Seedbanks:
Caring for the Future Article by Jessica Kirby
“I don’t think we have the option of despair. Hope is a duty. It is something we cultivate with daily consciousness through our actions.” —Vandana Shiva, environmental activist
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here are more than 1,000 seed vaults around the world—places where natural and heirloom seeds are stored, saved, and studied in a global effort to preserve them. They are both a symbol of hope and of worry, but most importantly, they introduce tangible acknowledgement of the importance of biodiversity. Seeds vaults are as diverse as their regions. The Millennium Seed Bank Project, located at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, United Kingdom, currently stores samples of the country’s entire native plant population, including several hundred endangered species. The oldest seed bank in the world is the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry in Russia. It was established in 1894 in St. Petersburg and is named after Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian biologist and plant breeder who was one of the first scientists to understand the importance of crop diversity. The Berry Botanic Garden in Portland, OR, houses seeds from endangered plants of the Pacific Northwest; the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia holds cassava, forages, and beans; and The International Potato Center in Lima, Peru is home to various potato species. The International Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria preserves groundnut, cowpea, soybean, and yam, and the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos, Philippines, is a place for preserving— you guessed it—rice.
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The world’s largest and most famous seed vault is Svalbard Global Seed Vault on Spitsbergen, part of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, and it may one day save our lives. Millions of seeds representing more than 930,000 varieties of food crops are stored in this incredible building, constructed in an abandoned Artic coal mine. “Inside this building is 13,000 years of agricultural history,” said Brian Lainoff, lead partnerships coordinator of the Crop Trust, which manages the vault, in an article in Time magazine.
The world’s largest and most famous seed vault is Svalbard Global Seed Vault on Spitsbergen, part of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, and it may one day save our lives. The Vault was built a decade ago as a safeguard—if a nuclear war or global warming, for instance, threatens specific crops, governments will be granted access to seeds from the vault to restart their agricultural industries. In 2015, researchers withdrew seeds from Svalbard to create seed banks in Morocco and Lebanon after the region’s
central seed bank in Aleppo, Syria, was damaged during the country’s civil war. The seeds have since been regrown and were redeposited at the Vault in 2017. Closer to home, in April 2019, a labour of love with seeds at its heart began a new chapter in Southern Ontario. The Heirloom Seed Sanctuary, tended for two decades by the Sisters of Providence of St. Vincent de Paul, holds nearly 300 varieties, some of which date back to the 1500s. Its seeds are being gifted to the Kingston Area Seed System Initiative (KASSI) and to Ratinenhayen: thos—which in Mohawk means, “They are farmers of seeds”—based in the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory west of nearby Napanee. The Heirloom Seed Sanctuary began in 1999 at the Sisters of Providence property in Kingston, Ontario, with a collection donated by Napanee farmers Carol and Robert Mouck. “Now it is time for the sisters to cease this ministry, to let the descendants of the original seeds to move again to responsible and caring organizations,” said Sister Sandra Shannon at a ceremony during which the seeds changed hands. “We have confidence that the seeds have found, once again, good homes in which they will be treasured for the future,” said Shannon in a story in the Kingston Whig Standard.“It is with pleasure that we pledge that we will pass these seeds on.” Cate Henderson is head gardener at Sisters
