Fruition Seeds Stops Selling, Plans to Give Away Its Seed Instead

August 27th, 2024

   The upstate New York seed company, Fruition Seeds, is taking a rather radical step for any business.

Petra Page-Mann in one of the flower beds at Fruition Seeds near Naples, N.Y.

   As of today, the producer of organic, Northeast-adapted vegetable, herb, and flower seed is shutting down its online seed sales and moving to what co-owner Petra Page-Mann terms a “gift culture.”

   From now on, Fruition will give away – not sell – the seeds produced on its 20-acre farm near Naples, in New York’s Finger Lakes region. It won’t sell or ship anything else, for that matter.

   Page-Mann and co-owner Matthew Goldfarb are laying off the company’s other 10 employees by later this fall and depending on volunteer help and donations to sustain Fruition’s operation.

   Gardeners will be able to obtain free Fruition-grown seeds in one of two ways.

   One is by visiting the farm directly, primarily on days when Page-Mann and Goldfarb schedule events. Those events will be publicized on the Fruition website, which is continuing without the shopping-cart feature.

   The other give-away avenue is from a series of on-the-road events that Fruition hopes to establish – an extension of the company’s past participation in seed libraries and seed swaps.

   Page-Mann and Goldfarb also plan to give away fruit and nuts from the more than 100 trees planted on the farm.

    “We can no longer commodify our beloved kin – these seeds – or ourselves,” wrote Page-Mann in announcing the move. “The call is simple. Seeds are gifts. Gifts are shared, not sold, not hoarded, or otherwise contained by control.”

   So after 12 years of conventional business in which the company reached an annual budget of more than $1 million, Fruition plans to subsist on trust and faith.

   “A few folks have asked if we have wealthy benefactors or other sources of independent wealth,” Page-Mann says. “Thank you for your curiosity, and the answer is no. Rather than entrusting ourselves to ‘deep pockets,’ we are cutting the bottom out of our pockets, trusting the generosity of the seeds, soil, and our wide community to truly practice receiving and giving very differently than our culture says is possible.”

   Fruition’s website now includes a sort of wish-list budget for 2025 that outlines the needs for how to keep the farm – and Page-Mann and Goldfarb – afloat without sales dollars coming in.

   The $105,200 annual budget, which the couple trusts will be met by no-strings-attached giving, includes $22,500 for seed production and farm costs, $10,200 for utilities, $10,800 for rent, and a stipend of $15,000 each for Page-Mann and Goldfarb.

   “Market economies demand immediate, direct compensation,” Page-Mann wrote in her announcement. “This is how, in large part, Fruition has stayed ‘in business.’ As we re-imagine gift culture together, we are curious as well as committed to trusting you, our beloved community, to truly receive as well as give.”

   Although Fruition operated in a conventional sense at least superficially, Page-Mann and Goldfarb are far from traditional capitalists.

   That was apparent several years ago when Lowee’s Group Tours and I ran a tour to Fruition on the way to Garden Walk Buffalo.

   In listening to Page-Mann that day, Fruition was obviously more of a mission or calling to her than a business.

   If you’ve ever watched one of the many videos Page-Mann has done on Fruition’s website, you’ll quickly notice she refers to people as “friends” and never as “customers.”

   And in her website explanation of the shift from sales to gifting, she emphasizes lofty principles such as “leaning into trusting abundance” over the tradeoff practical downsides such as 10 people losing jobs, affiliated seed-growers and product manufacturers losing a sales source, and gardeners outside of the Finger Lakes region losing a seed source they liked. (The full details are in a “Fruition’s End and New Beginnings” post on the Fruition website.)

   If you’re now in the market for an alternate online seed company, I like these five: Pinetree Garden Seeds, Jung Seed, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Renee’s Garden Seeds, and Johnny’s Selected Seeds.

   Also check out my list of Top 10 Seed Catalogs in the George’s Handy Lists section of this website.

   And good luck to the Fruition gifters. It’ll be interesting to see how this unfolds.