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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public Radio. I'm Jane Lindholm. I host the show. Here in Vermont, where I and my friend and fellow But Why maker Melody Beaudet live, we've just hit the date where it's safe to put just about any plants you want to grow in your garden into the garden because there's very little chance of frost or below freezing temperatures even overnight anymore. So many of us are planting seeds or putting seedlings we started indoors into the nice warm soil to grow.
Perhaps some of you are doing the same thing, because we've been getting lots of questions from you about seeds. And even if you're not a gardener or a farmer, and even if it's winter where you live right now, or you have a much longer growing season and planted things weeks or months ago, seeds are always fascinating to learn about. Some of the largest seeds, I'm not even sure I could lift one, they're so big. And then there's tiny little ones that you can hardly see with your eye.
And then there's ones that are really weird looking. You know, they have like all sorts of spikes and different ways of getting around. You know, seeds travel. They're made to be able to be transported by different kinds of animals, to stick to different kinds of fur. Some seeds are made that you have to first to be eaten by an animal and then pooped out again.
Until they can grow. Different species have very different kinds of seeds and very different conditions to grow. Some grow with very, very little wetness, and some need to be submerged underwater for a while until they can grow. Some need to be frozen first before they can grow. Seeds are amazingly complex. That was Hannes Dempewolf. He's a plant scientist in Germany, and he works for an international organization called the Crop Trust.
Hannes is going to help us answer a few of the questions you've been sending us about seeds. But there are a lot of seed questions we're not going to get to in this episode. And that's because we have a whole other episode we already did where we tackled so many plant and seed questions. But Melody and I have loved getting to listen to your great questions on this subject lately. Do you want to hear the voices of kids who've been sending us seed questions? Yeah, let's listen.
Hi, my name is Livia and I'm seven years old and I live in Brazington, Florida. My name is Lauren and I live in Wisconsin. I'm seven years old. My name is Matt. I am seven years old.
I live in Western Massachusetts. My name's Finley and I'm five years old and I live in Maine. And my question is, how do plants make seeds? Hi, my name is Penelope Rose. I live in Fernandina Beach, Florida. My name is Ashna and I'm seven years old and I live in Sunnyvale, California. And my question is, how did seeds form? How do seeds form?
Hi, my name is Sol. I'm four years old. I'm from Brooklyn and my question is, how do seeds sprout? My name is Foster. I'm three years old and I live right here in Colorado. Why do plants grow to trees? My name is Meredith. I live in Oshkosh. I'm five and a half years old and my question is, why do seeds grow?
Hi, my name's Ethan. I live in North Carolina, Wilmington. My question is, how does a sunflower fit into a tiny little seed? My name is Joe. I'm six years old and I live in Hartford, Connecticut. My question is, how do seeds grow into trees?
Those are all such great questions and so important. How does a tiny little seed become a great big tree? Or a cucumber vine? Or an invasive weed? Or a beautiful sunflower? You can find answers to those questions in an episode we did called How Do Big Plants Grow From Such Small Seeds? Don't worry if you missed it. We actually made it four years ago.
We'll put a link to it in the show notes for this episode. That means if you look at the description for this episode in whatever podcast app you and your adults are using, you should see a link that will take you right to the episode on our webpage. Or you can search for it by title in the app you already use. So since we've already answered those questions, what are we going to focus on today?
In this episode, we're going to hear more about how the Crop Trust works to help protect the world's seeds, including by storing thousands and thousands of them inside a vault inside a mountain deep above the Arctic Circle in Norway.
And we're also going to learn about a seed-saving project in Vermont that aims to find and preserve some of the native seeds that the Abenaki people, who've lived on this land for thousands of years, used to grow, that have kind of gotten lost over the years.
But first, let's get back to Hannes Dempewolf. Who is he exactly? Most appropriately, I think you'd call me a plant geek. I've always been interested in plants and throughout my career and my education, always focused on plants and still doing that today. Technically, Hannes is a senior scientist and director of external affairs for the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
Crop Trust for short. We are an international organization that was founded by the United Nations more than 15 years ago with the idea to be supporting seed conservation, to make sure that the seeds that feed us all are conserved. Old varieties, different types of seeds are there for many, many generations to come.
