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. Read More