Seeds of Resilience

Two years into World War II, as Nazi forces laid siege to St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad), Russia, suffocating the city’s food supply, a team of researchers at the Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry barricaded themselves in a secret vault to guard the world’s largest seed collection of the time — a priceless repository of genetic diversity.

For 880 days, this group of plant researchers struggled to stay warm and survive. They started to starve — adamant that they wouldn’t eat the seeds around them — and smuggled seeds whenever possible to safety, fearing that the institute’s collection of potato samples would either be taken by hungry locals, seized by enemy forces, or freeze during winter. As a result of their sacrifices, many members of the research team succumbed to disease and starvation. However, by the end of the siege, the survivors had managed to preserve irreplaceable food crops that they believed would be crucial to rehabilitating the nation’s agricultural system after the war.

Nikolai Vavilov, the institute’s director, was inspired to start the world’s first seed bank after witnessing brutal famines in his youth. He believed that the emerging field of genetics held the key to overcoming such disasters and argued that modern domesticated crops were particularly vulnerable due to inbreeding and genetic uniformity, leaving them unadaptable in the face of environmental hardships. In contrast, he found that wild crops were hardier and more diverse, leading Vavilov to crossbreed wild species with domesticated ones to create more resilient food crops. In short, Vavilov was an early advocate of what we now call biodiversity.

Today, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a descendant of the Vavilov Institute, safeguards more than half a billion replicated seeds — with the capacity to store up to 2.5 billion — on one of the world’s most remote islands; the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard is so far north that it’s closer to the North Pole than the Arctic Circle. Its collection includes seeds that originated from the Vavilov Institute, making up what Time magazine has called “one of the most historically significant deposits of seeds inside the vault.”

According to Åsmund Asdal, a biologist and agronomist responsible for seed deposits into the Svalbard vault, the replicated seeds stored there are conserved in three locations: the gene bank that’s home to the original seeds, a partner gene bank, and, of course, the Svalbard vault — which acts as the ultimate backup facility. This multilayered approach ensures the seeds’ preservation in worst-case scenarios (for example, a refrigeration system failure in the event of a catastrophe) and their availability for future use.

While Svalbard is inhospitable to most forms of agriculture, which might make it seem like an unsuitable home for the world’s largest and most diverse agricultural seed collection, in reality, it is precisely the Svalbard vault’s isolated location that keeps its collection safe. Completed in 2008 and built 150 meters, or about 492 feet, into a sandstone mountain, the vault’s temperature is maintained at minus 18 degrees Celsius, or minus 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit, by refrigeration systems. These systems are protected by the mountain’s permafrost should they ever fail and have the ability to maintain the seeds at a below-freezing temperature for approximately two centuries, as Cary Fowler, an American agriculturist who led the effort to establish the vault, wrote in his 2016 book, “Seeds on Ice: Svalbard and the Global Seed Vault.”

Asdal tells The Rooted Journal that when he’s at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, he is “amazed by all the efforts that scientists and gene bank workers from around the world invest in keeping and maintaining their genetic material, and trusting us to take care of their backup samples.” He adds that “crop diversity is crucial,” and encourages people to “use and eat more diverse food products, support politicians that allocate resources to gene banks and plant breeders, and take care of nature and wild flora, where genetic diversity in principle is found.”

Today, agriculture faces unprecedented challenges. According to estimates from a 2023 United Nations report on the state of food security globally, between 691 and 783 million people dealt with hunger in 2022, and with the population expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 (up from more than 8 billion today), food production will need to meet that demand. All of this must occur against a challenging backdrop: dwindling water supplies, less arable land, and other effects of climate change including the increasing frequency of extreme weather events and changing precipitation patterns. Biodiversity experts believe that seeds will play perhaps the most crucial role in the future of food production. This pressing moment echoes what Vavilov so adamantly advocated for over 100 years ago: genetic diversity.

Saving seeds has been integral to human history. However, most farmers today simply don’t save seeds but instead purchase them every season from commercial suppliers. In 1862, the majority of Americans were farmers presumably relying on saving and using seeds from previous harvests; according to a PBS article, in 2019, that percentage was down to 2%. This decline, combined with the industrialization of agriculture, which favors efficiency and consolidation, has led to increasingly homogenized crops. These trends have cost us a wealth of genetic diversity at a time when climate change makes genetic plant research and understanding a necessity. Just how much has it cost us? Since the 1900s, approximately 90% of our produce varieties in the U.S. alone, according to Time magazine.

Approximately 1,700 seed banks, also known as gene banks, around the world house invaluable collections of plant species today. Unlike the mostly sealed Svalbard Vault, which only receives deposits twice a year as its focus lies on the backup and maximum security for seeds, many gene banks are dynamic operations vital for scientific research, education, and species preservation. They actively conduct research while storing seeds, keeping their genetics and cultural heritage alive. Saving seeds preserves culture; sowing seeds perpetuates it.

