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Restarting the 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, not the last word. 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 extraordinary expansion and movement of food plants over the past 12,000 years alongside the much more recent trend towards homogenisation. The result is the weird world we have 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 systematic 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. There’s a 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 have tended to live in separate boxes: 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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Where have all the nutrients gone?

The “nutrient collapse” story has been doing the rounds for years, and we’ve been picking at it on the blog for almost as long.

Back in 2009, Jeremy looked at evidence that older crop varieties could contain more minerals, protein and other nutrients than newer ones, and discussed various possible reasons, including the intriguing possibility of a “genetic dilution” effect as breeders selected for yield.

By 2012, we were stressing that the evidence was more complicated than the headlines suggested, and in 2019 we linked to the latest critical review of the evidence by Robin Marles of the Bureau of Nutritional Sciences in Canada.

Now the latest episode of the BBC’s indispensable More or Less podcast asks again whether carrots are becoming less nutritious, prompted by a listener who clearly hasn’t been following our blog, and turns to Dr Marles, now retired, for the answer. Which hasn’t really changed much.

The bottom line is that breeding for yield and other commercially important traits can change the balance of what ends up in the harvest, and that we have historically been much better at measuring tonnes per hectare than what is actually in those tonnes.