Lecture and discussion: "He who has the seed calls the shots".

Where does a radish actually form its seeds? Hardly anyone knows that today. Seed cultivation is no longer taught even in horticultural training, and in past decades there was hardly any public discussion about seeds. The latter changed in 2016 with the news that Bayer wanted to buy out Monsanto. Since then, there has been hot debate about what this merger means - after all, Bayer is now the world's largest company for both agrochemicals and seeds.

What is the context of these developments? How did we get into such a situation in the first place? What does it mean that in the last 100 years about 75% of the diversity of our crop varieties has been lost worldwide and that farmers are increasingly deprived of the possibility to decide about their seeds themselves?

The lecture will give a rough overview of the developments of the past 100 years and discuss how we can regain the say over our seeds. In the process, it will become clear why it is so important to use diverse seed-proof varieties and to do some seed propagation ourselves. Questions about practical seed gardening will not be the focus of this talk, but can be discussed if needed.

The speaker Anja Banzhaf, author and self-taught seed gardener, has attracted a lot of attention with her 2016 book "Seeds - Who Has the Seeds, Has the Say". She has brought a globally explosive topic into focus with her intensive research in and beyond Europe. It is also about the ever-increasing market concentration of seed corporations and thus very practically about the crucial question of how our crop diversity can be preserved and further developed in the hands of farmers and gardeners.

Afterwards, two initiatives that are intensively dealing with the topic of seeds will introduce themselves:

Miri Löhr, commercial gardener at Solidarische Landwirtschaft Freudenthal, reports on the possibilities of producing one's own seeds on the farm.
Lea Forster, activist at OpenSourceSeeds, will show a way to make seeds a common good for all again through a special license.

We are looking forward to an exciting discussion!