For the Love of Plants

In a world where humans are increasingly disconnected from nature, our relationship with plants and the land that sustains us feels more fragile than ever. Humanity faces immense social, political, and environmental challenges, and many people are feeling a strong call to action in their lives. As someone who has spent the last 25 years immersing myself in the world of seed conservation and plant breeding alongside others who believe that preserving biodiversity is key to a more sustainable future, I believe one of our most important sources of hope is in the quiet resilience of seeds and the stories they carry.

With 2024 being the 100-year anniversary of Nikolai Vavilov’s groundbreaking theory on centers of crop origin, I can’t help but wonder: what would he think of the state of agriculture today? Have we honored his legacy, or have we strayed too far from the symbiotic relationship between people, plants, and the land? The answers may lie in the seeds we’ve saved—and the relationships we’ve lost along the way.

Since Vavilov published his ideas about where to find the greatest diversity of wild ancestors and close relatives of different food crops, they quickly became foundational to modern plant breeding world-wide even though tragically he would later be starved for his scientific beliefs.  Efforts around the globe have focused on building and maintaining seed and plant collections to preserve crop diversity before it disappears from places where it originated. Today these are primarily managed as a resource for the world’s scientists and plant breeders to study and use for crop improvement.

When thinking about his legacy a century later, I try to imagine how it might have changed our relationship to food and agriculture today had Vavilov reframed his theory as “centers of coevolution” instead of centers of origin—or even “centers of diversity” later used by American agronomist Jack Harlan. If preserving the human relationships with the plants and land was regarded as equally important to preserving the crop diversity, would we see the definition of these centers expand to include the culture as well as the geography? Instead of looking to crop diversity extractively as a disappearing reservoir of useful traits to be rescued by skilled scientists trained to preserve the world’s resources, would it be also regarded as a renewable resource that can still be generated by anyone, anywhere? 

The growing loss of relationship between plants, people, and land at the everyday level of human existence threatens not only the diversity from primary centers of origin where crops were first domesticated, and the secondary centers of diversity where further adaptation and diversification historically took place but also unknown iterations of what that could look like still to come. Putting all our faith into businesses, governmental institutions, and nonprofit organizations, to take over the responsibility of preserving our collective heritage—which are understandably limited by their own constraints and sometimes short-sightedness—puts the future of crop diversity at risk just as much as the existential threats we face like war and climate change. 

I once had a professor, who taught the history of world vegetable crops, challenge the class to imagine what kinds of new crops we might domesticate today that weren’t already. I loved this question—ever since imagining how edible wild plants that humans frequently forage could metamorphosize into new forms with a little time and attention, or how existing crops could be further diversified by ongoing coevolution between plants and people.

One of the most fascinating real-world examples we have to look at for inspiration is in Brassica crops, which were independently selected for different plant parts (i.e. roots, leaves, stems, flowers, flower buds) by different cultures in different regions of the world. By selecting from a wild green within the edible species Brassica oleracea that grew across the Mediterranean and northern Europe for example, we came to have vegetables like kale, collards, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts. In a closely related species called Brassica rapa, different cultures across Asia created vegetables like napa cabbage, mizuna, bok choy, tatsoi, and turnips.

Another interesting historical example is the secondary diversification of apples following the movement of peoples and apple seeds from one continent to another during the time of European diasporas to the Americas. Because of the government’s incentive at the time to grow apple trees on land as a way to establish land rights, a tremendous amount of apple seeds were planted during a rapid wave of expansion of new people occupying these lands. The remnant trees and orchards that remain represent a unique set of apple diversity when compared to the apples growing in the continents of Asia and Europe—including characteristics that are useful for fresh eating, storage, baking, canning, and cider.

