Seeds are rarely seen for what they truly are: the building blocks of agricultural systems that determine how our food is produced. This is no accident. It is the result of industry taking control, progressively turning seeds into just another input in service of a growth model built on privatisation, standardisation, and homogenisation—with seeds at the hub.
As a consequence, in both farming and food production, the loss of knowledge related to seed diversity has become so pervasive that even its very absence seems to go unnoticed. Yet seed stewardship has always been inherent to working with agriculture and food.
Reintroducing this concept is crucial in building capacity for agroecological seed systems at regional levels. But how to challenge the dominant approach to seed practices, and expand access to knowledge grounded in autonomy?
In this second of a two-part series, we examine the tools and approaches that could strengthen the transmission of alternative seed knowledge and know-how, as well as the pitfalls to avoid in order to ensure their social and economic relevance. By Adèle Pautrat.
Take Our Seeds Seriously: Towards a Local Culture of Agrobiodiversity
In training courses on agriculture and food, seeds are systemically absent as a subject. The Seeds4All project facilitated a workshop to address this transmission breakdown in November 2025, at ARC2020’s rural gathering in Plessé, France.
Our aim was to explore how the reappropriation and dissemination of knowledge rooted in seed autonomy could strengthen rural development and local food sovereignty. Participants were invited to collectively imagine what meaningful seed education might entail—from dedicated modules and aligned training centers, to identifying local partners.
Key contributors included Frank Adams (seed artisan, market gardener, coordinator of SEED Luxembourg, and teacher at the Luxembourg Agricultural & Technical High School), Fazia Smail (Belgian farmer-baker), Véronique Chable (senior scientist at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research – INRA – and board member of Réseau Semences Paysannes), Emmanuel Antoine (board member of the Graines de liberté – Hadoù ar frankiz cooperative), Tijs Boelens (Belgian market gardener and cereal grower) and Sina Ribak (independent researcher working on bioeconomy, biodiversity, and solidarity).
Discussions helped in particular to revive a project originally initiated by Frank Adams several years earlier: defining the core foundations of a curriculum to support and strengthen agroecological and artisanal seed practices.
A Curriculum for High-Quality, Genetically Diverse Seeds
The idea of a seed curriculum first emerged around 2019 within the Réseau Meuse-Rhin-Moselle. Coordinators from France, Wallonia, Luxembourg, and Germany identified a gap between amateur seed-saving workshops and highly specialised university plant-breeding programmes. So, they decided to develop a curriculum that would enable people to produce high-quality, genetically diverse seeds, “somewhere between semi-professional and professional practice,” says Frank Adams.
Brought to a halt by the COVID-19 pandemic, this initiative gained new momentum at the Seeds4All workshop in Plessé, where Frank Adams and Véronique Chable facilitated a working group to pinpoint the core pillars of knowledge on seed stewardship.
The ‘why’ emerged as one central issue: why it matters to return to diverse, open-pollinated varieties. Such a curriculum should engage with the philosophical dimension of doing seed work differently from a system that centralises, standardises, and privatises seeds.
Not by direct comparison of agroecological and industrial systems—as their parameters are fundamentally different, and the performance of hybrids cannot be meaningfully compared with that of population varieties—but by going beyond technical skills to cultivate an awareness of what we contribute when we reconnect with the very essence of living systems and their natural functioning.
For Frank Adams, this sense of meaning is crucial to engage people in the demanding work of artisanal seed production:
“It’s about bringing the community back into focus, while pushing people to ask themselves: what are we doing here? (…) Because if they were to do it for financial reasons, it wouldn’t work. It’s too demanding, too intense, and without seeing the sense behind it, people wouldn’t make the effort.”
The Importance of a Holistic Approach
That participants from across Europe were gathered in Plessé to support a local initiative to create a ‘peasant university’, was particularly fitting. Once a curriculum to restore seed autonomy is created, the next step is to find the right places to embed it—and to think how it should be integrated.
