Oral histories tell that rice from West Africa was transplanted to the Americas by enslaved women, the seeds braided into their hair to smuggle the staple crop across the notorious Middle Passage. Many years later, enslaved men in Georgia would be freed and granted land by the British in exchange for their service in the 1812 war. What they took with them to Trinidad, and into a new, free life, were grains of red rice, descended from African varieties like those brought to North America by their forebears. Inscribed in the seed is not only the potential for new growth, for food and for development, but also the histories of places travelled and climates weathered.

The story of seeds is, quite often, the story of human survival: of migration, preservation, flourishing and ruin. It is a struggle over who owns the rights to seeds and, by extension, who has the right to grow food, to harness nature’s reproductive power freely and without artificial constraints. It was in plain brown envelopes that free seeds were distributed to farmers first by the agricultural wing of the U.S. Patent Office and then, from 1862, by the newly-founded USDA. This free seed program was an attempt to support farmers and improve and diversify crops grown in what was, at the time, an overwhelmingly rural society. By 1900, over one billion packets of seed had been sent to farmers across the USA, laying the foundations for a kind of agricultural development rooted in free exchange of resources and in individual creativity on the part of farmers, who worked hard to breed the best-yielding, most resilient and most tasteful plants to yield cultivars such as Red Fyfe wheat and Rough Purple Chili potato.

But with the formation of the American Seed Trade Association in 1883, a backlash to the program began to swell, seed companies rallying together to protect their financial and intellectual interests against what they perceived to be a threat to entrepreneurship. Farmers weren’t protected in their breeding developments, with other growers able to take those painstakingly cultivated varieties and claim them as their own. Without intellectual protection, profitability from breeding developments was low and investment poor. After several decades of fervent lobbying, the seed program was disbanded by Congress in 1923.

What happened over the next few decades has been widely publicised and frequently condemned. Seed companies began to focus their capital and energy on hybrid seeds, which are infertile after the first generation, meaning that farmers are often compelled to buy new seed every growing season, no longer able to hold back a handful of seed in a bag or a box someplace, ready to be resurrected next year. These seeds are called terminator seeds thanks to their ingrained finality, as if each tiny grain is a decisive full stop.

Slowly, seed companies merged and were bought out, a diverse cast of growers and breeders funnelled into an increasingly narrow gene pool. Today, as Dan Barber has reported, four multinational agrochemical firms control over 60% of global seed sales. And with this power is the freedom to channel money into genetic developments in agriculture that take the seed out of the common grasp and plant it in the realm of the commodity, the intellectual property of a multinational company. A landmark US lawsuit in 1980, Diamond v. Chakrabarty, laid the groundwork for this commodification of seeds, when the court ruled that patents could be obtained for living organisms. These patents, as they began to be handed out to the seed firms, prohibited the seeds from being freely distributed, even for research purposes.

There is, of course, a promise implicit in these seeds — a claim that tempts agriculturalists even as it denies them their old freedoms. The seeds that farmers are sold by multinational seed companies have behind them the weight of cutting-edge agricultural research, technology and thinking. The claim is that these seeds will be high-yielding, efficient, pest-resistant and hardy, and that they will provide a more consistent product. These are, we might be led to believe, precisely the kind of cultivars that we might need to feed a rapidly growing, hungry global population. This was the founding ideology for the so-called green revolution: a kind of agricultural modernism that would drag farmers out of the time-old furrows they have ploughed and into a bigger, better, more bountiful way of farming, an agriculture in step with the rhythms of the 21st century.

One problem for many farmers, growers and environmentalists is that even when these commercial seeds deliver on their promises, they do so at the expense of the environments in which they’re sown. When commercial seed companies skew their research towards the success of monoculture crops — huge plantations of a single crop on industrial scale, often of staple crops like corn, wheat or soy — they insist on an ecology that flattens biodiversity and eliminates natural variation. As Michael Pollan has noted: if potato monocultures risk being devastated by Colorado potato beetles, the solution, in the eyes of the seed industry, is to eliminate that beetle via pesticides, via selective breeding of the potato cultivars and even through genetic modification of the potato, introducing genes from a bacterial strain that produces a natural insecticide. The solution is seldom, if ever, to question the efficacy of vast, densely-packed landscapes comprised exclusively of that beetle’s favourite food.

Eighty percent of Europe’s biodiversity has been lost over the last century, in no small part thanks to the suffocating patchwork of large-scale, monoculture crops that carpet our countryside. Where biodiversity is allowed to flourish, ecological niches have a way of regulating themselves. This process isn’t always particularly efficient, nor is it failsafe in the way that top-down interventions such as genetic engineering might claim to be. But where no space is left for accident — or variety, mishap, mutation or happenstance — to pierce through, crops are left vulnerable. When the genepool is narrow and the planting dense, one disease has the potential to obliterate a harvest. When the intricate web of an entire ecosystem is stripped down to only its ‘useful’ or ‘productive’ elements, the natural system of checks and balances, predators and prey, is erased. In a world subject to such rapid, even unprecedented environmental change, this rigidity should give us cause for concern: when your cultivar has been painstakingly optimised for the minutiae of the here and now, what happens when circumstances, and climates, change?

