Future Projects

Although there are other seed preservation organizations and companies that market open-pollinated seeds, very little effort is made at actually providing a historical information. We believe that communication and community are as important to seed preservation as the physical work of growing and banking seeds.

The following are "wish list" projects that your support will make possible:

  • Library - (Please also refer to "Catalog Scans" and "Library Donations") The "Library" is intended to be a physical space to house the collections of books, journals, company records and seed catalogs, as well as a virtual web space where the electronic forms of these materials can be accessed and referenced. This is to be the core function of this research Web site. Financial support would help to build the library facility and to procure and scan historically important horticultural documents. These document scans would then be made available.

  • [UPDATE 6/27/04] - The Futterman Collection - A *HUGE* donation of 31 boxes of books was made to the horticultural library by a lifelong collector and preservationist. Read more about it and learn how you can help get the information available for use by clicking here.

  • [UPDATE 03/18/08] - Although the library continues to grow, very little support outside of that from the Victory Seed Company has ever been realized. Progress is slow but continuing as resources are available.

  • [UPDATE 10/18/14] - The Rezelman Collection - We are honored to help the family preserve his agricultural library as well as his memory. Click here for a list of titles donated.

  • [UPDATE 6/28/17] - Very little progress has been accomplished. Donations of reference materials has all but stopped. With a decline in sales, the Victory Seed Company has not been able to subsidize any work beyond the scope of their core preservation mission. Roughly $60,000 is required to construct and furnish the library facility. Another $40,000 would be required to hire a temporary, part-time librarian to organize and catalog the collection and possibly begin coordinating the digitization effort.


  • Seed Industry History Project - Along with documenting individuals important to the field of agriculture and the seed industry, this project would begin the process of following the genealogies of companies and organizations.

  • [UPDATE 2/10/07] - This work, although a background task, has begun. Several old companies have been researched. Instead of waiting until complete and thorough histories and timelines are written, we have decided to post them as "works in progress" and update as information is made available. Click here for more information.


  • Cultivar Database Project - This project would work to create a series of databases documenting the history and lineages of cultivated plant varieties. A powerful tool to plant historians.


  • Seed Bank of Genetic Material - The Victory Horticultural Group, LLC has initiated this project and is actively working at collecting, documenting, and preserving seeds of edible plant varieties. It is hoped that this can eventually be maintained under this organization. Timing will be determined by the "Legal" project below.


  • Legal  - If you are a lawyer or accounting professional and would like to donate your time to help us through the process of becoming a non-profit, tax exempt organization, please contact us. This would allow up to apply for grants and be more appealing to donors. In this way, we believe that we could become a structured research organization with the ability to build a physical research library, seed bank, and compensating the necessary staff.


  • Private Web Server - This would allow us better control to customize needs and in the long run, be less expensive than a hosted web service. An internal Web server would allow us to serve up images (without incurring bandwidth overuse fees), databases, creating user forums, etc. It would also allow us the ability to add storage space and other system improvements as necessary.

To make this project more reliable and perhaps more efficient, it will require computer hardware such as a low-end pc with large capacity hard drives, tape drive, media, and backup software. If we all wanted this to be extremely reliable, a mirrored server and large uninterruptible power supplies with generator backup would be necessary.

  • [UPDATE 10/14/03] - Finally, after over a year of starts and stops, a server is online. It is tiny, dated, slow and somewhat limited, it is never the less, running!

  • [UPDATE 10/25/04] - As a result of a recent computer system upgrade / shuffle at the Victory Horticultural Group, a new (old) computer was donated to become the web server replacing the very old and dated server that we brought online last fall. It is not yet implemented as time has not been available.

  • [UPDATE 2/10/07] - The "new" server is now showing signs of age. It has been continuously powered up and operating for over five years. It sometimes "forgets" what it is doing and needs kick-started. Additionally, its hard drive storage capacity has been reached. New equipment will be acquired and installed as soon as resources (financial and human) are available.

  • [UPDATE 3/05/08] - The old server continued to limp along and was finally replaced with a server that has greater disk capacity, speed and memory. Additionally, operating system and other software upgrades were made.

  • [UPDATE 10/18/14] - The above is very out of date. The "new" server from 2008 died. Over the years, we did repair the old server, added a second DSL, and split the load between two servers. With the demise of the server and the cost to operate two high speed fiber internet connections, we decided to consolidate back onto one server, offloading some of the server traffic (mainly catalog file storage) to a hosted account off of the farm.


  • Internet Connection - This is a necessary part of the online library project and is being provided as part of the Victory Horticultural Group, LLC's network at no charge.

  • In about 2001, our local telephone service started offering a 6MB/384 kBps ADSL connection. We were one of the first customers to sign up and a beta tester for the service. To meet the demands placed upon the library's web server, we added a second DSL line of service in the mid-2000s, dedicated to the library. This was upgraded to a fiber optic high speed internet service in late 2012.

  • [UPDATE 10/18/14] - A dedicated server and internet connection is a costly configuration in both monthly expense plus management and hardware costs. Before all else, we have to be good stewards of our resources so that we can continue to perform our primary mission of seed variety preservation. Considering that we have been receiving little or no outside monetary backing for this project (please consider donating here) and that the economic times are greatly affecting cash flow, when the second server died this week, we had to make a difficult, but not very hard, decision to drop the dedicated line to the library's server.


  • Community Space - Along with providing a world-class information resource, we wish to create a means for connecting gardeners, researchers, organizations and others interested in the subject material. This can be accomplished through yet to be determined forum software.

  • [UPDATE 10/14/03] - One of the benefits of working in the Linux world is the environment of open license software. We were able to obtain and install (and learn) phpBB2. This is a forum software application that is full-featured and should serve the community well.

  • [UPDATE 9/1/06] - Due to a continual attack from spammers and a lack of human resources, we just could not keep up with the attention that the board required. It was turned off until we can upgrade our server and secondly research and implement a more secure and easier to manage board system.



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