How This Organic Farm Conserves Over 200 Farm Varieties a Year

A Note from Foodthink

As the commercial seed industry grows ever more developed, farm varieties and heritage varieties are becoming increasingly marginalised. Their disappearance is not merely a loss of biodiversity; it also signals the gradual decline of diverse local food traditions and cultures. Yet more and more seed conservers are recognising the importance of farm varieties. Guided by scientific methods, they are not only collecting and preserving these varieties but also multiplying and revitalising them.

At the end of 2022, at a sharing session titled “The Rebirth of Seeds: When Farmers Meet Foodies” held during the Beijing Harvest Festival, Tang Yaozhong, technical director of Yuefeng Island Organic Farm (affectionately known as “Brother Tang”), shared the farm’s experience of protecting farm varieties. Over the years, Yuefeng Island Farm has “sown the hundred grains and stored the seeds in the earth”, and has now conserved more than two hundred local varieties.

This article addresses the following questions:

How is seed conservation work carried out?
In today’s world of increasingly frequent extreme weather events, what difficulties does the seed conservation process present, and what unexpected discoveries emerge?
Is it truly worthwhile for a farm to save seeds year after year? How can farm varieties move from conservation to expanded production, and how can seed-saving work generate more sustainable value?

This article has been compiled and expanded from Brother Tang’s presentation. Click to watch the full recording of the session. Foodthink has also been long concerned with seed issues. Since 2021, we have partnered with the Farmer Seed Network to support twelve partners across the country in establishing their own community seed banks.

I. Why We Conserve Farm Varieties

My name is Tang Yaozhong. I look after the front-line production work at Kunshan Yuefeng Island Organic Farm, and many people call me “Brother Tang”.

●Brother Tang and the farm workers harvesting self-saved beans.

People sometimes ask us: why go to such great lengths to save your own seeds and conserve these farm varieties?

Setting aside the broader question of protecting biodiversity, let’s start with practical realities. As an organic farm, we have genuine demand for seeds.

It is very difficult to find organic seeds on the market today, and even when they are available, the prices tend to be rather steep. For various reasons — purity, quality, or unsuitability to local conditions — some seeds simply cannot meet production requirements. When we previously purchased spinach and amaranth seeds, two consecutive sowings produced no germination at all; it was only on the third attempt that they sprouted and grew properly. Seeds like these, beyond anyone’s control, affect procurement costs, labour hours, sowing windows and all the rest.

Since the farm’s founding in 2010, Yuefeng Island Farm has had some self-saved seed. But in those early days we simply chose varieties that already had some market acceptance, were easy to grow, and were straightforward to save seed from. Our methods were rather rough and ready, and the quality of our saved seed was inconsistent.

In 2017, with the help of the Farmer Seed Network, we began to systematically review our seed saving and seed conservation work, and set up a small, simple seed bank. By 2020, as the number of varieties in our collection grew, we started to implement the full cycle of the in-situ seed bank — from conservation and seed saving to regeneration and reuse — in a systematic way.

Kunshan is a comparatively prosperous area. With the growth of industry, arable land has been shrinking, and farm varieties — old varieties in particular — have become ever harder to find. As guardians of seed, we also take the opportunity while searching for varieties and carrying out seed conservation to unearth and document the food customs and human stories behind these old crops. In the farm’s nature education programmes, we weave seeds through the whole experience, leading visiting citizens to discover local traditional agricultural culture and history through hands-on contact with the seeds themselves.

Only by knowing where our food truly comes from do we find the motivation to carry it forward.

II. How More Than Two Hundred Farm Varieties Are Maintained

Yuefeng Island Organic Farm sits on the land between Yangcheng Lake and Kuilei Lake, two important sources of drinking water. It was established with the express purpose of protecting these water sources from contamination by chemical inputs. The farm covers around 230 mu, and when the organic rice grown in partnership with the local community is included, the total managed area approaches 600 mu. From 2020 onwards, the farm set aside two dedicated zones specifically for farm variety conservation: a wetland crop base and a dryland crop base.

●The blue area marks the dryland crop trial plots; the red area marks the wetland crop trial plots.

The first step in seed conservation is collecting seeds. Beyond the farm’s own self-saved seed, we also gather varieties from the surrounding community — through conversations with farm workers, nearby villagers, neighbouring farms, and fellow growers. Some were collected with the help of the local Seed Station of the Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, and a few were even drawn from the provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences’ seed bank.

Next, based on the characteristics of each crop, we assign plots to the varieties and draw up a planting plan, mapping out which varieties need direct sowing, which require raising seedlings first, and which call for a pre-chilling germination treatment. Before sowing, seeds are sorted and sun-dried. This screening improves seed quality and raises germination rates.

●Left: farm interns Zhang Qian and Chen Zhao sorting Brassicaceae seeds and removing off-types. Right: raising rice seedlings in the paddy.

After sowing, the main tasks are comparative trials and ongoing observation records, tracking changes in crop traits at each key growth stage.

●Field observations during the rice growing season.

