In Norway sits the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a safe place to store backup copies of the world’s crop seeds. A research center called ICARDA kept a seed bank in Aleppo, Syria, with about 150,000 cereal, food, and feed samples from more than 100 countries. From 2008 to 2014, they deposited duplicate copies in the vault. Then civil war forced them out of Aleppo. In September 2015, for the first time ever, seeds were withdrawn from the vault: 38,073 samples in 128 boxes, shipped to Lebanon and Morocco. They were sown that November. By 2016 they had harvested fresh seed, and in 2017 more than 20,000 samples went right back into the vault. Somebody saved seed in good times so there’d be bread in hard times. That’s what faithful sowing looks like. You plant for a harvest you may need later, and the harvest gives you seed to plant again.
