Exploring new, radical ways to grow a diverse and resilient food system that is productive, joyful, and farmer-led.
Modern plant breeding, geared towards high-input, industrial-scale corporate food production, has, in its efforts to increase crop yields and stamp out pests, severed seeds from their innate patterns of adaptation and renewal. Our crops have lost their diversity, and we, as growers, have lost touch with our ancestral seed practices; our confidence knocked by the uprise of ‘experts’, new technologies, and an imposed requirement for standardisation.
Among the farming community in the UK, there seems to be a deep mistrust of our skills as seed stewards. But who is more of an expert on our land than us? As farmers and growers, we are in an intimate relationship with our crops day in and day out, putting us in the best possible position to steward and guide them in a direction that is most relevant to our land and our communities.
Farmer-led plant breeding and seed stewardship offer a highly dynamic alternative to our current proprietary system of automation and uniformity. With our hands in the soil, we can work with seeds’ unique characteristics to adapt crops to both biotic and abiotic stresses. A less rigid breeding process and broader gene pool increase diversity, while seed saving allows crops to become better adapted to their locales wth each growing season. Resilient plants emerge with the adaptability, nutrition, and flavour missing from our current food system.
Spearheaded by Holly, our Future Seed Resilience Coordinator, the Crowd Breeding project began taking shape in 2024. It aimed to exercise participatory plant breeding as a means of cultivating evolutionary populations of edible crops.
“In creating new diverse populations, we open ourselves up to a vast genetic pool to dip into in this time of climate instability. And in working collaboratively as a crowd, we can go on this journey together, sharing the risks and the joys while increasing the potential outcomes and learning opportunties.”
Participatory plant breeding brings farmers, breeders and customers together to produce crops specifically adapted to local areas, soils and markets, regaining seed sovereignty. It is a partnership that focuses on resilience and adaptation and allows natural diversity to thrive. As a crowd, growers can breed evolutionary populations of genetically diverse, promiscuously pollinating and locally adapted crops.
Evolutionary populations are formed when several varieties of a crop species (with specific desired traits) are grown together and allowed to cross pollinate. Due to this cross pollination, the next generation becomes a hybrid swarm, containing many hybrid plants with diverse parents. Over time the grower begins to influence characteristics of the flock by selecting for preferential traits: flavour, disease resistance, colour. Through selection and over time, populations become more stable but remain dynamic. Where certain traits have been selected for, others are left to roam avoiding genetic bottlenecks. Due to the open pollination and mixed parentage, plants can have a higher genetic diversity to draw upon to learn and adapt to environmental stimuli.
Following a successful pilot in 2024, when a crowd of 18 growers collaboratively curated several ‘flocks’ of vegetable crops, the crowd breeding project is now in full swing.
Watch some of our recent crowdbreeding sessions, featuring stars from the seed breeding world:
The Utopian Seed Project is a hands-in-the-earth non-profit based in the Southeast USA. They cultivate, research, and celebrate resiliency in food and farming via crop diversity. Founder Chris Smith joins the group to share the project’s work and vision of an abundant and equitable ecosystem, rich in reciprocal relations of seed, land, and people.
Jen Williams, a seed grower and farmer based on Vashon Island in the US, joins the group to share her story. The vision of Wild Dreams Farm & Seed is to ensure abundance and biodiversity in our culture and in our food system for generations to come by growing food and medicines and by breeding open-pollinated vegetables, herbs, and seeds which nourish our human and more-than-human communities
Joseph’s book, ‘Growing Modern Landrances’ was one of the sources of inspiration for the Crowd Breeding Project, and his work through the Going to Seed community continues to help folks in the US, EU and beyond to experiment with diverse plant breeding. Joseph has been a mentor for the project since it’s conception; here he joins the group at the very start of their journey to share his own story and offer support and inspiration.
Find out more ways the Seed Sovereignty Programme is sowing a diverse and resilient seed system in the UK and ireland:
Growing, sharing, and sowing agroecologically grown, open-pollinated seed for food justice, community connection, and biodiversity. Welcome to the world of seed saving.
Our regional coordinators are accompanying communities reclaiming their rights to a climate-resilient food system.
The Seed Sovereignty Programme is training growers in seed production, saving, breeding, and legislation; imparting the knowledge and skills needed for a food revolution.