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The development of agriculture stems from when people discovered the great power of saving seeds. It’s been for some 10,000 years that people have been carefully collecting and saving seeds from a crop one year so that they could be used to plant another crop the following year.

But agricultural practices have dramatically changed over the last century, and this foundational act of seed saving has nearly become a lost art over the past couple decades. Seeds are increasingly not being saved from year to year, as traditional, local crops are being replaced by identical, new crops in fields all over the world. This threatens tens of thousands of plant species with extinction and is causing many to once again recognize the importance of saving seeds, not just from local fields, but from all around the world.

The history of saving seeds: Saving seeds is an essential component of agriculture itself. Originally, it’s thought that people collected seeds from edible wild plants and learned how to grow these plants in a more controlled fashion so they didn’t have to solely rely on gathering food from the wild plants. By taking seeds from the most desirable plants (those with the largest fruits or other edible parts, or that simply grew best in the local area), people over time came up with domesticated crops that were an improvement upon their wild relatives-an improvement at least as far as the people who wanted to eat them were concerned. Over thousands of years, this selection process led to the amazing array of crops we have today, with people historically consuming over seven thousand plant species in their diets.