Year after year, gardeners and growers usher small seeds into trays of soil and scatter them onto the land, and then wait for tiny green shoots to appear. This has been the process for thousands of years, since humans began leading agrarian lives. It began with our ancestors collecting seeds from the wild ancestors of the food crops we eat today. Then, from season to season, generation to generation, they grew out the crops and saved seed from them in a cyclical and reciprocal relationship between plants and people.   

Our food crops travelled the world as our ancestors migrated and took seeds with them, sharing, swapping and trading them. The plants adapted to place – to the different soil types, climates and environments – and evolved in collaboration with their growers, which contributed to a great breadth of varieties and biodiversity.  

Seeds were once communities' most precious resource, held safe and passed down through generations. In many parts of the world, this is no longer the case. Often seeds are seen merely as an input into the agricultural system – as something external supplied by seed companies, be that via seed catalogues, garden centres or seasonal displays at local supermarkets. 

Unwittingly, this has resulted in for-profit companies – that make decisions based on their bottomline – controlling the supply of much of the world’s seed for food crops. Shockingly, it is believed that just four companies now sell close to 60% of seed globally. With this shift to industrially produced seed, and an industrial food system at large, not only are communities losing control of their food systems, but they are losing intergenerational knowledge, including that of seed saving, potentially forever. 

Troublingly, there is further loss. In the past 100 years, it is believed that there has been a 75% decrease in the biodiversity of our food crops worldwide. Around the world, local varieties of foods are being replaced with a homogeny of cash crops and high-yield hybrid and engineered varieties. With this replacement, local varieties – grown by communities in their place for sometimes millennia – disappear. This biodiversity loss puts the global population in a precarious position in terms of our future food security. The limited number of food crop varieties and the diminishing gene pool that we are increasingly reliant on could be wiped out by disease or fall victim to the climatic pressures of our warming planet. Could it be that in a few decades, we no longer have corn, or tomatoes, or lettuces?   

Thankfully, around the world, there are initiatives, many of which are grassroots, reclaiming ownership of local food systems, pushing for food and seed sovereignty and protecting and restoring seed diversity. Though often locally focussed, these initiatives plug into a global network of activists working to shared goals through sharing knowledge and building advocacy. In the UK, there is a growing groundswell of seed activism, from ecological seed producers to seed co-ops to living seed banks, and there’s a huge drive to re-skill gardeners and growers to save seed, thanks to the Gaia Foundation’s Seed Sovereignty Programme. In North America, there’s the Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) and Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI); in Australia, there is the Seed Saver Foundation (SSF); in Europe, there is the Let's Liberate Diversity (LLD) network; and in India, there is Navdanya, led by prominent seed activist and scholar Dr Vandana Shiva. This is to name just a few. 

Without leaving their gardens, small-scale growers and home gardeners are part of the movement too through exercising the simple acts of saving, sharing and swapping seed within their communities. Those who are practising seed saving are witnessing firsthand how varieties of crops respond to place – how season to season the plants are more adapted to their soil, their climate and their environment, and thriving. Locally adapted varieties are increasingly crucial to build resilience into local food systems as our climate is rapidly changing.  

Communities that are empowered custodians of their seed are exercising a radical act of resistance. Yes, they are protecting and restoring biodiversity. But they are also collaborating with both the living world and their community in meaningful ways that respect that nature isn’t a commodity. With every carrot, beetroot or kale we grow and eat, with every seed that we save and share, we are invited to take a step further outside the oppressive capitalist system that afflicts so much pain on our people and planet. Instead, we may honour a way of being that sees nature and us as one. This is an act of resistance.    

And there’s the invitation for you to resist too – for you to be part of a collective effort to build more resilience into local food systems by working together with your community to reclaim seed sovereignty through saving, sharing and swapping seeds.

So here are some notes on how to get started: 

• Begin your seed-saving journey with open-pollinated seed. Get it from your local seed initiative or open-pollinated seed producer. Look here: seedsovereignty.info/near-me/

• Grow organically.

• Later in the season, start learning the basics. Some seed initiatives offer workshops, or you can look here for resources: seedsovereignty.info

• Start out saving from easier varieties.

• Save seed.

• Share and swap seed within your community.

• Store seed well for the next season.

Welcome to the revolution. Because, as the Gaia Foundation perfectly puts it, “a food revolution starts with seed.”