Category: Seed systems

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Restarting a relationship with seeds

Two recent stories about Indigenous seed rematriation sparked some reminiscing, and a reflection about what genebanks might need to do differently.

In her Ambrook piece, Emma Glassman-Hughes follows the return of ancestral corn to Wampanoag and Nipmuc communities in the northeastern US. While Rowen White, who is a Seed Keeper and farmer from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, explores the cultural and spiritual meaning of seeds, farming and “fertile resistance” in a conversation with For the Wild. Now, I don’t think that formal genebanks were involved in either case, but together the two pieces raise an intriguing question for them: what happens to the knowledge that travels with a seed when the seed comes home?

White talks about seeds as relatives: carriers of relationships, cultural memory and knowledge. Glassman-Hughes’s story makes the problem more tangible, if less poetic. Metacom corn has returned to Wampanoag land after roughly 350 years, but the people, landscape and farming conditions have changed in the meantime. No complete set of instructions came with the seeds. But even if they had, they probably wouldn’t be much use now. People had to experiment, observe and learn again.

I think that’s an interesting lesson. We tend to think of traditional knowledge as something that can be documented when an accession is collected and then preserved and made use of, much like the seeds themselves. But information that was useful to a farmer even just a generation ago may no longer be relevant in changed circumstances. Some knowledge may have been lost, some may have evolved, and new knowledge emerges when people start growing the crop again.

We’ve talked about this here before. Back in 2010, I wrote about a social media exchange between taro breeders in Hawaii, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. A video posted by breeder John Cho sparked a conversation in which people translated results, identified promising hybrids, compared performance in different countries and even discovered discrepancies in the identity of some material. I asked then whether this kind of open-ended discussion might be more useful for encouraging the use of crop diversity in genebanks than conventional accession-by-descriptor tables.

A week later, I pushed the idea further, asking whether genebank documentation needed a “social networking makeover.” My point wasn’t that we should abandon databases. (Although…) I was trying to put the people using and evaluating germplasm at the centre, allowing their observations, questions and experiences to accumulate around the accession, while still feeding validated information into structured databases.

If knowledge about a seed changes as people grow it, select it, use it and adapt it, then a genebank accession’s record is just a starting point. When material is returned to cultivation, what people learn about it should have a way of flowing back into the conservation system. So it can be used by the next in line.

Rematriation is not just returning seeds, it is restarting a relationship with those seeds. That doesn’t mean every genebank needs a community liaison officer. (Although…) Nor should genebanks romanticise traditional knowledge or assume that a community’s current practices are frozen remnants of the past. It does mean recognising that seeds have a social life, and that the knowledge surrounding them changes too.

The practical challenge is to build conservation systems that can value not only what we know about an accession when we put it away, but what people learn about it when we bring it back. And that, fundamentally, means recognizing that those people should have a stake in the genebank documentation system. That’s far from the case now.

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Joining the dots on food plant diversity

We have access to more kinds of food plants, yet the world’s diets and production systems have never been more alike. That is the paradox at the heart of Food plant diversity in a rapidly changing world, an unusually broad review by Colin Khoury (very much friend of the blog) and colleagues. It has all the latest data, but it also does several other things that make it more than a conventional state-of-the-art paper.

For one, it brings together diversity at several levels that are too often discussed separately: species, varieties and genes, of course, but also the diversity of diets, farming systems, foodways and the knowledge associated with them. It traces the movement of cultivated food plants over the past 12,000 years alongside the much more recent trend towards homogenisation. The result is the weird world we live in today: more kinds of crops available globally, but less difference between what people in different places eat.

Colin and friends also take a hard look at what we don’t know. We have surprisingly little evidence for how much food-plant diversity has actually been lost, how vulnerable today’s production systems are because of increasing uniformity, or what is happening to less visible forms of diversity, such as nutritional and chemical variation. The authors call for better monitoring, including an early-warning system for crop vulnerability. Now where have I heard that before?

