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Saving Seeds for 30 Years!

Thirty years ago, the Canadian Organic Growers (COG) formed a seed-saving project called the "Heritage Seed Program". That project grew, and eventually became an organization - Seeds of Diversity! The warning signs were starting to appear that traditional seed varieties were becoming harder to find. Growers who bought their seeds every year were dismayed to find their favourite varieties dropped from seed catalogues. Often, the seeds sold through many companies were actually retailed from the same wholesale supplier, so a discontinued variety could disappear from several catalogues at once. Worse, it was becoming more common during the 1980s for small seed companies to be bought up by larger companies, and their whole assortment to be abandoned.

At the time, it was a shock to many farmers and gardeners that their crop varieties were disappearing, but we now know that the damage had already been done earlier in the past century when up to 75% of our crop diversity had been lost due to corporate consolidation in the seed industry, variety registration laws, and a mass shift toward genetic uniformity as agricultural and transportation technologies changed the food we grew and ate. Growers realized that if they wanted to grow their favourite varieties they would have to learn to save their own seeds.

That was why Seeds of Diversity was born, and thirty years after the warning call we are still taking up the challenge of rescuing endangered seed varieties.

Our first volunteers catalogued seeds, relearned the often-forgotten skills of seed saving, and began to exchange saved seeds with each other. In 1988, our first member-to-member seed directory was just a few pages in the back of our newsletter, with 140 seed offers. In 2014, it has grown to a 108-page book with 3,751 seed offers, also available to members online.

Our Member Seed Directory has grown thirty-fold in thirty years, but 2/3 of its seeds are still not available commercially. The good news is that the trend has been reversing. Seed varieties are still disappearing, forever, but more varieties are returning to commercial seed catalogues than ever before.

Our real legacy lives up to the original idea behind Seeds of Diversity. During the past thirty years, hundreds of seed varieties that had fallen out of commerce in the 1980s have been kept alive by our member seed savers, and they have been reintroduced in the seed catalogues of companies started by those same members.

Our founders imagined that ordinary people could be a living gene bank for seeds. You have proved them right!

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