The Place of Partnerships

In a meeting this week, I put forward the proposal that if we're serious about food resilience in the UK, all agricultural universities should host a Seed Bank (or Seed Multiplier Unit) with an associated mandate to grow, maintain and multiply seed (after all, agriculture is more than just meat, dairy and arable grains.)

The logic is this:

• We know that the UK is not food secure or resilient - this goes for seed even more so than it does for food (just no one 'sees' seed)

• Most of our horticultural seed comes from warmer, drier countries with longer growing seasons. If those supplies are disrupted (climate, blockade, trade restrictions) we will be left without.

• Horticultural seed that is imported is not genetically well-suited to our climate - which makes the role of local/bioregional production so crucial - (see the Wales Seed Hub, Real Seeds, Seeds of Scotland, Vital seeds for great indie seed Cos in your area)

• Recently I've been interviewing some of the UK's independent seed producers, not only are they struggling in a regulatory system build for economies of scale, but one noted "if we [independent veg seed producers} make up even 1% of the UK's horticultural seed production, I'd be surprised".

• Wars and conflict have shown us that Seed Banks and seed hubs are often targeted (because they're so crucial to food security for a population) - the Hebron Seed Multiplier unit in Palestine was destroyed in 2025, and with it centuries of cultural heritage, and food security for Palestinians. A distributed network of Seed Banks means security.

• Warwick University has a genebank which holds 14,000 samples of vegetable crop seed - but this is one location. Like Hebron, it's loss could have a huge impact.

As illustrated in 'From Just in Time to Just in Case" by Prof Tim Lang, et al (2025) - these centralised systems are vulnerable. Resilience comes from distributed networks. The key - the aim - is to design in redundancy.

In this case, we could imagine every Agricultural University as a central node in the 'Decentralised' system... or better yet, we could create a resilient Distributed system of seed banks across the nation - formal as suggested above (well organised, resourced, with useful tech and infrastructure), professional seed growers at farms of all scales, as well as informal community initiatives, seed savers, home gardeners and trainers (like our friends at the Gaia Foundation Seed Sovereignty Programme and at Garden Organic's Heritage Seed Library).

"In the case of horticultural seed production, small is beautiful - and in the hands of many, we have a stronger more secure food system - one bolstered by a nation of seed savers with the knowledge to not only protect our ancestral food heritage, but to hold it for future generations, while nourishing the present."

And let's not forget what which could offer to students... The students at our agricultural universities will be inheriting a broken food system and having to reinvent it on the fly, in the most challenging of circumstances, while bearing the heavy responsibility of feeding the nation.

• A network of Ag-University Seed Hubs would demonstrate in-situ to students just how important seed is to agriculture and our food security.

• It would be a way of introducing horticulture into the programme offer and curriculum of the University and could host a wide offering of academic avenues.

• No longer would seed be an invisible 'input' on a farmer's spreadsheet ordered along with all its inputs from a multi-national org, but a real living thing to be tended and cultivated for future generations. This is where regenerative systems thinking can take root - outside of a reductive, extractive systems.

Last year I was speaking to a university lecturer who works in food resilience, consulting regularly with DEFRA and the Ministry of Defence. I spoke to him about seed as a blind-spot in CFR conversations, and about food partnerships within the Sustainable Food Places network working on Civil Food Resilience. He was floored - he had no idea that this grassroots-level capacity building was happening across the UK and compared it to the county agricultural offices in War time. He fully agreed that the government doesn't 'get' food resilience in a 'systems thinking' way. The Defence community is thinking hard about food though. Let that one settle in.

At the Shropshire Good Food Partnership, our central focus is on building food systems resilience - but like the distributed network, this means that we aren't focusing on just one thing. It's a matter of weaving together initiatives, actions, people, networks, sectors, levels of governance, institutions, steps in the food chain. This is where systems thinking is a superpower - it lets us see the gaps and we can flag those to key people in different spaces.

We plant seeds. Lots of them, all over the place.