I think this Offshoot episode will make you pause next time you find yourself in front of a colourful wall of seed packets. As with many seemingly simple things, the story of a small seed, can in fact be a lot more fascinating and complicated than it might at first appear.

So take a journey into the history and science of seeds. We'll ponder the Portuguese, spreading pepper seeds around the world and seed banks in St Petersburg, Syria and the Arctic Circle. We'll hear about the skills of Ethiopian farmers.

Adam Alexander, also known as the seed detective and a self confessed vegetable anorak is endlessly curious about seeds and in his new book The Accidental Seed Heroes he is on the trail of the growers who are championing traditional varieties and breeding new ones that will adapt to our changing climate.

What can these seed heroes teach us, as we think about what to grow this April?

.Takeaways:

• The inception of plant breeding can be traced back to our Neolithic ancestors, who began selecting wild relatives for cultivation approximately 12,000 years ago, primarily focusing on cereals.
• Adam Alexander, the author of The Accidental Seed Heroes, emphasises the significance of traditional plant breeding and the critical need to preserve genetic diversity in crops for future food security.
• The podcast highlights the remarkable adaptive capabilities of open-pollinated crops, which are essential for resilience against climate change and environmental fluctuations.
• The discussion reveals the importance of seed banks and living collections, such as the Vavilov Institute, in maintaining genetic diversity and supporting agro-biodiversity.
• Adam Alexander describes his travels to Ethiopia and Albania, where he learned from indigenous farmers who practice sustainable agriculture and maintain a rich diversity of crops.
• The episode sheds light on the necessity of evolving our agricultural practices to ensure food security in the face of climate change, advocating for the cultivation of diverse and adaptive crop varieties.

Welcome to our Plant Stories and an offshoot episode All About Seeds.

It all kicked off 12,000 years ago when our Neolithic ancestors were selecting from wild relatives, initially cereals in the Fertile Crescent in the near Middle east, wheat pulses of various types. These key founder crops, they were selecting for traits that meant that they could start to grow in an organized way.

And actually, we've been doing that ever since, up until really about 200, 250 years ago.

You may already have heard Adam Alexander, also known as the Seed Detective, in this month's Plant Story, he joined me in conversation with Richard Bowman, who is trying to see if he can germinate some very old seeds salvaged from his great Uncle Eric's potting shed on the Yorkshire moors. Adam has been passionate about seeds for many years. Listen to the previous episode and you will hear the story of the Ukrainian pepper.

And he's just published a new book called the Accidental Seed Heroes. He also describes himself as a vegetable anorak.

I call myself an anorak because I've, you know, I've got diaries going back 40 years more.

And because I also make notes about what the seasons are like, that also helps me in terms of thinking about when I need to be sowing things now. So I'm constantly referring back, and I call that true anorak behavior.

Where did the inspiration for this book come from?

There were two things that were happening at the same time. First of all, I'm a storyteller. I've been, you know, I was a filmmaker, some movies, but mostly documentaries.

And I always said, you know, the great joy of being a storyteller, particularly in the factual world, was that I wanted to make films on subjects I knew nothing about. And although I do know a fair amount about growing vegetables and seed saving, actually, the thing that I really know nothing about or knew nothing about was really the world of plant breeding.

And I had written my first book, the Seed Detective, which essentially was about where had our vegetables come from and how, you know, it's history on a plate.

But we need to be building sustainable future for food and how we grow it, and we need to be moving towards a drastic reduction in the amount of carbon that is being created in food production.

And also, I was railing against the hegemony of the great seed and agrochemical giants in the world who are dominating the narrative around how we should be thinking about the future for plant breeding and what the solutions are. And so this was sitting in my mind, and then I thought, I need to see what's going on.

And the most interesting country for me at the start of this was America, because I had been receiving seeds from the Seed Savers Exchange and others over many years.

And there is a wonderful woman called Carol Depp who wrote the sort of bible for plant breeders, which was a guide to, if you like, backyard plant breeding. And I got in touch with her to ask her, you know, what's going on? What should I be looking for? How, you know, is this an interesting subject?

And she was very involved with an organization called the Open Source Seed Initiative in America, which is where people are breeding new varieties, which they are then sharing with other breeders. It's the complete antithesis of what modern commercial plant breeding is all about.

And we were chatting, and she said to me, in her slightly fierce fairy godmother way, she said, adam, you have to realize, you know, yeah, you're saving seeds and you're maintaining varieties and blah, blah, blah, but actually, you're a plant breeder whether you like it or not.

And I thought, you know, it's really interesting that I had never thought of myself as being a plant breeder in the true traditional sense of what plant breeding was. Which was it all kicked off 12,000 years ago when our Neolithic ancestors were selecting from wild relatives, initially cereals in the Fertile Crescent, in the near Middle east, wheat pulses of various types. These key founder crops. They were selecting for traits that meant that they could start to grow in an organized way.

