,” Jere’s mother explains in a whisper screaming with irony as she surveys the menagerie of activity swirling around her. (Jere’s parents recently gave over their original homestead to the young couple, building a home out of recycled lumber across the river, where the pace is a little more to their temperament.)

"He’d wake me up at four in the morning to haul him to Springfield to the small-animal swap meet,” Jim Gettle recalls of son Jere's first foray into commerce. “He got to be quite...I don’t know what you'd call it...He would get in there with the old boys and wrangle.” While Jere has been a vegetarian for nearly 15 years and now only deals in seeds (and a few sidelines related to educating the public), he's still as successful a salesman as ever. The painted wooden sign above represents one of his earliest attempts at advertising.

The first Baker Creek Heirloom Seed catalog went to press in 1998 featuring 70 varieties. Now, with Debbie Gettle’s colorful renderings still gracing the covers, more than 1,200 varieties are offered to about 90,000 catalog subscribers, online customers and anyone who visits the store.

“It’s definitely kept us busy and seems to be growing every year,” Jere Gettle says by phone a few days after the spring festival. “This year kind of surprised us, the growth and the level of interest. We never know quite what to expect.

“The first year or two was kind of the biggest surprise, that people would come out here,” the man in yellow recalls of the daylong midsummer festival that drew about 400 visitors in 2000. “The next year we decided to have a spring festival. We had about 700 people, and from there they just started growing.”

And this is far from suburbia. The boonies, you might say. So what’s the big attraction?

More natural, more local, more gardens

“I think that in the past few years people have become more and more interested in natural foods, getting back into gardening and organic and local food and all that,” Jere Gettle offers, becoming quite modest when asked to reflect on his business’s positive impact on the local and greater farming and gardening community.

"I imagine it does in different ways. It brings a lot of people into the area and into the restaurants and hotels…We’re trying to get people to grow more of their own food, that’s our main focus. We get kids coming here who hardly know what a rooster is anymore, or a turkey or a duck or a goat.”

Besides the two-day festivals held in May and in August, Bakersville hosts a First Sunday event, which, Jere explains just a few days after the spring festival wraps up, “is basically kind of a mini version of what we had this last week.”

The idea behind all of these events, he says, is not only to educate about and help preserve heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables, but to do the same for the old-time skills and arts and crafts of the region.

A few heirloom breeds of livestock were on display and available for purchase as picture-perfect weather graced the first of two festivals held each year at Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds near Mansfield, Missouri.

Besides employing a large number of people locally, Baker Creek sources its huge complement of seed mainly from smaller growers around the country. “Just basically people we’ve run across through the years,” Jere Gettle explains. “A lot of times it’s market gardeners who want to supplement their income, maybe a Mennonite farmer who’s wife has a small side business or a retired couple looking for a little extra income.”

With business growing as much as it has, Jere Gettle says his own 2-acre garden has been given over largely to trials over production. “I still raise some [seed] every year, but not too much. The first year in a couple-of-acre garden I could grow all my own seed.” He can’t quite manage that feat anymore, he says.

Clients are still largely home gardeners and smaller market gardeners farming part-time, he says, adding that some seed is made available in bulk on a case-by-case basis.

“We try to work with farmers as much as we can.” Gettle says. “Some of these farmers are wanting this seed so bad they are buying 100 or 200 individual packets because they want to be able to offer the varieties at their stands.”

Given his background, it’s no surprise that Jere Gettle remains wary of the federal Certified Organic program. He says he’s still considering the possibility of offering some certified-organic seed selections in the future but is leery of corporate influence over the organic label. For now he’s content with the fact that organic growers who want to carry his selections may do so if they are either: 1) small enough, or 2) can prove that they can’t find an existing certified-organic source for the varieties he carries, which is often the case.

“We don’t really have any rhyme or reason for what we decide to carry. If it sounds interesting, we’ll give it a try and see how it does. We’re collecting and preserving as much as we can each year and trying to get things out to people that they never tried before—maybe a melon from Mexico, something that’s neat and good but that nobody’s ever been able to try.

“We pretty much try to get anything that’s old and rare and unique,” says Jere Gettle as he—save for the age reference—perfectly describes himself.

Dan Sullivan is senior editor at the Rodale Institute.

May 9, 2008