Seed-Saving

Seed-saving has been practiced by agriculturists for millennia. It is the single reason why agriculture developed into a life-sustaining practice. The premise of seed-saving is to improve a crop variety by taking seeds from plants with the strongest or most desired traits and using those seeds for the next planting. Take the example of tomatoes. You plant a tomato crop and care for it. When harvest time comes, you comb your garden for the best ones – healthy, big, vibrant color – the traits you want to enhance. Then you preserve seeds from those tomatoes and plant them the following season. The new crop will have the genetic heritage of the ones you picked – the strongest, healthiest ones.

By repeating this process over the course of millennia, human beings developed thousands of crop varieties. Seed-saving led to hundreds of varieties of tomatoes alone, known as “heirlooms” precisely because seeds were passed on from generation to generation. Have you ever seen a purple, orange, yellow, black, striped, pear-shaped, oval, or oblong tomato? This is seed-saving at its best.

Modern agriculture has done away with seed-saving. The “green revolution” of the mid-20^th century gave way to hybridization and mono-cropping – planting vast fields with a single crop and using chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers to control its growth. In the last 30 years, biotechnology has added genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to the mix. Agricultural technologies no longer rely on the careful task of seed-saving, concerned instead with achieving higher yields through manipulating plant environments, soil, and genes.

Today’s home gardeners usually purchase seeds from commercial seed producers that promise “true” varieties of plants. Because techniques of seed-saving are no longer passed on as common household knowledge, most people don’t know that they can develop their own healthy lineage of home crops through the simple, ancient art of seed-saving.  

Is seed-saving really important? YES!

The reason is biodiversity: Seed-saving is about promoting a healthy diversity of crops. It took 10,000 years to develop the agricultural diversity we now enjoy, but just in the last generation that diversity has been put at risk. At the beginning of the 20^th century, the world still relied on up to 1,500 different crops. Today 90 percent of global nutrition is provided by just 30 plants, and 75 percent is from just four: corn, rice, wheat, and soy. But nature has always favored diversity over mono-culture. Smart agriculturists of ancient times knew that diversity protected their food security, because diseases and pests attack one variety at a time. If Ireland had been planted with several potato varieties instead of one, the famous potato famine of the 1800s would have merely dented the food supply rather than caused devastating, widespread famine. Healthy ecosystems are diverse for this very reason.

To learn more about seed-saving, including techniques for preserving seeds, the ins and outs of pollination, and gardening tips, visit the International Seed Saving Institute.