And the paper connects the dots between conservation approaches that all too often live in isolation: genebanks, botanic gardens, community seed banks, on-farm initiatives, protected areas, breeding programmes and markets. Genebanks are all well and good, but diversity also needs to keep going in fields, landscapes, cuisines and communities. Again, not particularly new, but it’s good to have it repeated, brought up to date, and placed in the broadest possible context.

A couple of those dots are discussed in more detail in a companion opinion paper, Enhance food plant diversity conservation and use through greater coordination between genebanks and botanic gardens, which asks what might become possible if two of the world’s major plant conservation communities worked a bit more closely together. Which must be possible because they are nicely complementary, so neither should fear the other as a competitor.

The review paper maps the problem. The opinion piece explores a possible route towards a more joined-up conservation system. Which leaves us with its own small paradox: conserving food plant diversity requires flattening some of the differences within a remarkably diverse conservation community. Happy Crop Diversity Day 2026.

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Mind the seed

Seeing the new Tree Seed and Seedling Field Guide Series from the Landscape Alliance reminded me that I’d also meant to write about the International Principles and Standards for Native Seeds in Ecological Restoration. That’s been sitting on my to-do list for a while now. It is not one of those standards documents that tells you what everyone ought to do and leaves the messy details to somebody else. It really gets into the…well, I was going to say weeds but that would be all wrong. Let’s just say it’s pretty comprehensive: where the seeds should come from, how much to collect, how to maintain genetic diversity, how to process and store them, how to test viability and germination, and what information should accompany the seed lot to the person who eventually plants it. There is even a pro-forma label. In other words, lots of advice about how not to screw up the supply chain for seeds of native plants to be used in habitat restoration and the like.

The new field guides sit very nicely alongside that. They take the same concern with quality and turn it into practical guidance for people producing and using tree seeds and seedlings in Kenya and Rwanda. The scales and specifics are different, but the underlying problem is much the same: restoration depends on getting seeds from a wild population to a restoration site without losing the information, quality or diversity on which success depend. The standards provide a framework for doing that; the field guides help people put it into practice specifically for trees in East Africa.

It’s all a welcome corrective to the tendency to think that restoration begins when you put a seed or seedling in the ground. Quite a lot has to go right before you get to that bit. One question, though. Are all these various principles, standards, guides and recommendations integrated into the digital workflow for forest restoration that I blogged about a couple of weeks back?

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What seventy years of adoption research can teach genebanks

There’s a paper out that’s worth getting to grips with if you are interested in genebanks having an impact, even though it never actually mentions genebanks. David Pannell’s Reflections on Adoption of New Agricultural Practices distils more than 70 years and 5,000 studies of why farmers take up, adapt, abandon or reject innovations, be they new practices or technologies. It’s not specifically about plant genetic resources, but think of bringing back lost landraces, releasing a new variety or giving a neglected crop a second chance as an innovation and some of Pannell’s conclusions will seem very relevant to genebanks and their users. I’ll just pull out what I think are the top lessons.

Perhaps the main point Pannell makes is that testing something out isn’t adoption.

That sounds pretty obvious, but agricultural projects routinely give farmers something to try and then apparently count the resulting trial as adoption. Pannell points out that what is in fact being measured may be nothing more than farmers trying to figure out whether the innovation is good enough to keep using once the project support disappears.

The farmer planting that accession from the genebank or that new variety from the breeder is evidence of interest, not adoption. The more meaningful result is whether she is still using it, without being paid or encouraged to do so, several seasons later.

And speaking of trying things out, how easy that is to do matters for adoption, and it varies enormously among innovations.

Pannell notes that a new crop variety has an important advantage over other agricultural innovations: farmers probably already grow the crop. They can try the new variety right alongside the older ones without redesigning their whole farming system. In contrast, innovations that require systemic change can take decades to reach widespread adoption.

