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For day three of Seed Week, Wales Coordinator Katie shares how seeds both rely on and inspire cooperation; tending not only to the depleted diversity of our soils, fields, and meals, but also to the widespread disconnection in our communities.
Seeds need people. People need seeds. In this interdependence, there is huge potential for a future of seed sovereignty.
Unlike wild plants, who work with wind and pollinating creatures to disperse their seeds, the primary conveyors of crop seeds are humans. We have co-evolved with crop plants. We have literally created them, selecting certain characteristics and saving their seeds year on year. Our food crop varieties exist because we made them so. And we exist because of them. They nourish us, they are the foundation of our food cultures, they shape the way we cook and the way we share food. We are beautifully inseparable.
It is no coincidence that culture declines alongside seed diversity decline. Seeds are culture: recipes, stories, livelihoods, harvests, rituals. And, as we live in an increasingly homogenised and globalised world, losing languages, local food systems, and bioregional food cultures, our seed diversity has mirrored this. As we are overwhelmed with profit-led practices for efficient, industrialised production of mass-marketable, uniform food: we have lost 75% of crop diversity in the last 100 years (UN FAO). Crop seeds are rapidly losing their primary dispersal method – communities of people – to share them and keep them alive.
Growing seeds to pass forward is a rare act of long-term thinking in our modern world of short-term planning. It can part the clouds for us to connect to a future we don’t often see – one of hope – in which we are passing precious genetics forward to build a more resilient future. Seeds need us to keep their genetic lineage going. But crucially, we need them to fix the pain of our declining local food relationships and regional cultures. Reviving seed diversity helps us to build a healthier food system in the present. When we create community seed libraries, networks of growers devoted to reviving old varieties, and cooperatives distributing locally adapted seeds, we are reweaving ourselves back into our food cultures.
In our work to build stronger seed sovereignty in the UK, we have experienced the power of seed stories, in particular, in bringing people together. The story of the lost black oat ignited a passion for heritage crops in hearts across the country. Tales of the history of peas conjured a renewed sense of belonging in Tyneside. A love story about the Llanover Pea, gifted by a prisoner of war as an act of love, spurred many to buy this Welsh grown pea from the Wales Seed Hub. It is interesting to ask ourselves the question; who is inspiring who? Are we driving seed preservation with our tales of their importance, or are the seeds themselves inspiring us to forge stronger connections?
One thing is clear, that a seed sovereign system is not one of individualisation, it is one of cooperation – human and more-than-human – a notion that underpins my upcoming Churchill Fellowship. Later this year, I’ll be travelling to Bhutan, Nepal and India to learn from the thriving ecosystem of agricultural cooperatives in those places, hoping to answer the question: how can cooperative models transform the UK seed system?
India has one of the largest cooperative networks in the world, with over 850,000 registered rural cooperatives. I’ll be visiting Navdanya, the Indian based NGO founded by Dr Vandana Shiva that has supported over 150 community seed banks to flourish in more than 30 Indian states. I hope to understand how this wildfire of seed banks has spread and how the conditions for their success have been tended.
In Nepal, I’ll be learning from the Himalayan Permaculture Centre and the National Cooperative Federation of Nepal. Known as a cooperative society, with agricultural cooperatives constituting approximately 33% of the total 350,000, Nepal is full of examples of how working together is facilitating more healthy regional food systems.
In Bhutan, I will be hosted by 15 different cooperatives across this mountainous region. Willing to share their learning with me, these cooperatives produce dairy, meat, traditional foods, grains and seeds. Well-known for their progressive government, who measure the nation’s gross national happiness, Bhutan is leading the way in supporting cooperatives. The Bhutanese government passed a Cooperation Act in 2001, creating a “cooperative friendly” environment by providing a supportive legal framework, financial incentives, and capacity-building programs for farmers cooperatives. Through the generous insights shared with me, I hope to better understand the conditions for cooperative germination.
We are seeing an obvious need for cooperation as the UK seed sovereignty movement rises to the challenge of building future seed resilience. Networks working to revive rare grains are experiencing a vacuum of appropriate machinery to process those grains, a challenge which can be answered with the formation of machinery rings to share equipment. People wanting to grow food are looking for seeds adapted to their bioregions, seeds which can be found by following collective local histories, then saved, shared, and adapted further together. Growers hoping to address the changing climate by producing genetically diverse crop populations are finding unexpected new discoveries through working collectively in their explorations. By asking questions about the form, function and binding ingredients of seed cooperatives in other parts of the world, I hope to understand how to better establish and feed a cooperative seed movement here.
While, unlike the long-standing networks I’ll be dipping my toe into, our society in the UK may seem a far cry from cooperative; the very nature of seed has proved itself capable of overcoming such an obstacle so far. As our seed sovereignty work has expanded over this last decade, a beautiful pattern of UK cooperatives has begun to emerge. A strong example of this is the Wales Seed Hub, formed by growers who previously took part in our Year Long Seed Production Training. Over the past six years, this collective has grown into a functioning seed-selling cooperative, distributing Welsh-grown seeds across the UK. Not only does cooperation help share the load of running a seed selling business, it also fosters vital peer-to-peer learning and community. Following in their footsteps, new seed selling cooperatives such as the Scottish Seed Hub are emerging as catalysers to regional seed revival.
As I prepare for my travels, I’ve been reflecting on the deep longing felt across our networks for community and how, by bringing people together, seeds are answering this longing. Their possibilities for the future are the adhesive we needed to keep going. And in beautiful reciprocity, our cooperation is ensuring the survival of seed diversity into the future.
We’re raising £20,000 to reclaim our future from profit-led giants. By placing seeds back in the hands of growers, we can revive the climate and community resilience of farmer-led food systems. Every donation is doubled, multiplying our work to strengthen regional and national seed networks, revive heritage and endangered crops, and retrain growers to save seed adapted to their bioregions.
