http://www.ancientcerealgrains.org/

Kusa Seeds Ancient Cereal Grains

Our Mission Statement

The purpose of The Kusa Seed Society is to increase humanity’s knowledge and understanding of a very ancient relationship the relationship connecting humanity with the edible seedcrops.

The precious edible seeds of the earth the cereal grains, grain-legumes, oilseeds and other precious edible seeds have a history of small-scale cultivation and utilization which dates back more than 10,000 years.

The purpose of The Kusa Seed Society is to educate about this relationship connecting humanity and the seeds, with a modern voice.

Our Motto
Practical Work With Seedcrops Research Work on ‘Sacred Grasses’
“Work for the Future, Being Done Today”

The purpose of The Kusa Seed Research Foundation and The Kusa Seed Society (established 1980) is: to be a voice for the precious edible seeds of the earth.

The Kusa Seed Research Foundation is a not-for-profit scientific and educational organization chartered under United States tax laws as a 501(c)(3) public charity. The Kusa Seed Society, managed and operated by the Foundation, is the interactive, public face of the seedwork.

The task of The Kusa Seed Society is to make available for immediate distribution, benefits having to do with humanity’s ancient relationship with the seeds.

The task of The Kusa Seed Research Foundation is to carry-out the managerial and administrative aspects of the seedwork, and to be a “think tank,” developing educational services in the topical area of human nutrition and grains. The Foundation concerns itself with seedstock regeneration and conservation, publishing for public consumption, and long-range planning and development, working to insure the future of the seedwork, in order that a steady flow of distributed public benefits may be maintained.

The Kusa Seed organization has operated continuously since 1980, regenerating rare seed, carrying-on public education work in the form of public lectures and color-slide presentations, and distributing seed and literature in accord with its mission. Lectures and color-slide presentations have been delivered to audiences numbering in the hundreds, and thousands of packets of rare seeds have been distributed to the public.

To serve its assignment, The Kusa Seed organization has pursued research studies exploring ancient cultures, traditional farming practices, and the folklife, folkways, and rural cuisine of edible seedcrops worldwide. The Kusa Seed organization strives to be a resource of expertise on the role and function of cereal grains as culture and cuisine elements. In the view of the Kusa Seed organization, the seeds and grains of its mission are among the earth’s most valuable heirlooms and their preservation is of primal significance. The Kusa Seed organization’s research studies have employed scholarly investigatory techniques to explore the food-arts and nutritional merits associated with humanity’s ancient cereal-grains, grain-legumes, and other edible seedcrops. Study intensives have included the topics of modern nutritional values and traditional healing and medicinal principles associated with the edible seedcrops, and the ecological farming methods for producing the crops.

About The Word “Kusa”

The word “kusa” is a word from the ancient Sanskrit language. In the fullness of time, the word came to be used in India as a name for a storied, ceremonial sacred grass: the kusa grass. Behind the legendary kusa grass lies one of humanity’s great myths. The legend of a “sacred grass” rises out of the mists of time at the beginning of history in the ancient East.

Just as a human mother nourishes her offspring, humanity at the beginning of history perceived a “great vegetal mother” whose green plants made human life possible through nourishment.

Humanity’s ancient legend of a special “sacred grass” (the kusa grass), pays tribute at its root to this concept of a great vegetal mother whose botanic bounty sustains all life on earth.

The cereal grains are humanity’s most important, renewable, human food resource. As such, they have rightly been called “culture elements” (pillars of civilization). Because of their life-or-death importance, the cereal grasses have been from time immemorial respected as “sacred grasses” by many peoples around the world.

Because its purpose is to reawaken and foster a modern appreciation of the precious value of the ancient, biodiverse edible seedcrops, at the time of this organization’s founding, the ancient Sanskrit word kusa was employed to form the organization’s name. This christening was made as a gesture of botanical respect focused on the grain-producing cereal grasses of the earth.

About Our Philosophy and Approach

The Kusa Seed organization’s concerns include the question of seed ownership. As others have pointed out, for 10,000 years the owner has been the one who grew the seed. Humanity’s industrial revolution has produced an agriculture which seeks a reversal of that ancient paradigm.

Industrial-strength agriculture minimizes the different kinds of seeds and the total number of farmers. Local seeds disappear, replaced by highly-fixed, genetically uniform varieties. Sterile hybrids, genetically-modified-organisms and private intellectual property rights controlling the ownership of seed are some of the products of industrialized agriculture a social movement to commodify nature and reshape landscapes, diets and lives according to criteria, standards and laws which ignore and abuse the commonality of humanity and the common good.