Once the seeds mature, they are harvested, recorded, sorted, and taken into the seed bank. After storage begins, further steps include photographing, measuring, and weighing each batch to build up more detailed records.

●Once the rice is ripe, it is time to cut the panicles, select seeds, sun-dry them, and store them. The work of seed conservation and seed saving is incredibly meticulous. Zhang Qian and Chen Zhao — interns who came to the farm through Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme — helped me with a great deal of this detailed work. From left to right: Brother Tang, Zhang Qian, and Chen Zhao.

Part of the stored seed goes into the seed preservation boxes; another part goes onto the “multi-functional seed display wall” for public education and outreach.

●The farm’s two dedicated seed-preservation cabinets: one serves as the conservation store, the other as a backup — a double safeguard. The cabinets maintain a cool, constant-humidity environment to protect germination rates and seed quality.

●The “multi-functional seed display wall” is also one of the farm’s science education points. Why “multi-functional”? Because alongside the seeds, it also displays crop specimens — whole rice plants, wheat ears, and so on. Paired with visits to the seed fields and guided explanations, the vivid, hands-on presentation lets the public immerse themselves in the “past and present” story of each seed.

By 2022, more than two hundred farm varieties had found a home on the farm. In the wetland crop base, we conserve 101 rice varieties and one variety of water bamboo; in the dryland crop base there are 113 crop varieties, including wheat, beans, and assorted vegetables.

III. Dryland Plots: Beans, Wheat, and Vegetables

In 2022, we planted 113 farm-variety crops in the dryland base: 33 bean varieties, 22 wheat varieties, and a combined 61 varieties of other vegetables drawn from the Apiaceae, Brassicaceae, Cucurbitaceae, and Solanaceae families, among others. Growing so many varieties on a single plot was a considerable challenge for me.

●Dryland crop base: watering the beans after sowing.

From 2021, Yuefeng Island Farm began a systematic effort to conserve bean varieties. At first we trialled a large number of varieties — six that the farm had been self-saving all along, plus others gathered from elsewhere — but in the end only a handful proved truly suited to local conditions and worth saving seed from.

In 2022, we grouped the beans carried over from the previous year by colour, characteristics, and intended use, and planted guard rows around the plots to reduce interference from outside pollen.

●Seed-saving layout plan for some of the bean varieties.

By the farming customs of the Kunshan area, beans are sown each year in May.

When selecting the farm’s self-saved broad beans before planting, we noticed that they appeared to include two varieties. Judging by colour, one type is a pale blue-green and the other a blue-brown. On some of the darker beans, the hilum takes the form of a pale white line.

Beyond appearance, the varieties also differ in flavour: the white ones tend to be soft and starchy and cook more easily; the smaller green varieties are less starchy but more fragrant, with a richer, more complex flavour.

●Comparison of the farm’s self-saved broad bean seed stocks.

Among the local bean varieties we save seeds from, the most distinctive is undoubtedly the “Niutabian”. This is a bean traditionally grown across the Suzhou and Shanghai regions. The grains are oval and flat, shaped like a cow’s hoof — round and broad — and the taste is fragrant, starchy, soft, and sweetly fresh. The Qing dynasty poet Qin Rongguang wrote in his “Bamboo Branch Lyrics”: “Purple Fragrant, Green Jade — the beans bear many names; black shells, green skins, filling every jar. In June, the Yellow meets the Niutabian; tender pods plucked fresh to grace the plate.” Clearly, this bean is not only delicious and nutritious but also carries a long cultural history behind it.

●Last year the farm harvested 80 kg of fragrant japonica edamame, and entrusted small batches to Xiucai Bean Workshop to try making two flavours of dried bean curd. Consumer feedback was positive.

The area around Suzhou once had a tradition of growing wheat, but that is dwindling fast. In 2021, we finally managed to source some local heritage wheat varieties, but by the time they reached us, each variety had only about 20 seeds. With so few seeds, every single one was precious. I remember one variety — in the end only a single plant survived. It was called “Zhangsihuang”. Fortunately that lone wheat plant pulled through and set seed, so this year we can carry on growing it.

●Through our studies with the Farmer Seed Network, we adjusted our planting plan: of the 22 varieties, 21 were grown individually within plots, 2 varieties were selected for cultivation in a pedigree nursery, and 18 varieties were grown in a head-row nursery, in the hope of helping with purification and vigour restoration.

In 2022, we also expanded our seed-saving to include a range of other vegetable crops: tomato, melon, radish, sweetcorn, bok choy, and Chinese cabbage, among others.

●The farm’s self-saved tomatoes and carrots — after harvesting, we still record their unique shapes and flavours.

●The locally distinctive “Huanglang pumpkin”. Remarkably, pumpkins from a single “Huanglang pumpkin” variety grew in different shapes — some elongated, some round, each one unique. Next year when we replant, we hope that through purification and vigour restoration, plants of this variety will produce more uniform fruit.

●Cross-pollinating Brassicaceae crops (bok choy, Chinese cabbage, and the like) are prone to varietal mixing and mutation. In 2022, we deliberately selected five leafy-vegetable varieties and planted them individually in different areas of the farm, using spatial isolation to improve the purity of our saved seed.

