It's All In The Seed

Seed saving was at the heart of the world's agricultural history.

Farmers once saved seeds from their best plants, selecting for flavour, resilience, and adaptability to local conditions — whether surviving heat, cold, drought, pests, or disease.

These seeds were saved, replanted, and shared within communities, creating rich diversity in our food crops. While some growers still carry on this tradition, much ancestral knowledge has been lost. By the early 20th century, farming became industrialised, and seeds began to be bred for uniformity rather than diversity.

Today just four firms own 56% of the global seed market.

In industrial systems, diversity is often overlooked — pesticides keep plants alive, and synthetic fertilisers sustain them to harvest.

In nature, resilience works differently: plants that survive waterlogging, blight, drought, or early frost pass those adaptive traits on through their seed. By saving and replanting seeds from these naturally successful plants, each generation carries forward stronger, more resilient genetics.

Plants adapted to our environment.

The plants will be adapted for the specific environment it's parent plants were all grown in, and thus gifting us with a much more secure food supply than that we could ever get from seed bought in.

2024 was the wettest summer on record, while 2025 was the hottest. Here at Oxton we had the worst drought we've ever seen. So now, saving seed is vital to ensure we can continue to grow crops on our land while being subjected to the erratic climate, weather patterns and the new shifts in our seasons.