And actually, we've been doing that ever since, up until really about 200, 250 years ago, if you think about plant breeding. It was all led by farmers until really we started the systemization of plant breeding in the middle of the 19th century.

And then it fundamentally changed, essentially at the start of the 20th century with the understanding of genetics, the work of Mendel.

And what happened was that plant breeding went from the field into the laboratory, and also because of political mindsets changing, particularly in the US and in the UK plants, or rather seeds, were seen as a commodity. And that fundamentally changed our relationship with how we breed and how we think about seeds.

And I was keen to understand actually what's going on in the world. Is there a counter revolution happening?

And what is it that we can learn from, particularly how indigenous farmers who continue to be the plant breeders in the world are doing things. And that's really what got me started. And I wanted then to, because of my, I'm a curious soul, to explore particular places where there were.

I thought there were really interesting things that were happening and where I could understand much more what it really means to be myself an accidental plant breeder, but also how I am part of a continuum. And that even modern plant breeding that we think of as being, you know, involving people in white coats is for the most part also accidental.

And so therefore we get to the. The accidental seed heroes, correct?

That's right. The accidental seed heroes.

Who are they and what is it that they're growing that is so important to them, which is so delicious, but which is also fundamental to our future food security around the world.

Before we get into those stories, I feel we should maybe start with a few kind of quick fire basic seed and plant biology, because that, when you read your book, is quite key. So open Pollinated versus hybrid cultiva.

Okay.

So up until what I would call systematic deliberate plant breeding, which really got underway in the last half of the 19th century, what happened was that any changes in the morphology or phenotype, how plants looked and tasted, those things happened through accidents. They either happen because of accidental cross pollination or because of mutations that happen. And this is because these plants are heterogeneous.

They have very diverse genomes. And so they contain lots of traits which have flex, I call it. You know, they're able to adapt. They are adaptive modern cultivars.

So what I would call traditional plant breeding. Let's. Let's go. Let's break it down into two bits.

You have traditional plant breeding, which essentially just selected from what Mother Nature was doing. And then over a period of time, through a process of selection, you build up a huge diversity of. Of different varieties.

And you can think of that very simply with key crops. One of the wonderful crops that I write about in the book is the oxheart tomato and also the sweet pepper.

And put yourself back into the beginning of the 16th century when the first of what we call the new world crops arrived from Mesoamerica, from Mexico and Central Southern America. And actually what happened is, you know, it was the Portuguese who spread most of them around the world because they were the great seafarers.

But they didn't bring a huge diversity of peppers or tomatoes back with them. They bought maybe two or three that were very distinct and different.

And then what happened is, as they traveled around conquering, colonizing, particularly Africa and then into Asia, Southeast Asia was those single types of crop, whether it was a big tomato or a long, thin chilli or a round, fat pepper, they were then in a sense embraced by the people who they left those seeds with. And it's human selection for all sorts of different reasons. They're all preferences.

It was driven by things like colour, shape, how hot and fiery a pepper was, how fruity it was, tomatoes, what their colour, what was their shape, could they cook with them, how did they fit or evolve into their cuisine meant that over the generations and the centuries that these individual crops were spreading around, they changed because they were heterogeneous and very genetically diverse.

And that is why we have, or had, until a century or so ago, an unbelievable diversity of what we would call, I call in the book, Farmer's varieties, or FVs. The other term for them is landrace. People always ask me, what is a landrace?

And I say a landrace or a farmer's variety is a locally adapted version of a particular variety or type of crop. And there are literally tens, if not hundreds of thousands of landraces of all the crops that we eat around the world.

Because still 60% of the world is fed by crops that are grown on very, very small farms in very traditional ways, with seeds maintained by farmers.

These traditional varieties are, for the most part, they are actually open pollinated, which means that either like tomatoes and French beans, they will self pollinate, or they need to be pollinated by being in populations. A field of wheat, for example.

Wheat is in fact self fertile, but, you know, the wind blows, the bees travel, Brassicas need to be pollinated in populations. And then you have other things like maize that are pollinated by the wind, beetroot, another one.

And so these open pollinated rises have different mechanisms for reproduction.

Then what happened really towards the end of the 19th century in the UK was that at first a farmer and seed seller started to experiment with crossing different varieties, first of all of oats, but then the whole thing exploded in, particularly with cereals, into crossing cereals, cross pollinating them.

And that, in a sense, was the start of modern plant breeding, where you then no longer had a variety which sort of happened naturally, but you have a cultivar which is the result of deliberate crossing by humans. And from that you end up with lots of different things, like F1 hybrids.