“Seeds are a living germ plasm and although you can, under the best conditions, store them for a very long time, eventually they’ll die,” Mike Bollinger, director of the U.S. nonprofit Seed Savers Exchange, tells The Rooted Journal. “Part of what you need to do is regenerate that germ plasm to keep it living. The participatory work in our exchange is crucial.”

Since it was founded in Missouri in 1975, Seed Savers Exchange has championed the heritage and stories behind heirloom seeds, providing educational resources and building a network of gardeners who save and share seeds amongst one another. These gardeners contribute their heirloom varieties to the Seed Savers Exchange collection, the largest nongovernmental seed bank in America. “Participatory conservation is community work,” says Bollinger. “We have over 20,000 varieties in our seed bank and doing that conservation work alone would be insurmountable. It’s safest in multiple hands.”

The organization backs up many of its seeds at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and invests in initiatives that gather information about seed performance and provide educational resources to the public. In one example, through a partnership with The Edible Schoolyard Project, a Berkeley-based nonprofit that brings organic gardens to public schools, Seed Savers Exchange engages students in growing and saving seeds from food plants that they then pass onto next year’s classes. The nonprofit is also repatriating seeds to Indigenous communities, returning heritage varieties to their original custodians. And it involves home gardeners in trialing seed bank varieties in their own yards; they then share feedback on how those seeds perform in terms of flavor, yield, appearance, and even disease resistance. Through this vast network of home gardeners, Seed Savers Exchange gains on-the-ground insights into seed performance in different regions and in some cases real-time data on the effects of climate change and other environmental pressures on food plants.

These community-generated learnings help inform the seeds distributed through Seed Saver Exchange’s catalog, an annual print mailer that weaves stories and recipes with quirky descriptions of unique fruits, vegetables, and legumes. According to Bollinger, the direct sale of seeds generates 60-70% of SSE’s revenue with the remainder coming from other means such as members, donations, and grants. Aside from administrative and fundraising costs, the organization’s proceeds go toward its seed-saving and exchange efforts, community education and programming, and the maintenance of its farm in Iowa.

The success of Seed Savers Exchange’s advocacy over nearly 50 years has led to growing awareness, and competition, from other heirloom and open-pollinated seed companies. “The organization is successful in its mission when we see more of these seed varieties,” says Bollinger. “Whether it’s growing interest in seeds that are uniquely adapted to certain regions or the meaning and cultural significance they bring to certain ethnic groups, it’s all a wonderful thing. It also means fewer people will come to us for specific seeds. That’s one of the organization’s biggest challenges moving forward.”

On an even more grassroots level, seed libraries are gaining in popularity both in the U.S. and globally, with many providing seeds to their local communities, often for free.

An early adopter, Rebecca Newburn founded the Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library in May 2010, located inside the Richmond Public Library in California’s Bay Area. Like others of its kind, the seed library’s aim is to make locally grown seeds available to gardeners. “I wanted to create a replicable model that anyone could take, tweak, and use to make their own seed library, or to just be able to provide seeds to their community,” Newburn tells The Rooted Journal.

Since opening the library, Newburn has seen growing public interest in climate resilience and seed sovereignty in her area, driven largely by the strength of the library’s community of home gardeners and the compelling seed stories they share with one another. “It’s so active and engaging,” she says.

The Richmond Grows library website offers extensive information for beginners and more advanced gardeners alike: on how to use the seed library, save seeds, start new gardens, and the tools Newburn’s developed and made public for helping others open new seed libraries. Her latest project is collecting census data to inform the Seed Library Network, a comprehensive database of the world’s seed libraries. The database aims to help people locate seed libraries in their own neighborhood or region, with the hopes of being able to foster and encourage more participation in the movement worldwide.

Efforts are underway in some other places as well. In Kenya, for example, farmers are turning to community seed banks to store and test indigenous seeds, doing what they can to navigate the country’s laws, which limit the sale of seeds. And in 2021, Maine voters passed the nation’s first “right to food” amendment to the state’s constitution. The amendment states the inherent rights that individuals have to “grow, raise, harvest, produce, and consume the food of their own choosing.” While these small movements are certainly positive, their cumulative impact remains uncertain.

As Fowler wrote in “Seeds on Ice,” “Anyone who claims to see into the future and discern what should or should not exist, what will or will not be useful in future climates to future generations, is a fool.” The book illustrates the stark reality and challenges we’re facing, yet the very existence of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault offers hope for the future.

Take the vault’s geographical and political reach, for example. Seeds from the U.S. sit near those from Russian gene banks. South Korean seeds are stored next to seeds in magenta-stained wooden boxes from North Korea. The vault houses seed samples from nearly every country on Earth and continues to receive deposits every year.
No matter where we live, one thing that we have in common is that we all need to eat — and for that, we need seeds. In turn, these tiny entities of immense significance rely on our cooperation to thrive. What else can be held in the palm of one’s hand, encapsulating the potential and miracle of life while so clearly symbolizing our world’s interconnectedness and mutual dependence?