With biodiversity being eroded and with farming technologies monopolised by an increasingly powerful few, the matter of saving seeds is not just about safeguarding the future of global food supplies — it is also about saving an endangered past. In the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, artist Vivien Sansour collects, saves, plants and shares seeds that are on the brink of being lost. She has revived the jadu’i, an ancient variety of watermelon prized for its sweetness and flavour. There are courgettes that can survive with barely any rain through the arid Palestinian summers and an almost lost wheat cultivar known as Abu Samara — the dark and handsome one. As Palestinian farmers come under increasing pressure to yield to modern farming practices, the art of seed-saving becomes an act of resistance and cultural preservation. As Sansour notes, “agriculture is truly comprised of both “agri” (traditional farming practices) + “culture” (the associated lifestyle/livelihood traditions essential to a community’s identity).”

There are times when saving seeds means extracting them from our flawed systems, keeping them safe from the power of markets and industry and out of reach of environmental disaster. This is where seed banks make their fantastical entrance. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic circle is home to nearly 1,000,000 seed varieties from around the world. Sometimes referred to as a ‘doomsday vault’, its scale and seclusion speaks to the Biblical proportions of the task at hand: if the world is on the verge of climate chaos, a frozen seed repository near the North Pole becomes a kind of modern day Noah’s ark. It’s here that Cherokee Nation have recently banked seeds that are culturally and ecologically precious to them, including corn, beans and squash. They join potatoes deposited by indigenous Andean communities, 500 specimens of each variety frozen in hope of a bright new start after the storm.

Not all seed-saving efforts are so momentous: the seed resistance is as multifaceted as the diversity it seeks to protect. To save a seed, the impulse might be to hold this tiny capsule static, keeping it in a state of suspended potential. But what happens when organisms are preserved not by being frozen in time but by being rooted in the here and now, by being planted? One seed creates a hundred more, each generation enacting a kind of living, in vivo, conservation, while continuing to evolve and adapt. This is the kind of seed sharing and saving that happens in growers’ networks, in public seed libraries and in the old-fashioned practice of setting aside this year’s seed for next year’s crops. These seeds are preserved by being planted and talked about, shared, germinated, cooked, eaten: kept alive not in isolation, but in conversation with the (agri)cultures of which they necessarily form a part. This is the central paradox of the seed: it is when a seed is abandoned to the soil, allowed to break free of its own neat form and transform into something very different, that it is most itself.

Photo: Maria Bell

It was this kind of preservation this Esiah had in mind when he started to think about seeds. It was never an abstract idea for Esiah, or some ideological project — it is necessarily and inextricably bound up with the way we eat today. “Growing food is every person’s right,” he wrote on his LinkedIn resume in late 2016, setting out his mission to help other gardeners take steps towards food sovereignty. He wanted to show that growing food is possible even in the city with a full-time job and two young sons. The question of food sovereignty — the right of communities to healthy, sustainable food systems crafted by, rather than for, them — is a difficult one. The aims of legislators, producers and consumers too often pull in different directions, while in urban environments such as Esiah’s native London, communities may be disconnected from these food systems altogether by a system that allows food to appear as if by magic on supermarket shelves. Esiah knew that change would need resources and action, not just talk. No resource could be more valuable, or symbol more potent, than the seed. As environmental activist Vandana Shiva has written in her seed sharing manifesto: “Control over seed means a control over our lives, our food and our freedom.”

“I started seed saving because I wanted to do something different,” Esiah shared in a video for the Gaia Foundation. “I wanna be using what nature provides.” He didn’t trust garden centres or seed companies, and — always committed to doing things his own way — approached every piece of received garden wisdom as a rule to be broken. So when he discovered that he could collect 360 seeds from a Crown Prince squash, his interest was piqued. “I decided to share those seeds with gardeners in the UK, in Europe, around the world… and beyond.”

“Our official curiosity is a form of obedience, an indebtedness to the authorities,” writes Adam Phillips in Attention Seeking. Our unofficial curiosity, however, is a reckless, dreamy place. This is where the real magic happens. “It is the difference between knowing what we are doing, and following our eyes.” Esiah hatched a plan.

The produce he grew in his little garden — dense, sweet terracotta squash flesh, stalks of blushing rhubarb, the striped heirloom tomatoes — would be cooked and eaten, filling the bellies of Esiah and his young family. Meanwhile, seeds from those plants would be fastidiously dried, stored and labelled. Esiah would then send the seeds free of charge to whoever wanted them. All recipients had to do was to cover the cost of postage and to share the fruit of their labours with friends and family, passing on their own seeds, letting others know how easy it could be. In December 2016, Esiah settled on a name for the project, and SeedsShare was born.