And then we have genetically modified crops which are continuations of, of this way of breeding, through working with the genome, understanding the genome of a crop and working with it to create new cultivars.

One thing that I also was really curious about in the book was you talk about these incredible seed banks in the world. One up in the Arctic Circle, one in Syria that was luckily rescued, one in Russia. Can you tell me about them? Where do they come from?

Where did they start?

Well, there was this amazing guy, Vavilov, who is a Russian plant scientist who created this incredible seed bank in St. Petersburg at the early on in the 20th century. And he was collecting farmers varieties firstly of cereals across the Soviet Union.

Actually before the Soviet Union was founded, he was doing it, he was also, he was all over the place and he built up an amazing collection of this huge diversity of cereals, but also other crops. And that was in a way the first seed bank in the world. Vavilof unfortunately was a victim of Stalin and died in a gulag.

But his contribution to the conservation of the genetic diversity of edible crops is, you know, I can't tell you how important it was. Without him, God knows where we would be today.

Then obviously the story of the Vavilof Institute which held this collection, you know, it's had its ups and downs over the last hundred years, but it's still very much in play.

And as you will know from reading the book, it is continues to contribute to the conservation of genetic diversity of crops and also to evolve evolving populations of cereals that we can be growing here and in other parts of the world that are really providing a solution to in a changing climate. The Vavilof Institute is a seed bank and it has tried to be what we call a living collection.

In other words, small amounts of seed are kept and they are grown out on a regular basis. Every few years they grow a few and they keep a small sample of those particular varieties and they are being refreshed on a regular basis.

This has proved very, very difficult in the Soviet Union and then with the collapse of communism and what's been going on in Russia in the last few years.

So what happened was you then have this amazing guy, Carrie Fowler, who persuaded the, I can't remember was it, who owns the Norwegian government, to go up into the Arctic Circle to Svalbard to build a seed bank inside a mountain where the temperature is, I don't know, freezing minus 30 degrees. You can put seeds in there and you can take them out in about in 100 years time and sow them and they'll grow. But it's a seed bank, it's not a living collection.

There are others collections which are a mixture of banks and living collections which are doing two things. So in the case of the Svalbard Seed bank. It is ex situ.

You're taking seed from one part of the world, sticking them in a mountain in the Arctic Circle to preserve them, because in they're in situ situation where they've been growing or being maintained, they may be lost.

That's brilliant on the one hand, but then you had other gene banks, like one in Syria, in Aleppo, that held a huge diversity, particularly of cereals that were specific to the cradle of civilization. And where all of these cereals were domesticated and that was also a living gene bank, they were also growing and maintaining them.

So actually what happened was, rather than being frozen in the past, these varieties were able to wake up every now and then in the world in which we're living today. Obviously Syria, you know, there was a war, but the collection was able to be taken out and held within Svalbard.

And now part of that collection is being grown again as a living in situ collection. Actually, some of it's even going back to Syria, but it's been in North Africa and various places.

These are really, really important things that are happening. But then there's another type of seed bank, actually. They're really seed libraries.

And the one that we're probably most familiar with here in the UK is the Heritage Seed Library. It holds the national collection of heritage and heirloom ex commercial varieties in the UK, about 850 varieties.

And then you have community seed banks or libraries. And there's a particular example that I went to see in Ethiopia, which I think is an amazing model.

And what has happened is that traditional varieties, not just of cereals, but of pulses and herbs, all sorts of different things, are maintained within communities.

And if I'm a farmer and I want to grow a traditional variety of wheat, I join the cooperative, which gives me access to the library, and I can borrow seeds. And at the end of the season, I return the seeds I borrowed, plus 10%. And this enables other farmers to also borrow seeds.

And these are very, very poor Ethiopian farmers. They don't have any money. They can't go out and spend loads of money on, you know, elite modern cultivars, even if they wanted to.

And we see this model, it's not only in Ethiopia, we're seeing it happening in parts of South America and in India, where farmers are back in control of seed production and maintenance and they are consummate seed savers. And how do they maintain this incredible diversity?

Through observation and also becoming much more skilled in selecting and maintaining the best parts of their crop. To go back into the library, it's an incredible Model.

It's a beautiful model, isn't it?

It is.

How do seeds, how important is that for the way that seeds are adapting to climate change and how we are going to have to adapt to climate change?

It's a great question.

So our normal experience as growers, as gardeners, keen gardeners, is we, you know, get out the cataloge every winter and we select a load of seeds and we buy loads of packets of seeds.

And if they are coming from the big seed cataloge companies, the vast majority of those seeds have been imported and they're being grown in Spain, a few in France, quite a lot in America, North Africa. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with these seeds, but of course they haven't been grown here. And for the most part they perform pretty well.

And these, if they are traditional, open pollinated varieties, are very heterogeneous and we can save their seeds. And if we save the seeds, these varieties over time flex and change.

