Banking on seed
The future of food is reliant on viable seed. The adaptability of open pollinated crops is well documented, but the majority of seed preservation is conducted through a gene bank model, storing seed in a cold store or freezer.
Alongside this, great work is being done at a community level up and down the UK to actively grow and share seed through seed libraries.
In 2025, The Third Report on the State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture documented the current status of diversity, conservation and use of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture to food security. It set out the need to foster greater cooperation among breeders, gene banks, farmers and community seed banks to enhance the adoption of a diverse range of well-adapted quality seeds and planting materials. Both banks and libraries have an important role to play in preservation and access to cultivated biodiversity.
The role of seed banks and libraries 🔗
Community seed libraries have played an important role in conserving and sharing varieties. Just like a library, growers may have the option to ‘borrow’ the seed with the intention of harvesting and returning a new generation of seed back to the library for others to use.
Our Heritage Seed Library (HSL) is the oldest community seed bank in Europe and currently home to a living collection of 800-plus heritage varieties, sharing around 30,000 seed samples with members each year. We are also helped by a network of more than 200 volunteer Seed Guardians who grow and return seed to support our heritage seed conservation work.
Communities often run seed libraries in their local area, growing and collecting seed that perform well, and it’s this dynamic relationship between seed and grower that helps establish and preserve locally suitable crops. The London Freedom Seed Bank is a great example of a dedicated network of food growers and gardeners saving, storing and sharing open-pollinated seed.
Research and breeding 🔗
The UK’s network of gene banks also has a strong presence in conserving plant biodiversity with 850,000 samples of plant material secured.
Most are wild species, crop wild relatives or forage species, rather than cultivated food crops, conserved as seed and other germplasm for research and breeding. In the case of most seed, decades of shelf life can be secured in frozen storage.
For example, Warwick University’s UK Vegetable Genebank (UKVGB) contains approximately 14,000 samples of vegetable crop seed, with a wide range of plant diversity accessible to plant breeders and researchers. These largely include root and leafy vegetables such as carrots, onions, cabbages, cauliflowers and lettuce, but the collections also include crop wild relatives and landraces (a variety that has become adapted to local conditions) – an important pool of genetic diversity. Gene banks also act as secure depositories for other site’s collections. For example, UKVGB acts as a back-up collection for the Heritage Seed Library, conserving a duplicate set of samples in frozen storage.
Seed banks preserve vast genetic diversity under controlled conditions, and these seeds may remain static samples with the primary aim of conserving a wide range of genetic traits. Regeneration of seed may be infrequent to keep that pool of genetic diversity with as little change as possible. In contrast, community seed saving involves actively and regularly growing, selecting and adapting seeds in real-world, local environments. This dynamic process puts people at the heart of the solution and allows seeds to evolve traits that better suit rapidly changing climates – such as drought tolerance, heat resistance, or pest resilience – through natural selection and grower-led breeding.
Both have an important role to play in conserving the genetic diversity needed to develop better adapted plants.
Who conserves seeds? 🔗
Our experience of producing heritage seed underpins the case for having a diverse range of plants regularly sown to identify and maximise adaptability, viability and productivity.
Different varieties of the same crop grown side-by-side respond differently to growing conditions. Our 170 cultivars of common or French bean alone carry anecdotal reports of resilience to drought, pests and disease. The process of regenerating seed of runner beans at our HQ, for example, each isolated from cross-pollination but all exposed to the same heat wave or cold start to the growing season, presents a significant opportunity. The stark contrast between those varieties that shrug off the challenge, those that bounce back quickly and those that really can’t cope, provides valuable performance data.
Each year, the HSL team conducts growing trials on newly discovered varieties thriving in local gardens and plots, and we search for underutilised and heirloom crops that have been cultivated for their seed.
We’ve also been delighted to collaborate with gene banks such as the UKVGB to trial and reintroduce heritage varieties into use and actively conserve as part of the library collection.
Our current project Sowing your Seeds, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, has illustrated how collaboration can bridge the roles of seed libraries and gene banks.
In 2025, we started our first trials of 10 gene bank seed samples and successfully collected seed, phenotype and performance data, including from old ex-commercial varieties and underutilised species such as orach and purslane. The opportunity to exchange seed and data brings together expertise and resources, to connect genetic resources and real-time use and conservation, as well as putting seed back in the hands of growers.