#seeds

🇵🇪 Peru · AGUAPAN (Asociación de Guardianes de Papa Nativa del Centro del Perú)

Quechua and mestizo highland farmers organized into a self-governed association to keep thousands of native Andean potato varieties alive in the ground, not just in gene banks.

🌍 Global · Bat Conservation International

Volunteers and researchers are replanting a 1,200-km chain of agaves along the US-Mexico border to refuel three species of endangered nectar-feeding bats.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Bumblebee Conservation Trust

A Scotland-based charity trains nearly a thousand citizen scientists a year to track bumblebees and restore the flower-rich habitat they need to survive.

🇧🇴 Bolivia · Fundación PROINPA

In the Bolivian highlands and Amazon, farmers who once planted whatever seed they could buy are now running their own trials, selecting potato clones and cassava on their own plots.

🇬🇹 Guatemala · Asociación Campesina Río Negro Trece de Marzo Maya Achí

Descendants of families displaced by the Chixoy dam are installing 20 solar water pumps so farmers can irrigate heirloom vegetables, including the revived Maravilla tomato.

🇨🇴 Colombia · SWISSAID Colombia

Colombian peasant, Indigenous and Afro-descendant custodians now run community seed houses that together hold over 1,500 native and creole varieties, and in Boyacá farmers just rescued four lost native potatoes.

🇪🇨 Ecuador · Red de Guardianes de Semillas del Ecuador

Of more than 300 maize varieties Ecuadorian researchers catalogued in the 1960s, this farmer network has been able to find only about 50 still growing, and it is replanting them one season at a time.

🇬🇪 Georgia · Biological Farming Association Elkana

Georgian farmers rebuilt a organic-farming union from 9 founding members into a nationwide network that is bringing indigenous Caucasus wheat varieties, wiped out under Soviet collectivization, back into highland fields.

🇪🇹 Ethiopia · Ethiopian Orthodox Church Development and Inter-Church Aid Commission (EOC-DICAC)

In a country that has lost most of its forest, small wooded islands around Orthodox churches are often the only native trees for miles, and the church's development commission now helps neighbouring farmers protect and expand them.

🇪🇹 Ethiopia · MELCA Ethiopia

At a seed and food fair in Welmera, Oromia, eight-plus school clubs and a farmers' cooperative showed how a community seed bank keeps local varieties alive for the next generation.

🇷🇴 Romania · Fundatia ADEPT (Agricultural Development and Environmental Protection in Transylvania)

A Saschiz-based foundation works with farmers to keep Transylvania's flower-rich hay meadows mown and grazed the old way, protecting one of Europe's last great semi-natural grasslands.

🇦🇹 Austria · GLOBAL 2000 (Friends of the Earth Austria)

Since six activists founded it in 1982, GLOBAL 2000 has turned public petitions into Austrian law, from a landmark 1997 anti-GMO referendum to the country's 2011 climate protection act.

🇬🇭 Ghana · NUS Network-Ghana

Ghana had no community seed banks until NUS Network-Ghana set up a pilot at Adawso in 2023, and its newest at Abrewankor now holds 58 local varieties including fonio.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Grootbos Foundation

Grootbos leads a roughly 50-landowner conservancy protecting over 1,500 fynbos species in the Cape Floral Kingdom while training unemployed young people for green jobs.

🇬🇭 Ghana · Ghana Wildlife Society

Ghana's leading wildlife NGO is pulling a critically endangered tree back from the brink while training communities to steward forests and birds.

🇹🇷 Türkiye · Buğday Ekolojik Yaşamı Destekleme Derneği (Buğday Association)

Buğday's seed-swap network, running since 2011, now has a dozen Hatay farmers growing local karakılçık durum wheat agroecologically on 100 decares of a chemical-heavy plain.

🇺🇸 United States · Borderlands Restoration Network

Borderlands Restoration Network installs thousands of erosion-control structures across the Sky Islands drylands of the US-Mexico borderlands to heal gullied land and recharge groundwater.