Within the seed industry framework of plant breeding, the ability to pursue opportunities for crop improvement within market classes that are outside of the “standard” categories (let alone explore all new ones) is rather limited due to very real business constraints—even within the most creative and innovative companies. Although varieties with unique or novel colors, sizes, shapes are more widely available than ever before, these are far less focused on unless there is an incentive to do so. Because of this fact, not only does maintenance of older open-pollinated and heirloom varieties commonly suffer within the industry, but whole crops or market categories are sometimes abandoned or just never really given a chance to reach their potential.

With the massive shift in traits being focused on by business entities in comparison to the generations of people who previously selected them, what are we missing out on that could be important to our future survival as a species? Will these choices we’ve made in recent history come back to hurt us later?

We can look towards university plant breeding programs with some hope to be able to explore agricultural opportunities that fall outside of the typical seed business model. Yet these programs too are competing for limited funds, and support for projects outside of the commodity or mainstream crops is extremely limited – not to mention that much of this work ultimately feeds back into the same industry pipeline. The very ground on which the research farms carry out their work is also increasingly at risk of being on the chopping block as leadership changes happen and college budgets get cut or future revenue-generating opportunities considered.

While there are careful preservation strategies in place at gene banks like Seed Savers Exchange, the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and others throughout the world who care for the already existing diversity that has been collected – none of these are impervious to the same challenges and risks as the industry and academia are. The seed collections held by gene banks in Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq have been damaged or destroyed in recent periods of war, while a collection in the Philippines was affected by both a flood and a fire. The institute Vavilov started himself nearly faced ruin—not once but twice—due to war and economic factors in Russia over the last century. Svalbard too—which is designed to be the world’s back-up seed vault, representing 13,000 years of agricultural history buried in a mountain in the arctic circle for safe-keeping—has even once been affected by permafrost melts as the world’s weather patterns change. This has led to some recent consideration of even putting a gene bank on the moon as conditions on this planet become more unpredictable.

Unfortunately even the strongest public entities here on earth (or perhaps elsewhere one day) can suffer from lack of critical funding, climate change, war, and other very real existential threats—the same things faced by Vavilov and his colleagues 100 years ago—and more. While the crops in the care of these places are stored in state-of-the-art ways intended for these living libraries to last a very long time, the schedules for regeneration of the varieties (i.e. growing them out and making new seed) can also sometimes be on the scale of decades or longer due to insufficient resources to do so more frequently. I can’t help but wonder – is this timeframe sufficient for evolution and adaptation to occur, given the world around us is changing at such a rapid pace?

It gives me hope to see so many promising examples emerging that we can look to for ideas and inspiration. From the vaults of these gene banks and the pages of seed company catalogs, the ancient connections between humans, plants, and land are being rethread in many new and lovely forms. My worldview of possibility has greatly expanded through learning about the inspiring work happening across different pockets of the seed community. 

The most accessible and powerful form of seed work I’ve seen happens when descendants of various cultures in the U.S. reconnect with the seeds and foods of their ancestors—and parallel international efforts to recover the seeds and heritage lost from their countries of origin but preserved through the immigrant diasporas to America. Additionally, community celebrations of culturally and regionally significant food crops and culinary traditions offer really meaningful ways to unite people from all walks of life to honor, preserve, and enjoy biodiversity.

The proliferation of educational resources empowering home gardeners and farmers to save their own seeds or breed their own flowers and vegetables is another beacon of hope shining a bright light on the future potential of crop diversity. With these tools, more grassroots and participatory models of crop preservation are becoming possible—including community science programs that are helping evaluate and regenerate seeds in gene bank collections, and plant breeding efforts focused on creating new crop diversity, particularly with climate adaptation in mind.

The world I hope to see us living in is one where more people are rooted in stronger connections to plants and land; the depths of the crop heritage revealed by Vavilov and others since is thriving as well as still evolving by adapting to new climates and cultures; and the human experience is rich from our love of plants. If this makes you curious and want to take more action, there are a lot of ways you can get involved, even if you can’t grow plants or save seeds personally, just being mindful of choices you can make about the food you eat and buy is a profound place to start. Support local, grow a garden, cook a meal, donate to a cause, save a seed or just savor good food.