And we are located in Germany, but we are owned, if you want, by the world. Is there a worry that seeds will go away or that there won't be seeds? Yeah, there is a lot of seeds around still, thankfully and luckily. But if we look at it globally, how many seeds there used to be just 100 years ago and we compare it to today, we think we've lost about three quarters of all seeds around the world.
three quarters of the diversity of different varieties of seeds. And that's a huge reduction. That's a huge loss of seeds, most of which we can never bring back. Because once you have lost a certain type of seed or a certain type of plant, it's gone forever. And that's why we put so much effort and money and
brain capacity and plant nerdiness and interest into the preservation of that diversity, which we feel is so important for humanity.
Why have three quarters of all the types of seeds been lost? That's a really good and very complex question to answer. If you think about plants, you know, there's wild plants that occur in nature. And then there's plants that make up our food. And those plants, we call them domesticated plants. So that means that these plants have been selected over many, many, many, many, many, many, many hundreds, thousands of years.
from these wild plants to be more like plants we like to eat. That process is called domestication. And what domestication does is it narrows down diversity. It automatically means selecting over and over means we only choose the best one to grow every generation. And that means that automatically through that process, we're losing diversity.
But the biggest loss in diversity over the last 100 years comes through the fact that many farmers and many people only grow a small set of varieties. So it's a part of just agricultural production. But if you grow many different types of plants, they can respond to different challenges much better.
If you have a variety that's really resistant to drought next to one that's really resistant to flooding, then if there's a flood, the one that's resistant to flooding will survive. And if there's a drought, the one that is resistant to drought will survive. Yeah, I mean, I was going to ask you if one of the things that we do in farming and agriculture is select for the best seeds, the things that are going to maybe grow the biggest plants,
Maybe not always the ones that taste the best, but hopefully. And ones that can withstand pests and that can travel well if you have to grow your crop in one place and then feed people hundreds or thousands of miles away. Why do we need more if we're growing for the best? It seems like, well, that's fine. We just have one best tomato, one best banana. That sounds good.
Yeah, well, the answer to that is also a really interesting one. It's because the world is so different. You know, different countries or even, you know, within a country, different regions have a very different climate, very different soils, very different pests.
Where we grow seeds is very, in itself, a very diverse environment. And that means we need many, many, many different kinds of seeds that are adapted or that, you know, do well in many different conditions. And with climate change, what we're seeing is that these conditions change over time really rapidly, much faster than they ever have.
And that means that some of the old seeds that we used to be able to grow in one area, we can't grow them there anymore because the climate has changed so much that now there's different seeds we need from maybe a different area that now grow really well there. And that's where seed banks are really, really important. Have you ever heard of a seed bank? It's a place or an organization that preserves, safely keeps all kinds of seeds. There are lots of different seed banks and seed libraries all around the world.
Some seed banks give out seeds to farmers or scientists who need them. But these are different from a store where you go to buy seeds for your garden each year. For the most part, seeds stay in the seed bank unless they're needed because seeds aren't available for some reason, a natural disaster or a problem with another seed library or seed bank, or because they're not available in stores anymore.
Those seed banks have an enormous wealth of seeds. So even though we've lost a lot, we still also have conserved a lot. One of the biggest examples I think I know of is rice. The International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines has the International Rice Gene Bank. And I believe there's more than 120,000 different varieties of rice conserved just in that seed bank.
And that's still not a complete collection. There are still many, many varieties of rice around that are not conserved there and that we need to conserve in the future. Whoa, more than 120,000 varieties of rice? And that's not even all the kinds of rice that are out there? The International Rice Gene Vault keeps all of those rice seeds in case there's a time when we might need one of them.
There are seed banks all over the world, and the organization that Hannes works for, the Crop Trust, runs an international seed vault. Hannes says it's a little different from a seed bank because the seeds in the global seed vault are designed to stay in there as a backup in case the seed banks in other parts of the world don't have the right seeds that countries or farmers or researchers need.
So they don't give out the seeds unless there are no other options at the other seed banks around the world. Hannes has actually been inside the global seed vault, so I asked him to describe it for us so we can all pretend we're exploring this amazing place with him. He says first we'd have to get to Norway, and then we'd have to travel up into the most northern part of the country, up above the Arctic Circle.
Then we'd have to get to a group of islands called Svalbard. It is very, very, very cold there with lots of glaciers and not very many people. Sometimes there are polar bears, though. On one of the islands, there's a town called Longyearbyen, which is sometimes called the northernmost town in the world. There, we'd find a mountain. And inside the mountain is the Seed Vault.
You get there and it's very, very, very cold almost all year round. It's so cold that the ground underneath your feet never really stops being frozen. Is that what's called permafrost? It's called permafrost. That's right.
