‘It’s unfathomable all of the answers we could have to these questions, because there are just so many answers and that’s just brilliant. You look up at the stars in the sky and there’s a million answers and a million questions to what you see. The main answer to me is always just, this is amazing, just look at this, we don’t need any answers we just need to allow ourselves to feel this amazement.’ Crystine, Uprising Seeds
The Context
Seeds and humans have co-evolved since the beginning of our existence – there is a deep history of relationship where we worked in collaboration with plants, selecting the tastiest and most productive from wild populations to bring into cultivation, forming a reciprocal relationship that allowed both plants and humans to thrive. But somewhere along the way we’ve forgotten that. And the impact of which we’re only now fully realising. Seed is at the heart of our food system, but it is the thing that is most often least considered, or taken for granted.
As farmer led seed stewardship has dwindled in the UK, importation has increased, and we currently import around 80% of our seed. Although not practical to grow all seed crops here, we can be doing significantly more. The fragility of this import system has been demonstrated both in the covid pandemic and with Brexit. Restrictions on importation of seed since leaving the EU has seriously impacted variety availability for small scale farmers. What happens when the seeds we order each winter don’t arrive in the post?
As well as importing much of our seed, due to the industrialisation of agriculture, most investment in plant breeding over recent decades has been in producing F1 Hybrids rather than Open Pollinated varieties suitable for organic systems. Hybrids are important: hybridisation is the foundation of plant breeding, and they can offer reliability and uniformity for growers. The problem is they also contribute to the commodification of seed. F1 Hybrids are only genetically stable for one generation. Which means if you want to continue growing that variety, you need to return to the breeder or seed company to repurchase that seed each year. We’ve got ourselves into a situation where seed has become a commodity, the control of these seeds in the hands of just a few corporations, and farmers and growers have a serious lack of power and agency when it comes to seed and the choice of varieties they grow.
We are not only becoming limited in inter-varietal diversity, but due to strict plant variety legislation we are also restricted in intra-varietal diversity. Most new varieties, before they can be sold at any scale in the UK, must be registered on the government National Varieties List, and to get onto the list the seed must be proven to be Distinct Uniform and Stable. This means the variety must be novel in some way, plants must have no phenotypic or genotypic variation, and the variety must not evolve or change when propagated. This is obviously of benefit for farmers who need uniformity and consistency in their crops, but it is aimed at large scale agriculture where only significant volumes of seed are likely to be traded. These restrictions leave little room for diversity in the market, or for opportunities for farmer-led plant breeding.
There is also an element of complacency in assuming these static varieties we rely upon will always perform well - our climate is rapidly becoming more unpredictable. By forcing genetic uniformity in all our crops, where is the plasticity, the ability to adapt and respond to the demands of the environment? Then there is the threat of genetic modification, the unknown implications this might have on food security...
All of this has been contributing to a growing sense of urgency and a need for decisive change in this sector. Working for the Seed Sovereignty Programme, and as a commercial veg and seed grower, I was becoming increasingly aware of the limitations of the current system, and I felt empowered to take action.
The intention of my Churchill Fellowship was to visit the thriving seed network of the Pacific Northwest of the US and Canada to explore how an alternative structure: a farmer-led, collaborative and less restricted approach to seed production can facilitate the creation of a more resilient and diverse seed system. I wanted to really unpick what is needed to build a thriving and abundant seed network, and understand what it would take to achieve something similar here in the UK.
I immersed myself in a network of farmers who were very much embracing the radical possibilities of seed, and demonstrating what could be possible if we step outside of the constraints of our current system. Reflecting on my experiences, the essence for building a movement for change here in the UK seems rooted in several key themes: abundance, intentional stewardship, collaboration and freedom.
Abundance
Plants are inherently abundant, often providing us with far more seed than we can ever need. A plant, if allowed, will set seed with many hundreds if not thousands of seed to ensure to continuation of its genetics. Anyone who has ever allowed a brassica crop go to seed will know that you end up with far more seed than you could ever need. They just want to give. The very nature of seed saving encourages you to share, it’s hard to be selfish when you’re a seed saver. In that way, seeds have the power to build community, they are asking to be shared and swapped and traded.
I spent 4 months travelling around the Pacific Northwest and I still couldn’t meet or visit with all of the seed folks I wanted to – indicating the sheer number of people in the seed network there. What I encountered was an abundance of people stewarding or connected to seed, and it clearly demonstrated that we have capacity for many more people doing similar work here in the UK. With more of us seed saving, we can actively challenge the current system of commodity, creating a movement for real systems change.
As plant breeder Carol Deppe proclaimed when I met her in Corvallis, ‘You breed your own values right into the variety’. Every individual brings a bit of their personality to the selection process, each person will be breeding plants just a little bit different to everyone else. I visited many seed companies on my Fellowship, and like the plants they nurture, these producers were able to coexist in relative proximity to each other because they have found their niche, because they all bring something unique to their stewardship. Like a balanced ecosystem, there was no obvious competition amongst the stakeholders.
Witnessing the abundance of seed stewards led me to reflect on what could be possible here in the UK and Ireland. We have a handful of amazing organic seed producers, but not nearly enough. Where is locally resilient seed going to come from, if it’s not coming from us? We need more people to be stewarding and guiding our food crops, all with different priorities and preferences but all working towards a similar goal of growing local quality organic seed. The more people there are doing this important work, the more diversity seems to thrive.
