As well as supermarket panic buying, seed sellers also saw huge spikes in sales. Seed producer David Price describes how, as lockdown approached, orders from customers increased by around 600 per cent.
Phil Howard, Associate Professor at Michigan State University explains how the global supply of seed now rests in a small number of corporate hands.
In Bristol, Dan meets people who are striving for a new form of food independence during the pandemic, and beginning to grow their own. Another seed producer Fred Groom of Vital Seeds argues that more of us should be saving seeds, growing food and helping to save diversity. He’s setting up an online course this summer as a way of recovering some of these lost skills.
For decades, helping to keep the seed saving flame alive in gardens and allotments have been various communities around the UK who have continued to rely on them for fresh food. Among them are people who arrived from the Caribbean in the 1950s.
Dan meets two inspirational Jamaican growers, Mr Brown and Leon Walker, both are evangelical about the power of seeds to shape our lives.