And so it thaws in the summer a little bit on top, but the deep ground never thaws. And so you get there and it's cold and you sort of wrap yourself up and you go up this mountain and all of a sudden you see this big portal building. It looks like a spaceship's landed. It sort of jags out of the mountain. It's a beautiful thing to look at, but it also looks like it's from another planet. Yeah.
And you go in through the big portal doors that are there to secure the seats and you walk slowly down a really long tunnel down into the depth of the mountain. And the further you walk, you understand the colder it gets. So it's cold outside, but it's even more cold in the mountain. You go further and further down until you're finally at another big door.
that protects those seeds, you open that up and you come into this entrance hall. It's like this big hall in the middle of the mountain. And from that hall, there's three big chambers that are accessible and you can get, you open this door which is sort of encrusted with ice crystals. And at this point, it's about minus 18 degrees cold.
And that is because the perfect conditions for seeds to be stored for a really, really long time is at about minus 18 degrees. Celsius. Celsius. Yeah, sorry. It's minus 18 degrees Celsius. And you get in through this ice-encrusted door and you open it and all of a sudden you see these huge, huge floor-to-ceiling shelves.
And on these shelves are all these different boxes that different countries and different seed banks have submitted.
And many of those seed banks have also put their little flag on it. And you can see these different boxes from all over the world that contain that wealth of diversity that has been domesticated and tended to and selected by farmers over thousands of generations. And when you think about that, I mean, you look just at boxes, but it always makes me a little silent. I'll think in awe about what diversity we have here in front of us.
And it makes me just be really, really thankful for the fact that this facility exists. How often do countries or different groups put seeds in?
Yeah, so the seed vault itself is, you know, it's usually it's a very secure facility and it's locked up, but it opens about three to four times a year for new deposits. And so we've had one earlier this year in February. There was the latest deposit and there's a new one coming up in June. We'll see seeds submitted from, again, many different countries, including from the United States, actually.
Has anybody ever taken seeds out or is the only way that seeds would come out if something really bad happened, a catastrophe somewhere in the world is the only way that there would need to be a withdrawal from the seed vault? You know, it really is not there for a global doomsday, as some people call it, the doomsday vault. Really, the idea is if anything troublesome happens to any particular single seed bank out there,
And we've had one case of one withdrawal already back a number of years ago in 2015. The International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas, it is one of the biggest international seed banks out there, that is located in Syria. And they could no longer operate because of the civil war in Syria. They decided to reestablish their seed bank in Morocco and in Lebanon.
And to do that, you know, they basically had to go back to Svalbard to get their seeds back and be able to grow them out again in Morocco, in Lebanon, to reestablish their collection there.
And they did that with many, many, many tens of thousands of different seed varieties that they requested back from Svalbard. So they were then sent back to Morocco and Lebanon, grown out, and then they put those new seeds that are being grown out back into the seed bank. And then they re-sent back a copy to Svalbard to make sure that even in the future, if something else should happen, they can go back there and get their material. And that's the only withdrawal so far?
So far, yeah. I mean, you know, it shows the worth of the vault and the fact that it's working, but really we hope that it'll never have to be used again. You know, it's a facility, as ironic as it is, that we don't want to use because it means that something really terrible has happened to the original seed bank.
Don't you wish you could go see this seed vault? I can almost picture the thousands and thousands of boxes with flags from the country they came from, filled with so many different kinds of seeds that are important to our world. In just a minute, we're going to learn about a seed-saving project closer to home. Well, closer to my home, anyway. And Hannes will answer a few questions about seeds. What's in them, and are they alive?
This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids. Today we're learning about two different kinds of seed-saving projects. Before we go back to Europe with Hannes Dempewulf, I want to introduce you to someone else who's concentrating his seed-saving efforts on a much smaller but no less important scale.
Fred Wiseman is a researcher, professor, and activist in Vermont. For a number of years now, he's been involved in a project called Seeds of Renewal. The idea is to find seeds that used to be grown by the Abenaki people, Native Americans who have lived in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and parts of Quebec, Canada since before Europeans arrived. Fred calls this the seed chase because he has had to hunt high and low to try to find the crops that the Abenaki cultivated or grew.
I met up with Fred Wiseman on a bright and warm spring day at a garden site at the new Indigenous Heritage Center in Vermont. And I asked Fred to describe how the garden was set up, with mounds of dirt every couple of feet in the long garden plot. We're out in the middle of a beautiful day and a field that we just planted with seeds of indigenous or native crops to this region.
