Producing seeds contributes towards maintaining a common heritage that has been developed over countless generations and that is fast disappearing; and it is an act of civil disobedience against increasingly restrictive laws that enable the big seed companies to gain total control over this source of life.

The monopoly of agro-industry in a standardized and globalised market has led to the destruction of thousand-year old agricultural systems that enabled generations to feed themselves. There used to exist hundreds of thousands of vegetable species across the planet, but today they face an accelerated process of extinction and the world's food relies on an increasingly limited number of plant species. Each region, each valley, used to have its own varieties adapted to local conditions. Exchange between farmers was part of life. Varieties travelled. Industrial agriculture, on the other hand, needs "homogenous" and "stable" varieties that will produce uniform vegetables with a long shelf life. The very opposite of the selection criteria used by farmers who developed "populations" rich in diversity and with the faculty to adapt, to evolve and to resist to changing local constraints. Most plant diseases are today provoked by industrial agriculture. The monocultures at the heart of oversimplified and mechanised agrarian systems bring about irreversible genetic erosion that will only lead to famine in the future. They are an insult to the boundless ingenuity of generations of farmers.

This project originated from our partnership with Les Greniers d'Abondance, and our realization that one of the pathways to local resilience, was diversifying cultivated varieties and developing automomy in seeds. The 4th section of the research paper called "Achieving Food System Resilience" goes over this topic in details.

Producing seeds contributes towards maintaining a common heritage that has been developed over countless generations and that is fast disappearing; and it is an act of civil disobedience against increasingly restrictive laws that enable the big seed companies to gain total control over this source of life.

The LocalScale Seed Exchange System provides a way for community members to list and exchange seeds locally against digital tokens of their regenerative local currency.