As outlined in the first part of this article, a notable critique of how seeds are currently taught is that they are framed almost exclusively as an agricultural input, detached from the broader agri-food system. As a result, they are also largely absent from culinary and nutrition training, leading us to overlook their crucial importance in transforming cultivated plants into food products.
To address this gap, we need learning spaces that value transdisciplinarity, where agricultural and food projects are built around seeds.
This holistic approach is found in the Université Paysanne project in Plessé. With the ambition of offering younger generations concrete opportunities to learn about and engage with rural professions, practices and challenges, this university is being developed in partnership with dozens of local as well as trans-local initiatives, building a community of projects that can act as drivers for rural resilience.
In Belgium, Fazia Smail is pursuing a similar holistic vision. She wants to create a school where students could train simultaneously in peasant agroecology and artisanal food production—from seed selection to bread making, including soil management, operation and maintenance of agricultural machinery, nutritional aspects, and economic models.
Fazia also sees peer-to-peer transmission as playing a central role in her future school. She points to the model of compagnonnage, which has been used to pass on artisanal savoir-faire and savoir-être since the Middle Ages, and has inspired combinations of classroom and workplace learning across Europe. In France for eg, Compagnons du Devoir invite apprentices on an initiation journey—the Tour de France—to learn from their peers.
“When I give training, I always encourage people to go and see what’s happening elsewhere—to stay open and build networks. Because it’s by connecting with others that we enrich one other,” says Fazia.
These inspiring initiatives, however, are not without their challenges—which we could address during our meetings in Plessé.
Attracting Diverse Profiles is an Ongoing Challenge
At the Rural Resilience gathering, we met actors from several rural schools that teach practices linked to ecological transition. One of them was Guillaume Moraël, co-founder of the Institut de Tramayes, set up in 2021 in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, France.
Five years after opening, Guillaume says the school still struggles with a major obstacle: recruitment. Despite growing interest, it hasn’t yet reached the student numbers needed for sustainable operation.
It’s hard to stand out in a crowded educational landscape, and it takes resources to earn endorsement from public authorities and higher education guidance platforms. Plus in a context of increasing polarisation between competing agricultural ‘ideologies’, alternative approaches struggle to gain trust and recognition.
For her school, Fazia Smail envisions a solution: draw people in with an issue that resonates across professions and backgrounds—nutrition.
“Our target audience is all the young people who want to train as bakers. So, nutrition could shift perspectives. Coming to our school to learn the whole chain—from soil to bread—doesn’t mean you have to become a farmer or farmer-baker. But it gives you crucial knowledge for your craft. As a baker, it’s important to understand the whole chain: how wheat is bred, grown, milled, and how that impacts its nutritional value.”
Ultimately, one argument can be put forward: artisanal knowledge builds autonomy—and autonomy can better support the development of practices that respond to today’s intertwined social, ecological and economic challenges.
Which brings us to another key point in supporting alternative seed practices: training alone isn’t enough. Even with good training, seed stewards will struggle to work under precarious conditions. For that reason, a seed curriculum must also address systemic bottlenecks.
Strengthening Value Chains and Market Pathways
A key challenge is the economic viability of organic, open-pollinated seed production.
Julian Marteens from CRA-Wallonie addressed this issue in a study exploring the possibilities for small vegetable growers in Wallonia, Belgium, to access varieties suited to organic farming and local terroir. Since a key barrier is the lack of local seed producers, Julian investigated whether it was possible for market gardeners to combine growing crops with seed selection and multiplication. His conclusion is stark: it is extremely difficult for a producer to make seed work financially viable.
Frank Adams reports the same reality:
“Some market gardeners multiply their own seeds for personal use, but usually, you wouldn’t produce your own seeds—or even your own seedlings. Seed work takes so much time that it isn’t really viable. And that’s a shame, but it’s true: even as a seed producer, you can’t really make a living at a regional level.”
What is generally missing from the system is the seed artisan: someone focused on expanding a diverse, high-quality range of locally adapted varieties. And for this profession to thrive, the seeds need to find markets.