When it comes to seed saving on the dryland plots, the trickiest part is getting the timing of each crop’s key growth stages right. The table below is our soybean observation record, covering characteristics such as the germination period, emergence rate, leaf shape, leaf colour, flower size, flower colour, pod shape, pod colour, and more.

These growth stages were identified through observation and discussion together with our interns. Because we are still building up experience, the timing for each crop is not always perfectly accurate. But for us, at least we have established a starting point for observation, formed a timeline, and made it easier to track and record progress over time.

IV. Wetland Plots: A Spectrum of Rice

For many people, the first image of rice is simply “white rice in a bowl” — lush green when young, golden when ripe, and all looking pretty much the same. But visit our wetland crop base and your perception changes entirely. Row after row of different rice varieties unfurl in a dazzling array of colours — green, red, purple, black — each with a distinct flavour and set of traits. Statistics tell us that the genus Oryza worldwide encompasses as many as 140,000 varieties.

●At the wetland crop base, the white markers indicate the 101 rice seed-saving plots; behind each marker is a different rice variety.

In 2022, guided by our earlier data analysis and planting plan, we trialled 101 rice varieties.

In recent years, extreme weather has hit the farm repeatedly, bringing episodes of prolonged heat and high humidity. Add typhoons and heavy rainfall, and if the rice plants grow too tall, the risk of lodging becomes very high indeed. In 2021, two rice varieties were lost entirely before harvest, making the task of successful seed conservation far from easy.

So in 2022 we drew up criteria for selecting and breeding rice. Varieties with good traits were prioritised for seed multiplication, while the rest were kept to small-scale seed saving only. We selected 17 varieties, added 10 newly acquired ones, and brought the total to 27 rice varieties for expanded planting — a selection and observation trial to see whether they might one day enter open-field production.

●Rice selection and breeding criteria for 2022.

●Brother Tang and an intern inspecting the rice undergoing seed multiplication.

In fact, old varieties such as “Suyu Nuo” and “Yaxue Nuo” have already entered open-field production, and the farm has been selling related products for some time. This year we also ran three mixed-sowing trials with these open-field varieties, each with a different aim: pairing Small Black Rice with Nan Geng 46 and Yaxue Nuo with Suyu Nuo were both aimed at improving lodging resistance; mixing white glutinous rice with Xiangxue Nuo was aimed at combating sheath blight.

●Rice trait record form, covering tillering ability, plant height, panicle shape, heading date, late-season yield and more — a reference for the coming season and a trail of evidence for seed conservation.

As the old saying goes, “One land nurtures one people.” Those of us who grew up in this land of fish and rice have a duty to safeguard more local rice varieties. Every additional batch of seed stored is one more measure of food security and one more flavour on the table.

V. Difficulties and Challenges

Seed conservation has never been a smooth road. Of the 113 varieties on the dryland plots, only 88 produced successful saved seed; 25 varieties failed to reach harvest. Looking into the causes, we found that the vast majority were linked to poor seed quality. Some seeds were from the previous year or even two or three years prior; some externally sourced varieties — especially those from the north — simply could not cope with such different geography and climate, and even though they germinated, they became prone to disease later in the season. With so much rain, some beans that are intolerant of wet conditions moulded before their pods had a chance to mature.

In response, we are planning adjustments to bean cultivation: staggering the sowing windows to avoid extreme weather; widening the spacing between plants to improve air circulation and reduce disease risk; and experimenting with reduced fertiliser rates to see whether podding rates can be improved.

All 101 rice varieties planted on the farm in 2022 were successfully harvested, but that success in itself brought the next challenge. With over 100 varieties already in hand and more likely to be added, carrying out the fine-grained work of purification and vigour restoration, along with meticulous record-keeping, for every single variety year after year would simply overwhelm us.

We have discussed the possibility of rotating the varieties in batches over two or three years. But before doing so, we would first need to take stock of the seed collection and test germination rates. Otherwise, if we divided the varieties into batches without checking, some seeds might fail to germinate altogether — and the continuity of those heritage varieties would be broken in our hands.

●In January, after the rice harvest, we held a premium rice tasting event together with the local agricultural extension centre, inviting 40 fellow farmers, consumers, and partners to sample the new rice and score it blind. They assessed cooked new- and old-variety japonica rice, cooked glutinous rice (including coloured rice), laozao (fermented glutinous rice), and rice cakes — judging each on appearance, texture, colour, and overall quality to find the “star” rice in every category.

This year we plan to streamline the 2022 rice varieties further, cutting the number under seed multiplication down to 19, and from those, selecting two varieties to enter open-field production — bringing them right to consumers’ tables. We will also choose three bean varieties to expand their planting area and develop bean-based products. After all, only by turning old seeds into products that reach the market and win consumers’ approval can the work of heritage-seed conservation sustain itself over the long term.

Photographs supplied by Shen Ye, Kunshan Yuefeng Island Organic Farm, and the Farmer Seed Network

Compiled and written by: Shen Ye

Editor: Wang Hao