Each mound was traditionally made in a family to fit the size of the children. So the mound starts small so that when you're only about three, four, and five, you can reach into the very center of it to weed. And then as you get older, you never get done weeding. The mound gets bigger and bigger so you can reach farther in. Basically what we do is we put corn in the middle.
And then out at the edge of where the mound starts sloping off, right near there is where we put our beans. And then where the mound is sloping down on the sides, that's where we put things such as summer squash, winter squash, even pumpkins. Because what we do is we train the pumpkins then to kind of, the vines will radiate out from there and they fill up the whole area in between.
What I'd like to share with you a little bit today is talking a little bit about seeds, what the Abenaki seeds are, where they came from, how you find them, and then more importantly for us, of course, is planting them and then being able to think about how they relate to the rest of us in our society or our culture.
The Abenaki people are communities of indigenous people that lived in Vermont, New Hampshire and western Maine. And also more recently in the 18th century and 19th century there are communities up in Quebec. Basically the native people of Vermont and this part of New England.
What I'm trying to do here is bring back as much as we can what's called a food system. Now, what is a food system and how do seeds fit in? Well, the food system is everything from where do you get the seeds, what's the origin of the seeds? How do you select to be able to plant them? Where are you going to plant them? What kind of a field?
Are you going to plant them in? And then once you plant them, what do you do to make sure they grow? When we think about seed saving and agricultural saving, we also are thinking about ceremonial saving. Native people consider that nurture also comes from the spirit world.
And so we have a whole series of ceremonies that we do right on this property to assure that the spiritual nurture of these crops are attended to as well as the fertilizing.
There's a lot of kind of sayings that, you know, if you don't know your past, you're not going to know your future. And memory is the essence of identity and who you are. If you couldn't remember, you know, your name or you couldn't remember your family, you wouldn't have an idea who you are. You see, each of these seeds has its own story, but also the people and the dances and the language.
Like if the story about these being Abenaki or Passamaquoddy, if that was lost, that'd just be another seed. And yeah, it'd be interesting, but you see, maybe in the future, one of the things we're thinking about with climate change and things like that, what about these crops? What if they're all 500, 1,000 years old in this area?
they've been through climate change huge amounts. And so potentially they have what we call a reserve or a climatic resiliency. These crops have been here through what was called the medieval warming period when it's warmer than it is and the little ice age when it's colder than it is here. So if we forgot that the name of these things and that they were indigenous,
you know, maybe 50 years from now, people wouldn't realize that there might be some really interesting genetic diversity or interesting little weird, you know, characteristics of these things. And so you never know to what use these things will come. That was Fred Wiseman at the Vermont Indigenous Heritage Center in Burlington talking about a project called Seeds of Renewal that aims to connect Abenaki people to traditional crops, customs, and food systems.
Before we end the episode today, there are a few questions you've been sending us that we haven't already answered in this episode or our previous one. So I asked Hannes Dempewolf, who we were talking with earlier, to help us understand some of the most fundamental things about seeds. Like this question. My name is Evie. I live in Haleiwa, Hawaii. I'm five years old, and my question is, are seeds alive?
Yes, seeds are very much alive. At least the seeds that we use to grow food. Seeds do die. So if they're not properly cared for or they're stored in too humid environments or too cold or too hot conditions, they can die and then we can no longer use, they can no longer grow into plants.
But they are very much alive. They're just in what scientists call a dormant state. It means that they're not, they're sleeping, basically. It's like animals, you know, sometimes some animals sleep in winter and they're dormant then. It's seeds. Seeds are also dormant and they need to be activated to grow. But they're still alive even while they're dormant.
And they need, as you probably know, light to grow and humidity and warmth. That's the conditions that allow seeds to grow. So yeah, they're very much alive. Humidity includes moisture. So, you know, not always lots of rain, but some kind of moisture, right? That's right. Some kind of wetness, usually most seeds need. Seeds are very, very different. Different species have very different kinds of seeds and different type of seeds also need very different conditions to grow.
Some grow with very, very little humidity, with very little wetness, and some need a lot. Some need to be submerged in, you know, underwater for a while until they can grow. Some need to be frozen first before they can grow. Seeds are amazingly complex. Hi, my name is Isley. I live in Downers Grove, Illinois. My age is six, and I'm asking, what are seeds made out of?
and I'm four years old and this is where I live, Kansas City. And my question is, what are seeds made out of? - Hi, my name is Rishabh and I'm from Austin, Texas. What in seeds makes plants grow? - So seeds are, they're actually quite complicated. There's a little thing in there which we actually call a plant embryo, just like we have embryos in humans in the womb.
