{"id":7068415,"date":"2026-09-27T16:14:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T16:14:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/agriculture\/restarting-the-relationship-with-seeds-agricultural-biodiversity-weblog\/"},"modified":"2026-09-27T16:14:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T16:14:15","slug":"restarting-the-relationship-with-seeds-agricultural-biodiversity-weblog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7068415","title":{"rendered":"Restarting the relationship with seeds \u2013 Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Two recent stories about Indigenous seed rematriation sparked some reminiscing, and a reflection  about what genebanks might need to do differently.<\/p>\n<p>In her Ambrook piece, <a href=\"https:\/\/ambrook.com\/offrange\/crops\/a-braided-heritage\">Emma Glassman-Hughes<\/a> follows the return of ancestral corn to Wampanoag and Nipmuc communities in the northeastern US. While <a href=\"https:\/\/forthewild.world\/listen\/rowen-m-white-on-seed-rematriation-and-fertile-resistance-encore-291\">Rowen White<\/a>, who is a Seed Keeper and farmer from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, explores the cultural and spiritual meaning of seeds, farming and \u201cfertile resistance\u201d in a conversation with For the Wild. Now, I don\u2019t think that formal genebanks were involved in either case, but together the two pieces raise an intriguing question for them: what happens to the knowledge that travels with a seed when the seed comes home?<\/p>\n<p>White talks about seeds as relatives: carriers of relationships, cultural memory and knowledge. Glassman-Hughes\u2019s story makes the problem more tangible, if less poetic. Metacom corn has returned to Wampanoag land after roughly 350 years, but the people, landscape and farming conditions have changed in the meantime. No complete set of instructions came with the seeds. But even if they had, they probably wouldn\u2019t be much use now. People had to experiment, observe and learn again.<\/p>\n<p>I think that\u2019s an interesting lesson. We tend to think of traditional knowledge as something that can be documented when an accession is collected and then preserved and made use of, much like the seeds themselves. But information that was useful to a farmer even just a generation ago may no longer be relevant in changed circumstances. Some knowledge may have been lost, some may have evolved, and new knowledge emerges when people start growing the crop again.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ve talked about this here before. Back in 2010, I wrote about a <a href=\"https:\/\/agro.biodiver.se\/2010\/01\/taro-gets-the-social-networking-treatment\/\">social media exchange between taro breeders<\/a> in Hawaii, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. A video posted by breeder John Cho sparked a conversation in which people translated results, identified promising hybrids, compared performance in different countries and even discovered discrepancies in the identity of some material. I asked then whether this kind of open-ended discussion might be more useful for encouraging the use of crop diversity in genebanks than conventional accession-by-descriptor tables.<\/p>\n<p>A week later, I pushed the idea further, asking whether genebank documentation needed a \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/agro.biodiver.se\/2010\/01\/does-germplasm-documentation-need-a-social-networking-makeover\/\">social networking makeover<\/a>.\u201d My point wasn\u2019t that we should abandon databases. (Although\u2026) I was trying to put the people using and evaluating germplasm at the centre, allowing their observations, questions and experiences to accumulate around the accession, while still feeding validated information into structured databases. <\/p>\n<p>If knowledge about a seed changes as people grow it, select it, use it and adapt it, then a genebank accession\u2019s record is just a starting point, not the last word. When material is returned to cultivation, what people learn about it should have a way of flowing back into the conservation system. So it can be used by the next in line.<\/p>\n<p>Rematriation is not just returning seeds, it is restarting a relationship with those seeds. That doesn\u2019t mean every genebank needs a community liaison officer. (Although\u2026) Nor should genebanks romanticise traditional knowledge or assume that a community\u2019s current practices are frozen remnants of the past. It does mean recognising that seeds have a social life, and that the knowledge surrounding them changes too. The practical challenge is to build conservation systems that can value not only what we know about an accession when we put it away, but what people learn about it when we bring it back. And that, fundamentally, means recognizing that those people should have a stake in the genebank documentation system. That\u2019s far from the case now.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two recent stories about Indigenous seed rematriation sparked some reminiscing, and a reflection about what genebanks might need to do differently. In her Ambrook piece, Emma Glassman-Hughes follows the return of ancestral corn to Wampanoag and Nipmuc communities in the northeastern US. While Rowen White, who is a Seed Keeper and farmer from the Mohawk [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12026],"tags":[13743,14528,17663,49533,20597,32125],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7068415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agriculture","tag-agricultural","tag-biodiversity","tag-relationship","tag-restarting","tag-seeds","tag-weblog"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Restarting the relationship with seeds \u2013 Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7068415\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Restarting the relationship with seeds \u2013 Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Two recent stories about Indigenous seed rematriation sparked some reminiscing, and a reflection about what genebanks might need to do differently. 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