In the way that I was explaining earlier, when you heard the Portuguese took a pepper and dropped it off somewhere and it spread across the world and turned into a thousand different types of pepper.

Actually, when we grow and save seeds and we do it year after year, actually we are creating our own farmers varieties, or as I like to call them, I don't call them this in the book, but actually when we're doing it ourselves as gardeners, they're gardeners varieties. And that's in many ways what a heritage or an heirloom variety is.

And these varieties, these things that we're growing because they are adaptive, means that as the climate changes, they too can evolve and change.

And evolutionary plant breeding is absolutely fundamental to how we build resilience into our food supply system going forward, because we need to be growing and breeding in an adaptive environment, not an adapted one.

If I buy hybrid wheat seed, for example, yes, I may get a greater yield than if I grow a population of traditional varieties or varieties that have been bred for low input production. But the trouble is, after three years, because every ear of that wheat is identical to the one next to it in a field. It's a monoculture.

And monocultures are fabulous breeding grounds for pathogens, because you only need one mutation in a pathogen that likes that new cultivar and the farmer is in big trouble. And what you have to do is increase the amount of inputs. You know, are you having to put more pesticides on.

What do you, you know, what, what is it you've got to do? Insecticides, herbicides? I don't know.

To me, the Smart farmers are the ones that are understanding that actually if we can grow in a much more diverse, heterogeneous environment, we can lower our inputs initially. We may see drops in yield because we're not growing elite cultivars with loads of inputs. But what we start to do is build resilience into our crops.

Your travels sound extraordinary. I mean, your trip to Ethiopia was obviously very inspiring. Your trip to Albania, what was your favourite part about those trips?

First of all, you know, I sit at the feet of these traditional indigenous farmers. They have forgotten more than I will ever know about crop growing. And what I really discover from, from them is, first of all, their expertise.

They are highly, highly skilled, they're hugely knowledgeable and they are brilliant survivors. And that is a lesson for all of us.

You know, when I was in the Khonso region in southern Ethiopia, which is a World Heritage site, an amazing, amazing terrorist landscape in the Rift Valley, not in the valley up above.

You know, it's an extraordinary part of the world where they practice agroforestry and have been doing so for the last, I don't know how long, 800 years. I mean, it's amazing. And, you know, we worry about famine and rightly so. And how on earth do we feed ourselves in a changing climate?

But I'll tell you something, our climate is so fundamentally different. Yeah, we whinge and moan because it's either too wet or it's a bit too dry.

But if you're a farmer in Ethiopia, or actually in anywhere in most parts of Africa or across the most difficult, challenging regions of the world, actually, whether the rains come early or late, if they're too much or too little, that can be the difference between life and death. And this is happening every season. So they have to be on their game.

And to be able to do that for eight centuries without suffering from famine, that's a lesson for all of us. And agroforestry is really, really interesting how they grow things. Everything's grown together.

You know, I could go into a terraced field in Conso and there are 50 different types of tree fruit and vegetable growing in that one field all together. And they, you know, this idea of no dig and zero till and stuff.

You know, I see farmers not just in Africa, but all over the global south particularly, they don't plow, they till the soil. They are continually adding organic material as and when they can't afford vast amounts of chemical inputs.

And although they grow modern cultivars to sell in the market, actually the ones that matter to them that they keep for their family, which they survive on, are those farmers varieties that they and their families and their predecessors have been maintaining for generations.

What gives you hope?

I'm very positive.

I'm a huge optimist because apart from anything else, the heroes that I've met and write about in the book and the crops that they champion actually are the solution and are being seen by more and more people and countries as the solution.

You know, when Andhra Pradesh in India says that it will have a million farmers growing in an agro ecological way and already hundreds of thousands of those farmers have seen their livelihoods improve, their quality of life, improve, their standard of living, improve, to me, that is a very good reason to be cheerful.

What's your advice to us as gardeners then? This is the season. When we get out there, we start buying seeds, we start sowing seeds.

First of all, I would buy seeds wherever possible from the new generation of seed growers and breeders. You know, I mentioned names, Real Seeds in West Wales, Tamar and Vital down in the south west, the Wales Seed Hub.

If you want to grow things that are already well adapted to growing in our climate and you won't be disappointed. They're also importing seeds and introducing the gardener to lots of new varieties that can really flourish here.

And they all encourage their gardeners to save seeds themselves, you know, and you'd think, my goodness me, this isn't a very good business model. But actually it's a fabulous way to think about seeds as commons. So that's where I go for my seeds.

Our Plant Stories is an independent podcast presented and to produced by me, Sally Flatman. Taking a moment to rate and review it helps it to grow and find new audiences and you can support it through Buy Me a Coffee.

The link is in the show notes.