Plants also have little embryos and they're usually connected to a starchy, we call it tissue, a starch resource, which basically gives them the strength to grow. - Is it kind of like food, like food for the seed? - That's right, it's like food for the seed, exactly, yeah. And then there's something else we call proteins that are very important to allow the seed also to grow.
And there's many different kinds of chemical compounds in there, micronutrients, you know, different kinds of things that the plant needs to develop. It's actually the starch of those seeds that, for example, makes bread.
The wheat or the wheat seeds, if you ever looked at a wheat seed, you know, if you can cut it open, you can actually see the starch. And that's what is ground into flour. And then we use that flour to make bread. So you have all of this stuff inside seeds. And, you know, anybody who has seen seeds knows that some seeds are very large, but some seeds are so tiny you can barely see them. It's kind of amazing to think about all of
All of that material, the genetic material, the starch, the proteins, all of this that is in that teeny tiny little seed that in some cases could become a giant tree. It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. My fellow, I'm four years old and I want to know what our biggest seed on earth is. What is the largest seed in the world?
Some of the largest seeds, you know, they're, I don't know if you ever heard of them. It's called the Coco de Mer, which is a type of coconut. They're huge. I mean, I'm not even sure I could lift one. They're so big. Oh, really? That big? Oh, yeah. They're really enormous. And then there's tiny little ones, as you said, that you can hardly see with your eye. Yeah.
You know, it's absolutely fascinating. Seeds are wonderful. And to Shab's question, it kind of goes back to what you were talking about with Evie's question of are seeds alive? You know, it's all of this stuff that's inside the seed, but then you also need other things. You need light and warmth and moisture and sometimes other things. So humidity, to make them...
to make them grow like little leaves. Often the first little leaves and that kind of thing, the nutrients that are packed very densely in a seed are actually all you need and a little bit of warmth and a little bit of light. But to actually for them to grow into a real plant or sometimes a tree, you know, sequoia trees come from seeds, tiny little seeds.
You need a lot more, a lot more different kinds of resources that are in the soil and also, you know, a lot more water and a lot more light, a lot more energy that is given to seeds through light. And so, you know, the more a plant grows, the more of those other types of things, other resources it needs to grow. Is there anything else that you think we should be
thinking about or knowing about or that's really cool about seeds? Seeds are so fundamental to all of us that I think we should be making sure that we always take good care of them and make sure that the diversity of them stays alive. Anything you can do to help that, I think is a great thing for the planet.
And some very practical things you can do, for example, is you can establish your own little seed bank. You can keep some of the seeds that you collect from a garden or from the roadside. I did that actually when I was a little kid. I had lots of little paper bags that I put into a wooden box and I kept them from year to year. And I did little experiments to try to see whether they germinated the next year. That's a really fun thing to do.
Another thing to do is to eat different kinds of plants, you know, if you and to be open and interested in eating different things.
So next time you go to a supermarket or to a farmer's market, don't just buy the apple that you usually buy, but try a different one. Because the more we eat, the more different kinds of plants we eat, that means that farmers will also grow different kinds of seeds and different plants. And that, in the end, helps us maintain a more diverse food system, a more diverse agriculture, which we really, really need in the face of climate change.
Thanks to Hannes Dempewulf, a senior scientist and director of external affairs for Crop Trust, for telling us about seeds and for describing the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. And thanks to Fred Wiseman for helping us understand the importance of seed and food to our cultures and senses of selves. I think I'm going to try to save some seeds from my garden this year, or maybe even just from the weeds that grow at the edge of my yard. How about you? If you save seeds and plant them next year, let us know what you discover.
That's it for today. As always, you can send us questions about the things that you're curious about. Have an adult help you record yourself, telling us what you want to learn more about. Tell us your first name, where you live, and how old you are. If your adults have a mobile phone or a tablet, there's usually a free app for recording voices that you can use. Then send your recording to questions at butwhykids.org.
If you can't record yourself or you're feeling shy, it's okay to have your adult type out your question instead. But Why is produced by Melody Beaudet and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public Radio. We're distributed by PRX. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds, and we had additional music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions. We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode. Until then, stay curious. From PRX.