So, a package of sorghum landraces, or a new disease-resistant sorghum variety, being presented to sorghum farmers is one type of adoption problem. Promoting an opportunity crop that most farmers have forgotten how to grow is quite another. That may require new knowledge, equipment, markets and consumers, as well as a convincing reason to grow it. It’s bound to take longer.

Next, and perhaps more surprisingly, extension cannot compensate for a weak advantage.

Pannell is pretty clear: extension services can speed up awareness and evaluation early on, but they cannot manufacture adoption if and when farmers discover that an innovation isn’t sufficiently good.

That puts the emphasis back on the thing being offered. Does the new variety really outperform what farmers already have? Does the old landrace being revived have drawbacks? Does the neglected but really nutritious opportunity crop provide a return that compensates for the risks and additional work involved? If the answer is no, the best communications operation in the world won’t fix it.

Finally, every innovation is unique.

Pannell shows that different innovations being considered by the same farmers, and the same innovation being considered by different farmers, can have radically different drivers of adoption. Farmers aren’t a uniform population, and neither are innovations.

That is a useful reality check. The story of one neglected crop becoming an agricultural opportunity will never be repeated exactly. Each innovation has its own combination of advantages, constraints and players. There is no generic path to impact, though there may be recurring questions.

So what does this mean for genebanks trying to have — and measure — impact?

I’ll go with four fairly simple things. First, don’t treat germplasm distribution or a farmer field day as the end point: follow up and find out what breeders actually used, and farmers actually kept using. Yes, I know that takes time and resources, but it needs to be a routine part of the genebank’s work. Second, design projects tightly around the particular crop diversity involved, rather than assuming that the same adoption machinery will work across crops, countries, ecologies, whatever. Third, spend at least as much effort understanding why farmers might want the diversity in the first place as on getting it in front of them. If an advantage isn’t there, no amount of factsheets and posters and field days will rescue it. Finally, and maybe most importantly, remember that non-adoption isn’t always failure. Genebanks exist in large part for option value: material nobody wants now may be exactly what everyone wants in 2060. Plan the project so that even a failure to adopt teaches you something.

I’ve written plenty of posts here celebrating some interesting new diversity getting into farmers’ hands. I’ve written far fewer checking back to see what happened next. But that’s the more important story to tell.

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Nibbles: Frafra, Seed multiplication, Quality seeds, Balearic genebank, Indigenous trees double, Bruno cart, Belgian wild yeast

  1. Frafra potato is having a moment: an indigenous West African tuber, adored locally and mostly ignored by science, out looking for its big commercial break.
  2. Speaking of breakthroughs, this bus driver found his own, swapping the wheel for seed multiplication and turning five acres into a livelihood, proof that sometimes the missing link in a seed system is just someone willing to do the unglamorous middle bit well.
  3. Which is, per Farming First, precisely Africa’s problem at scale: only 2.5% of smallholder seed in Sub-Saharan Africa comes from formal seed companies, so a few million more bus-driver-style multipliers wouldn’t hurt.
  4. Meanwhile in the Balearics, the opposite direction of travel: the local seed bank is expanding to rescue tomatoes, onions and broad beans, and is looking for farmers willing to take them back.
  5. Indigenous fruit trees in Malawi turn out to fight malnutrition and biodiversity loss at once. Happy coincidence?
  6. Getting those trees into the ground well needs the same unglamorous groundwork as any good crop seed system: a Mongabay commentary argues that restoration campaigns skipping Indigenous and local seed knowledge are optimising for trees planted, not trees that survive.
  7. And once you’ve got the saplings in the ground, you might want to monitor how they’re doing: enter Bruno, a pushcart rigged with mobile phones that can collect field data. And not just for breeders.
  8. Finally, proof that not all genetic-resource hunting needs a genebank: Brussels brewers are getting people to comb the city for wild yeast, because the raw materials for a proper lambic turns is hanging around in urban trees.