Ira Wallace

The Path

Training at New College in Sarasota, Florida, preceded the co-founding of Twin Oaks cooperative farm in Virginia, a formative step that placed Ira Wallace’s work inside a cooperative model rather than an individual one. The throughline is practical: shared labor, collective purpose, and an attention to how food systems are sustained by people who work them together. The timeline since then is part of the craft record. Since 1993, Wallace has been founder of Acorn Community, and since 1999 she has been worker/owner of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. Those dates show duration, but they also point to a method: building institutions that can hold knowledge, seed stock, and relationships across seasons. Seed work asks for patience, and her career has been organized around that long view.

The Work Today

At Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Louisa County, Virginia, Ira Wallace works as a worker/owner with southeastern heirloom open-pollinated varieties. Her name is closely associated with collards, a crop that carries regional memory and practical resilience. That pairing makes sense on the ground: collards are food that travels through kitchens and communities because they are dependable, familiar, and rooted in everyday use. Acorn Community remains part of the same working life. Alongside the seed company, it keeps agriculture tied to belonging rather than treated as a separate category. Wallace’s practice does not split cultivation from community; it places them in the same frame. The early habit of gardening with her grandmother in Florida still reads as an active influence, not a nostalgic one, and it continues to shape how she approaches seed, stewardship, and shared work.

In Their Words “I sometimes think that in the last couple of years, I've gotten a number of awards for the same work I’ve been doing for the past 30-40 years to figure out how we can raise up the BIPOC communities.” “I really didn’t think gardening would be my life’s work when I went off to college.”

Acclaim

Recognition, in Wallace’s telling, is measured against decades of practice. "I sometimes think that in the last couple of years, I've gotten a number of awards for the same work I’ve been doing for the past 30-40 years to figure out how we can raise up the BIPOC communities." The point is not the awards themselves so much as the continuity they acknowledge: labor that predated the notice, and work that was already underway long before the spotlight arrived.