Only 7 years old, the Heritage Seed Program (later known as Seeds of Diversity) formalized a cooperative agreement with Agriculture Canada's national seed bank to exchange seeds and assist each other to grow, store, and conserve seed diversity.
PGRC, a department of Agriculture Canada, operates a collection of over 100,000 food crop varieties that are available mainly for research and plant breeding. Seeds of Diversity is able to access seeds from this collection to help farmers and gardeners multiply varieties that are not available elsewhere, and we also donate some of our members' rarest varieties to PGRC to ensure that they are backed up in the best storage conditions available anywhere.
Our partnership with PGRC has led to several growouts, pairing backyard seed savers with varieties that needed to be re-grown for the government collection, and our growers have benefited in turn from access to those irreplaceable varieties.