Seed Sharing, Growing, and The Gaia Seed Conference

Thank you to our guest blogger Ed Macdonald, a local organic grower and member of the CAG growing collaborate group for this insightful blog. We'll be back in 2026 with part 2 of this blog series from Marta who coordinates the growing collaborate and will be sharing more from this group.

This Autumn, I attended the first in-person Gaia Seed Sovereignty Conference. Hosted at the Centre for Alternative Technology near Machynlleth in mid Wales. The event was a full-on and fascinating weekend for growers from all over the UK (and beyond) to share practical wisdom.

Having completed the Gaia Foundation’s year-long training course (1 evening per month with several site visits), I appreciated the chance to connect with other growers (after a long dry summer), learn directly from leading figures in the UK seed sovereignty movement and be part of this renaissance in seed saving.

For those that hadn’t considered it, saving your own seed is a fairly radical act of resistance to a market where crop diversity is dwindling. Breeding is increasingly limited to a few major seed companies and therefore the range of grains, fruit and vegetables marketed even by organic growers is narrow and homogeneous. In the context of a changing climate, this undermines food security, making markets vulnerable to environmental shocks and disease pressures.

Saving your own seed is a fairly radical act of resistance to a market where crop diversity is dwindling.

In contrast, saving seed year after year enables crop varieties to adapt to local soils, microclimates and ecological contexts, becoming more resilient as populations. Seed-saving also enables unusual, heritage or new varieties to be preserved or developed and

shared, increasing the diversity of foods that are available to local communities. This helps make food networks a little more self-reliant, empowered and ‘sovereign’. Honing and sharing these skills helps to build the capacity of growers at all levels to adapt and learn from one another, which is what the Gaia seed gathering is all about.

The CAG Community Growers Collaborate Group sharing seeds at the latest meet-up at Asthall Manor Kitchen Garden.

Highlights from the conference included round tables with small commercial seed companies in Pembrokeshire and Devon and panel discussions between non-profit community seed libraries in places like Liverpool and Glasgow, addressing various key topics from organic certification to membership and outreach. There were also some intriguing practical drop-in sessions from the likes of the soil ecology lab (casually saw a nematode nibbling at a mycorhizal hypha), which helped demystify concepts that might otherwise be shrouded in jargon.

Another practical session showed people how to get seed from a dry crop through basic threshing, winnowing and sieving, also showing how to build a clever machine to do this

more easily. Drop-in Zine making sessions went on in a back room throughout, and then of course there was a seed swap, which enabled growers to exchange surplus seed from some of their favourite and possibly quite unusual varieties.

After lunch on Sunday, I offered farm-grown and home-made tomato puree (passata) for passers by to taste, as long as they gave some (not too long-winded) feedback on the four different varieties available. It turned out that the tomatoes, which are a favourite at our CSA (Five Acre Community Farm, Coventry) as raw salad ingredients, didn’t make the most popular passata, whilst a variety which didn’t go down well in their raw form made a real crowd-pleasing passata. The winner, of course, was a variety grown by my mother on her allotment (tasty both raw and cooked!). Besides being a fun activity, this feedback was useful and hopefully inspiring to others in planning next year’s crops with a view to cooking and preserving some of them, a closely related aspect of food sovereignty.

Community Growers Collaborate group meets at Asthall Manor Kitchen Garden

Having returned inspired, it was wonderful to hear at a local Oxfordshire community growers' collaborate meeting (facilitated by CAG Oxfordshire and hosted by Asthall Manor Kitchen Garden) that there is widespread interest in seed saving and indeed some initiatives at seed sharing, including a seed library or two. Sharing across this emergent network has since been channelled into providing seed for local community growing workshops and offering emergency seeds for the family of a local person who are farmers affected by hurricanes in the Caribbean – a good example of thinking globally and acting locally. Hopefully, these efforts will continue to grow in capacity, learning from others elsewhere.