The Importance of Saving Seed

Farmers and gardeners have been saving their own seeds for thousands of years. And then we stopped and gave this task into the hands of a few specialists. Food nutrition has plummeted since, and we've sadly lost our autonomy too. It's time for us to revive this lost art if we hope to once again take control of our own food and build healthy, resilient communities.

I went out to my garden yesterday to do something that felt quite foreign. Instead of dropping tiny, crinkly onion seeds in the ground, I planted a couple of hundred big storage onions that I grew last year. I was returning them to the soil from where they were pulled just six months earlier.

Their red skins glistened as the rain fell from the gray skies. Within a few weeks, they'll awaken from their winter slumber and send roots deep into the soil. Their aim is simple: grow a long, sturdy stem that reaches higher than their neighbors. Then, unfurl a flower that'll attract pollinators. And finally, produce big, healthy seeds.

We may feel like innocent bystanders in this process of producing seeds, but the plants desperately need our support. Because we're not after any ordinary seed. We're after big seeds, full of minerals, enzymes, carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. More importantly, we're growing seeds coated with billions of microorganisms that future generations of onions will need to survive and thrive.

There are more microbes on a seed than the number of people on this planet. And they're far more diverse too, representing tens of thousands of distinct species. Think of these microbes as the employees at a massive car factory. Each person on the team has a specific function, and without one group of employees—from engineers to assembly workers to janitors—the system fails to function.

As growers, our task is to grow healthy plants that can produce fat seeds that can carry a host of microbes. We must foster a biological system that releases minerals from the soil and makes them available to plants. Our soils should be teeming with life that can be conferred to the seed to support future generations of onion growers.

Growing our own food is an incredible act of building community resilience. But saving our own seeds is stratospherically more important. When you grow food, you feed yourself for one year. But when you save seeds, you feed generations.