This is the message conveyed by Emmanuel Antoine of the Breton cooperative Graines de liberté: training is essential, but only if it supports the development of micro supply chains that value and sustain the artisan seed producer. What is needed is a cooperative ecosystem—spanning professions and production methods, from conventional to organic and agroecological—centered on a common goal: to reintroduce locally developed seeds outside industrial supply chains, for their nutritional, environmental, and social benefits.
So, how can this objective be effectively incorporated into a peasant university? This is an open question we will keep exploring with all the partners cited above.
The Regeneration of Varietal Quality
For diverse local seeds to (re)gain a place within food systems, another key condition has to be met: the varietal quality—which can be based on three general criteria: purity of species, germination rate, and health status; as well as production cost, the associated production system (conventional, organic, artisanal, etc.), and taste criteria. For more on this topic, see the report (in French) from the Semences d’Ici project.
Often, the first question farmers ask Fazia Smail about using farmer-bred seeds, is about yield. And unfortunately, the answer is a barrier for many.
Productivity should not be reduced to yield alone. It also includes nutritional quality, resilience, and the ability of crops to perform under variable local conditions. In many cases, genetically diverse populations can outperform uniform varieties in marginal or unpredictable environments. But demonstrating this potential requires research, experimentation, and long-term selection work.
This is where the work of Véronique Chable comes in.
Véronique is a researcher at INRA, France, focusing on crop genetics and organic agriculture. Early in her career she observed a troubling trend: much of modern plant breeding had become oriented toward standardisation and industrial agriculture. Research programs increasingly prioritised varieties designed for uniform environments and global markets, particularly F1 hybrid seeds.
As a result, older varieties and heterogeneous populations—better suited to local conditions—were largely abandoned by mainstream breeding programs. This narrowing of research priorities also had the effect of limiting the genetic resources available for future breeding, which is now posing serious problems.
Véronique set out to challenge this trajectory. Working closely with farmers, she helped pioneer participatory plant breeding, a research approach in which scientists and farmers collaborate directly in selecting and developing new varieties in real farming conditions. Much of her work focused on cereals suitable for organic systems, where genetic diversity can enhance resilience and reduce dependence on chemical inputs.
Véronique Chable’s approach reflects a broader vision of science. Rather than treating plants as isolated objects of optimisation, she advocates for a holistic understanding of agroecosystems, where biodiversity is recognised as the foundation of life—and where seeds are a cornerstone of agricultural civilisation.
At the Intersection of Research, Education and Farming Practices
This perspective resonates strongly with the ambitions discussed during the Seeds4All workshop in Plessé. Building new forms of seed training—which would be integrated into a peasant university—is also about reconnecting worlds that have gradually drifted apart: farming, research, and education.
In that sense, the first task of any university aiming at fostering rural resilience and agroecological transition, is to rebuild bridges between academic knowledge and field-based experimentation. Only through such collaboration can the research needed to expand seed diversity—and improve the productivity and quality of farmer-bred seeds for local supply-chains—truly move forward.
More
How to Cultivate Knowledge for Seed Autonomy? Part 1 – Who Teaches the Seeds?
Whats Seeds for Tomorrow? A Podcast Mini-Series by Seeds4All and Seed Carriers
The Future of Seeds: The Power Play Between Patents and New GMOs
Op Ed | Big Ag Pushes Lawmakers to Roll Back Consumer Rights
Where The Untended Feeds Us – Cécile Gilquin’s “Tiers-Paysage”
Letter From a …Forager! Third Landscapes and Edible Wild Plants
Crafting the Collective – Tijs Boelens’ Vision for a Farmer-Led Grain Revival
Rural Resilience Gathering | Knowledge is the Power to Shape our Rural Futures Together
Re-Sowing the Seeds of Connection in Switzerland, Part I – Nurturing What We Have
The EU Has the Funds but Lacks Focus – This Farm Shows What’s Possible with Both
France | Not Perfect, But Possible – Seeing is Believing at Institut de Tramayes
