‘If you control seed, you control the whole system’

Year after year, gardeners and growers usher small seeds into trays of soil or scatter them onto the land and wait for tiny green shoots to appear. This has been the process for thousands of years, since humans began leading agrarian lives. It began with our ancestors collecting seeds from the wild forms of the food crops we eat today. Then, from season to season, generation to generation, they grew the crops and saved seeds in a cyclical and reciprocal relationship between plants and people.

Crops travelled the world as our ancestors migrated and took