Join us in raising £20,000 to place seed back in the hands of growers this #SeedWeek2026, with every donation doubled between 22 – 29 April ➡️ Click to donate or share with your network.
Future Resilience Seed Coordinator Holly kicks off Seed Week with insights into how we can revive the incredible scale of diversity Nature can offer us, carrying the array of options needed for a truly resilient food system.
I recently encountered a quote that deeply resonated with me, proposing that, right now, we need ‘options, not optimisation’. Optimisation is something we, as humans, have been chasing for centuries, though it’s not always served us entirely well. The desire for optimisation is often driven by a very real need, sometimes with good intentions, always framed as ‘progress’. In an agricultural context, we’ve seen increasing mechanisation to make things easier, faster, more uniform. We’ve witnessed the industrialisation of farming systems to ‘feed the world’ after the very real food shortages of conflict.
Within the world of seed, crops have been intensively bred to perform within these systems: to produce high yields for mechanised harvesting, to be resistant to increasing levels of pests and diseases, and the chemicals used to further control them. As these plant breeding techniques have become more targeted and optimised, we’ve begun to rely on precision technology and processes beyond farmers’ fields. Pried from the millennia-strong wisdom of growers, we’ve outsourced responsibility for seed production to ‘experts’, intent on developing increasingly uniform F1 Hybrids and, more recently, genetically modified and precision-bred crops – the ‘ultimate’ in performance optimisation.
Optimisation comes from a very singular and human-centric viewpoint; it aims to solve a problem, which it may do – temporarily. But what it doesn’t seem to acknowledge is the complexity of natural systems, and how a singular vision can often be the detriment or loss of something else. As such, optimisation frequently leads to degeneration. In this case, of agrobiodiversity. In breeding crops for our singular vision, we’ve risked the complexity held within them. We have focused our energy on narrowing the genetics in favour of specific traits – drought resistance, for example – but in focusing solely on optimisation, we have eroded much of the plant’s natural diversity, and with that, their resilience to a diversity of factors.
We’re seeing this in our current agricultural landscape with lowering yields and failures more reliable than harvests when conditions vary beyond average. Our homogenous crops are vulnerable; if one goes down they all go down. In an era of climate chaos, where the normal cycle of things is now frequently disrupted, a return to diversity is vital for long-term resilience.
So what does resilience look like? To me, it is a tapestry of different crops offering a rich and complex mosaic. The woven complexity of a tapestry offers strength, each thread supporting the whole. It is hard to unpick, and can take a little strain, a little weight, and bounce back rather than collapse.
This tapestry would be woven from annual, biennial and perennial crops, reducing our reliance on a handful of catalogue-ready ‘staples’ and exploring a wide range of food sources. There would also be a diversity of varieties of each of these crops: open-pollinated and hybrids, to embrace all the options available to us. Instead of relying on one variety of kale each year, everyone would be growing many varieties, each filling a different niche, providing seasonal abundance even as our seasons shift and blend.
Another thread within this tapestry of resilience is intra-varietal diversity (diversity not just between but within a variety), another crucial reservoir of resilience. In growing some crops as populations – allowing for cross-pollination and mixing up of genetics within a variety – we create opportunity for faster adaptation to environmental stress. Going beyond distinct varieties with structured uniformity and narrow genetic pools, the diversity within a population is celebrated. Each plant might look a little different to its neighbour, but with that variation comes the differences in characteristics and traits needed for resilience.
The Crowd Breeding Network, now in its third year, has been working towards restoring this intra-varietal diversity in some of our most loved food crops. Broad beans, kale, spinach, squash and lettuce are now amongst the suite of populations being collectively nurtured by participants from across the UK and Ireland. At East Neuk Market Garden, we are growing the broad bean ‘flock’ for the third year. During this time, we’ve noticed an increase in plant health and yield, despite the challenges of a very dry spring last year, and it’s been a gift to experience the diversity of flower colours and growth habits displayed within the crop each season.
This richness of diversity also offers another unique opportunity: getting people excited about plant breeding! For generations, our ancestors carefully observed and honed the characteristics of their food, working in an intricate relationship with the seeds they saved each year. By handing our seed over to agrichemical giants, we’ve been robbed of this intimate process: its pleasures, delights, and decisions. When everything looks the same, where is the joy?
Diversity can act as a lever for change; it can be the spark that gets someone excited about stewarding seed. Noticing that ‘off-type’ or interesting cross in the field can be the hook that leads to a decade-long plant breeding project. And this spark then ripples out into their wider community as they share that excitement with others. This is exactly what is happening with the Crowd Breeding Network. Several participants are now mentoring community groups in their local area and setting up satellite crowd breeding projects amongst allotmenteers and home growers. As the project moves beyond the farm gate, the tapestry is now made up of a wider diversity of people, whose heritage, tastes, and preferences feed this diversity further.
Within the constraints of agribusiness and the corporate strive for ‘optimisation’, this expansive level of diversity could never be achieved. Placing this process back into the hands of growers and communities is a simple yet radical act. And in this time of unimaginable challenges, socially, politically and climatically, freeing the seed and growing our own liberation feels like an incredibly powerful act.
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.
