Seed Cluster Education project
If we want community food security we need to find ways of teaching people about the 'value' of seed in their food.
Local ‘Clusters’ of experienced trained people need to be identified, trained and mobilized in maintaining conservation of native and agricultural crop varieties adapted to the local growing region. Seed storage facilities need to be created to house the seed.
These seed banks can contain emergency preparedness seed stocks for a community as well as a working collection of seed to be used annually by growers.
This builds on the 1989 vision Sharon Rempel had in designing 'Seedy Saturday'. This document provides an outline for a community to create a Seed Cluster.
We need to fund farmers to bulk up quantities of open pollinated basic food crops for purchase by the Clusters. Farmers should not be expected to finance production of food as well as producing the seed for next year's crops.
We need to distribute the seed to Seed Clusters and train people to manage local seed collections. This will form a part of a ‘cluster’ that each local area will form to continue to research, identify varieties and bulk up seed.
The project allows interface with university researchers who are interested in mapping variety adaptation to land; GIS; geography, environment and agronomy interactions; organic agriculture to reduce CO2 emissions; organic plant breeders, plant and disease pathologists and entomologists and people interested in enhancing the nutritional aspects of food crops. It’s a wonderful local opportunity for students to experience agriculture and to train with experts who are in the community.
Seed varieties will adapt in each region. It’s important that the local ‘cluster’ identify curators and seed guardians for each variety. These growers will provide seed to the medium and long tern (Saskatoon seed bank) seed banks. They will also ensure that stocks of all community seed plants are maintained in a diversity of gardens and fields to ensure the survival of the core lines.
Networking with international organizations that are involved in global action strategies to conserve biodiversity of both agricultural crops and native plants will ensure that Canada is practicing ‘benefit sharing’ of information and seed.