🇺🇸 United States · Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance (NAFSA)

A national network founded by Mohawk seedkeeper Rowen White that reunites Native American nations with ancestral seeds lost to colonization and helps tribes rebuild their own seed systems.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · AB2TI (Asosiasi Bank Benih dan Teknologi Tani Indonesia)

Indonesia's farmer-run seed bank association says its member groups have bred some 3,600 crossed rice varieties, mostly from local germplasm, without waiting on a lab.

🇮🇹 Italy · Rete Semi Rurali

Rete Semi Rurali's Casa delle Sementi mails local bean, sunflower, tomato, rice and maize seed to farmers who must return double the seed they received.

🇰🇷 South Korea · Native Seedream (토종씨드림)

Native Seedream tracks down the elderly farmers who still hold Korea's heirloom seeds and has collected more than 10,000 native varieties since 2008.

🇳🇵 Nepal · Local Initiatives for Biodiversity, Research and Development (LI-BIRD)

A Pokhara-based NGO helps Himalayan hill and mountain farmers run their own community seed banks, keeping climate-resilient local rice, taro and yam landraces from disappearing.

🇵🇭 Philippines · MASIPAG (Magsasaka at Siyentipiko para sa Pag-unlad ng Agrikultura)

A farmer-scientist alliance safeguarding the Philippines' rice heritage by collecting, breeding and freely sharing thousands of traditional and climate-resilient rice varieties.

🇹🇴 Tonga · MORDI Tonga Trust

In Tonga's villages, MORDI Tonga turns community-written development plans into seed banks, cyclone-ready infrastructure, and new income for rural families.

🇬🇹 Guatemala · Asociación Qachuu Aloom "Madre Tierra"

After a civil war and a flood of hybrid seed wiped out their own, Maya Achi' women in Baja Verapaz started over with 20 families and now guard heirloom corn, amaranth and beans in earthenware jars.

🇲🇿 Mozambique · Micaia Foundation

In Manica Province, Micaia trained 52 villagers as seed-keeping facilitators, and 196 of the 340 people it trained were women.

🇺🇸 United States · Native Seeds/SEARCH

Native Seeds/SEARCH conserves and freely shares thousands of arid-adapted heirloom seed varieties tied to Indigenous farming traditions of the American Southwest.

🇬🇳 Guinea · Guinée Écologie

Guinea's oldest environmental NGO is running village nurseries to regrow the degraded classified forest of Mont Béro, tree by native tree.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Overberg Renosterveld Trust

A South African trust partners with farmers to protect the world's most biodiverse and most destroyed lowland habitat, home to a huge diversity of solitary bee and bee-fly pollinators.

🇵🇪 Peru · Asociación ANDES (Asociación para la Naturaleza y el Desarrollo Sostenible)

A Quechua-led biocultural park in the Peruvian Andes where six indigenous communities collectively steward more than a thousand native potato varieties in their original mountain landscape.

🇨🇭 Switzerland · Pro Specie Rara

Since 1982, this Swiss foundation has kept old alpine grain, vegetable and fruit varieties and mountain livestock breeds alive by growing them, not just storing them, on working farms.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Project Seagrass

The world's leading seagrass conservation charity, replanting millions of seeds to bring the UK's lost underwater meadows back to life.

🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan · CAMP Alatoo

A Kyrgyz NGO helps woodland communities in southern Kyrgyzstan sustainably manage the planet's largest naturally growing walnut forest instead of losing it to overgrazing and degradation.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Instituto SOS Pantanal

After record wildfires torched a quarter of the Pantanal wetland, this Brazilian NGO is paying Indigenous communities to grow and plant native seedlings that heal burned springs and riverbanks.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Rede de Sementes do Cerrado (RSC)

A Brasília-based seed network pays indigenous, family-farmer and urban collectors to harvest native Cerrado grasses and wildflowers, turning them back into standing savanna.

