Seed Banks

What if something tragic happens tomorrow and everything was washed away. Our dependency on a limited amount of crops would not be a good thing. I had never given much thought to seed banks before reading an article called, “Sowing For Apocalypse”. What do we need to survive? Shelter, water and food. Seed banks takes care of one of these three by securing our future in case anything goes wrong with a large variety of foods, including ones used for medicinal uses. The article talked about how Honduras and Nicaragua both lost their national seed banks due to natural disasters. But will they have enough time to reproduce the seed banks before another disaster hits? Although these banks are extremely important to secure our futures, they are so frail and can disappear at anytime. How ironic, the one thing that’s powerful enough to determine our futures is also one of the easiest things to vanish.

The article also had information on the national seed bank, the Fort Knox of seed located at Fort Collins, Colorado. This impressive bank holds over 250,000 seeds, including backups for international seeds as well. It sounds laborious enough just collecting and organizing the seeds, but the seeds that come in from the field all have to go through a certain treatment before going into storage. It makes me sad to think of all the hard work and time spent on creating these seed banks, in the US as well as in other countries, and to know that in another second everything could be gone. In another reading, the book, All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki, the elderly parents try to get their storage of seeds out to the public. Over the past years, they have patiently and carefully collected a large amount of seeds and now that their health is failing, they decide to share their collection so that the seeds will continue to grow long after they’re gone.

These readings got me thinking about the basics and what would happen if factories stopped working, or if one of the few crops we are highly dependent on fails. Luckily, there are people out there that think much further than I do and have already started preparing.

“The greatest service which can be rendered to any country is to add useful plants to its culture”- Thomas Jefferson