As a new millennium opens, the word “holistic” is well-established in the English lexicon. Increasingly, members of the public worldwide, appreciate and ask for, access to the benefits which derive from approaching a given subject-matter in an all-inclusive manner. Such an approach strives to consider the unity of all the dependent elements of a topic. The biodiversity of earth’s edible seedcrops is broad and wide. The plants hold numerous specialized traits for agroecologic performance (climates, soils) and the grains hold a vast array of traits for culinary, medicinal, and nutritional utilization. Over time, a vast corpus of folk-knowledge and folk-wisdom has been established by humanity as the lore of these crops. It is that corpus as well as the seeds themselves, which are the chosen focus of the Kusa Seed organization.

In the view of the Kusa Seed organization, great practical treasures reside in the depths of the folk-philosophy and folk-wisdom inextricably linked with the edible seedcrops. There are compelling modern reasons to study closely and to value the cerealian mini-farming and food traditions dating from the ancient past. There are practical reasons to explore the ancestry of these human food nutritional substances. The cereal crops produce grain which has deep harmonic resonance with humanity’s cellular biochemical nutritional structure. For nearly 30 years the Kusa Seed organization has maintained its operating policy to study and consider the edible-seedcrops from a “whole-crop” approach. In keeping with its mission, the organization has disseminated findings useful to utilizing the edible seedcrops as nutritious staple foods. In the view of the Kusa Seed organization, the techniques and arts of small-scale production of the edible seeds and grains including their post-production storage and safekeeping comprise a valuable body of human knowledge. In summary, the focus of the Kusa Seed organization is on edible seedcrops as human food nutritional substances in the context of small-scale processes. The Kusa Seed organization has intentionally specialized in seedcrops of folk-origin (non-hybridized folk-cereals) whose grain can be used as staple food and whose fruits can also be saved as seed. In the view of the Kusa Seed organization, these grains are the seeds for a healthy, sustainable, human future.

Our Seed and Literature Catalog

Join a collaborative network of people working to advance the knowledge and understanding of ancient cereal grains and other edible seedcrops for modern nutrition.

We offer you the “real thing”; planting-seeds for edible seedcrops. In the view of the Kusa Seed organization, the plants themselves are teachers. Enroll yourself in a “study course” at your own home! Simply invite one of our esteemed faculty members to come and grow at your place; you plant the seed and the “study course” will unfold before your eyes. Our faculty hail from the far corners of the earth’s storied mountains, valleys, and plains from Afghanistan; India; Iraq; Italy; Japan; Korea; Poland; Russia; Tibet and other places.

Join us!

To find out more about our faculty members and our course-literature, take a look at our Seed & Literature Catalog.

To download a .pdf document which you can print from Adobe Acrobat Reader, click on the following links: Seed and Literature Catalog | Order Form

Our Publication Project Needs Support

Reading materials providing information about seeds are probably the next most valuable thing after the seeds themselves. Print materials have the ability to travel far and wide with a certain amount of durability.

The Kusa Seed organization has at hand an opportunity to publish a one-of-a-kind handbook on the “lost art” of appreciating and utilizing the spirituality and beauty of grain. The manuscript is completed and ready for publication.

What grain amounts to spiritually, was deeply understood in the past. Today however, we have lost that understanding. The link between human spirituality and grain’s inner-beauty has become blocked from view in modern times. Consequently, the knowledge and understanding of the inner-beauty of grain has become something which is properly categorized today as a “lost art.”

So today, to understand to comprehend grain in a deep way to recover this beauty knowledge, it’s beneficial for us to visit the past to seek and consult teachings stored there. Visiting the past is not an onerous requirement, it’s simply a choice.

The Kusa Seed organization stands at the threshold of a grand opportunity to take a large step forward in fulfilling its public-benefit educational mission. The organization has at-hand a completed, three-volume Handbook detailing the “lost art” of appreciating and utilizing grain. The handbook is complete in manuscript form at the present time.

This literary-work, footnoted to the world literature-base, is the product of 35 years of painstaking scholarly research, discovery, and assembly. Written in everyday language for the general public, the three individual volumes are richly illustrated with photographs and line-drawings.

The first volume of the Handbook is a history of grains and humanity’s relationship thereto. Included is the history of porridge and also a crop-biography; the life-story of one of the cerealian founder-crops of agriculture. Volume One includes an explanation of the ancient myth of the sacred kusa grass, including material never brought to print before. Volume Two of the Handbook is a complete and detailed agronomic manual covering the small-scale production of edible seedcrops. Each step and every practical detail is explained and illustrated, from sowing to post-harvest storage. The manual features a complete ecological approach, completely free of the use of any synthetic input chemicals. Volume Three of the Handbook is an atlas mapping out the lost arts of delicious grain cuisine, a treasure trove of culinary recipes; cerealian cuisine completely free of meat, dairy, and sugar.

This publishing project requires financial sponsorship.

To take advantage of this one-of-a-kind Publication Sponsorship opportunity, contact the Kusa Seed organization’s executive director, Mr. Lorenz K. Schaller.

By Mail:

The Kusa Seed Research Foundation
Post Office Box 761
Ojai, California 93024 USA

By E-Mail:
info@ancientcerealgrains.org