🇨🇱 Chile · Fundación Reforestemos

Born out of the 2011-12 Torres del Paine wildfire, this Chilean foundation now runs the country's largest restoration campaign, planting native trees and rebuilding green space after each new round of megafires.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Borneo Nature Foundation

In fire-scarred peat-swamp forest that once burned nearly every dry season, this Borneo charity is replanting native trees and rewetting drained peat so the land stops fueling the next blaze.

🇺🇸 United States · Sequoia Parks Conservancy

After wildfire killed thousands of ancient giant sequoias, this park partner is funding cone collection, nurseries, and hand-replanting to bring the burned groves back.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Associação Caatinga

Associação Caatinga restores Brazil's semi-arid Caatinga biome using a long-root seedling technique that more than doubles tree survival on degraded, drought-hit land.

🇷🇴 Romania · Asociația Eco Ruralis

Eco Ruralis is growing experimental plots of the nearly vanished Romanian broad bean in two Buzau villages, while mailing free heirloom seed to anyone who joins.

🇫🇷 France · Réseau Semences Paysannes (French Farmers' Seed Network)

A nationwide alliance of more than 70 French farmer and gardener organizations working to keep peasant seed varieties in circulation outside the industrial seed trade.

🇧🇫 Burkina Faso · Association Yelemani

On an experimental farm outside Ouagadougou, Blandine Sankara's Yelemani association keeps a community seed bank and hosts an annual fair arguing there is no food sovereignty without seed sovereignty.

🇦🇺 Australia · Bush Heritage Australia

On a former sheep and cattle property south of Canberra, conservationists are rebuilding critically endangered natural temperate grassland paddock by paddock.

🇦🇺 Australia · Seed Savers Foundation (The Seed Savers' Network)

One of the world's longest-running grassroots seed-saving movements, linking more than 100 volunteer-run Local Seed Networks across Australia to keep heirloom food-plant varieties alive in home gardens.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Seed Savers Network Kenya

A Kenyan farmer network that has revived dozens of vanishing indigenous crop varieties by building a nationwide web of community seed banks.

🇸🇳 Senegal · Association Sénégalaise des Producteurs de Semences Paysannes (ASPSP)

Founded in 2003 by farmer Lamine Biaye, ASPSP stages seed fairs where Senegalese growers swap local millet, sorghum and vegetable varieties instead of buying hybrids.

🇸🇧 Solomon Islands · Kastom Gaden Association

For a one-off lifetime fee of $15, any Solomon Islands farmer can join a seed-and-cutting swap network run out of a seed bank at Burns Creek.

🇹🇼 Taiwan · Tse-Xin Organic Agriculture Foundation (慈心有機農業發展基金會)

Working with a government seed station, Tse-Xin collected 216 millet lines from Indigenous tribes in eastern Taiwan and returned most of the seed so it stays in the villages.

🇹🇭 Thailand · BioThai Foundation

BioThai has spent nearly three decades backing farmer networks that recover native rice varieties, local vegetables and tropical fruits, and in September 2026 it rallied 146 groups against UPOV 1991 seed rules.

🇸🇯 Svalbard and Jan Mayen · Svalbard Global Seed Vault

A tunnel driven into permafrost on an Arctic island holds a spare copy of the crops the world eats, in case a war or a flood takes the original.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Trust Links

Seven community gardens across Essex use hands-in-the-soil horticulture as frontline mental health support for thousands of people a year.

🇳🇪 Niger · Sahara Sahel Foods

Sahara Sahel Foods pays rural Nigerien women to harvest native trees and shrubs, turning stigmatized wild foods into a growing regional market.

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe · Zimbabwe Red Cross Society

Zimbabwe's Red Cross handed drought-tolerant seed and livestock vaccines to farmers in Binga before the 2023 El Nino drought took hold, triggered by a forecast, not a failed harvest.

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe · Community Technology Development Trust (CTDT)

Zimbabwean farmers run village seed banks stocked with sorghum, pearl millet, Bambara groundnut and cowpea landraces that CTDT helped them recover, some of which now sit in the Svalbard vault.