Intentional Stewardship
It is possible to identify all of the logical reasons why we should be saving seed, but all of that is irrelevant unless there’s a connection at a deeper level. We can breed and save seed from all the new novel varieties we want, but unless they really mean something to people and have stories that can be shared, will they persist? Seed needs to be grown with purpose and intent beyond just making money. Among many of the people I visited on my Fellowship, there was the presence of a meaningful relationship between the steward and the seed, and often the wider community. There existed a tangible connection to these varieties. Whether that be for culinary purpose, like the the varieties grown by Uprising Seeds, or the ancestral wisdom carried in the varieties stewarded by Bonnetta from Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance. There was a reason to be growing every seed in their catalogue, and a story behind every variety.
If we are to restore seed sovereignty here in the UK, I feel we need to step outside of the current models of commodity and scarcity, and grow crops that have a purpose, weaving these varieties back into our lives and our culture. When people ask me what seed to save, I always recommend to save something they love, because there needs to be intention and purpose behind the action to give it longevity. Our seeds need to be close to our hearts, they need to be deeply entangled with our communities and with very specific places and environments - they need to be part of the family.
Community & Collaboration
The dominant narrative in our modern world is that humans can exist in isolation, but everything lives in relationship to everything else, and we are no exception. Modern agriculture isolates and creates otherness, this is all causing deep harm. Throughout my Fellowship, I was exposed to a rich community that had embraced the power of collaboration. From specific varieties that seemed to be grown by everyone from Oregon all the way up to Vancouver Island, to the generosity I experienced throughout my travels, to the final couple of days participating in the Culinary Breeding Network Variety Showcase – there was an underlying sense of cooperation rather than competition within the network.
Amongst everyone I visited there was a humbling openness– a genuine interest in each other’s work and a willingness to share and collaborate. This openness fostered a nurturing and exciting energy. With support from organisations such as the Organic Seed Alliance, the Bauta Family Initiative and the Culinary Breeding Network, there was also a sense of belonging and cooperation within the wider food community. It may seem radical in our capitalist society, but through supporting each other in their shared interests and providing transparency and freedom of choice to consumers, this seed network is providing a very viable alternative to the industrial seed system.
Collaborative ways of working can be harnessed in many ways to incite change – and one of the most exciting methods I encountered on my Fellowship were the many participatory breeding projects: alternative ways of working that are centred in the notion of collaboration. The antithesis of modern plant breeding, these participatory projects are farmer led and non-proprietary. They create opportunity for direct feedback from a diversity of stake holders, from breeders to farmers to consumers, and therefore produce varieties that are fundamentally relevant: like the much-needed varieties of open pollinated broccoli that sprung from Jim Myers work at OSU. This way of working harnesses the power of collaboration, shares the risks and speeds the plant breeding process up. These projects are empowering for everyone involved: they bring people together with a common purpose, diminishing any sense of complacency by inspiring action and innovation.
If we can’t access the crop varieties we need, we need to make noise about it, tell our local MPs, but also feel empowered to take action ourselves. With more participatory projects like this in the UK, we could really begin to take control back of our seed system, maintaining and developing varieties that have purpose and are relevant to us.
Freedom
Working in this way is movement building, and it also requires a large degree of freedom. Freedom and autonomy to experiment, to react and to adapt.
Our current UK seed legislation seems prohibitively restrictive. My experience amongst the seed growers in the Pacific Northwest demonstrated to me the power that can found in having more freedom, and in ‘breaking the rules’. Encouraging on-farm stewardship and having more heterogeneity in crops equips both farmers and plants with the tools to cope, in real time, with the challenges of a changing climate. Hank from Avoca Seeds demonstrated this in his Dazzling Blue kale – by allowing for broader genetic diversity when breeding this variety, some of the population survived the extreme ice storms of last winter and the crop was not lost: ‘overall resilience can only come from diversity’. As our ecosystem changes and evolves around us, so too must we let our plant kin change and adapt. By bottlenecking genetics in modern plant breeding practices, in Hank’s words we are simply ‘breeding for something that humans can think of’ and not letting plants reach their full potential.
We’re so used to seeing row upon row of identical plants, vast fields of monocultures, there is something fundamentally joyful about working with heterogenous crops and the playfulness and delight they insight. This freedom inspires breeding projects like Frank Morton’s lettuce mixes, or Adaptive Seed’s Open Oak Party Mix corn – which are then shared and embraced by others who can take that population in a new direction. Diversity breeds diversity, the benefits of which could be exponential.
Having witnessed the advantages of this freedom, it feels imperative we start to challenge the current status quo here in the UK and explore all of our options in producing resilient crops of the future. I’m not dismissing the cultural and historical importance of well-loved heirloom varieties, nor do I want to dismiss the value of resilient OP and F1 hybrids when bred in a non-commodified system. They are an important part of this story and the future. But if we become more open to diversity within each crop, to these adaptive populations, we open ourselves up to a vast genetic pool to dip into in this time of instability. What if we let go of the idea of purity, challenge current legislation and adopt a more open approach to genetics and stewardship?
I acknowledge that I only had a brief glimpse into the seed network in the Pacific Northwest, and that they are facing their own unique set of challenges. But my time amongst this established network has given me so much inspiration and most importantly, hope. As I have observed on my travels, so much more could be possible. This is healing work. We could dwell on all that is not working, or we could decide to act, to be part of a movement for change. Together, we could take a step into the liminal space and begin a new way of being, where we embrace the radical possibilities of seed.