How Seed Banks Work

But you can find out all the information and all the deats at s y s K live dot com are Squarespace Live touring home on the web, and we hope to see everyone out there. Welcome to Stuff you should know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry rolland this is us stuff you should know. I'm just trying new stuff. I mean, we're coming up on a thousand episodes. Man, you've got to keep it

fresh somehow. So I tried the A team. You've actually done that like seventy six times, the same one. Kidding, It's probably true. Though. Uh, if you were a seed, what seed would you be? I would be a pumpkin seed. Oh wow, because you know you won't get eaten. Oh I don't know. I like pumpkin pie so well, and people toast pumpkin seeds, so yeah, I'm way off base there. Yep, what else you got, however? Mind no pumpkin seed? Bam. I would be a watermelon seed because they remind me

of my grandfather. That's sweet. How do they grow those seedless watermelons? Huh uh, you're a watermelon seed, you should know. Or the square ones? Yeah, those are cool too. They cost like sixty dollars in Japan. Really, yeah, they're really expensive. I would have one just that have it. I would like shell lack it so it would never die, right, and just keep it in my fridge for a conversation piece. It's not a bad idea, man. Or actually I took

that back. I'm gonna start marketing fake square watermelons as conversation starters or refrigerator magnets shaped like square water mountains. What about that? Hmm? All right, and they call that running running something into the ground. Um, I've got something

for you. You in the food Fads episode, asked me what my go to crock pot recipe was, and I told you, and then I was like, okay, moving on, and I upon listening to it because I don't know if everybody knows this or not, but you and I all listened to the episodes and Jerry before we release them, um, and I was like, I didn't ask Chuck what his crock pot recipe? What did you, Chuck? I didn't. What is your go to crock pot recipe? Do you know what it is? No? I don't. If it's not, um, no,

I'll tell you what it is. It is a a turkey ghoulsh surprise. That sounds good. So just some ground turkey and some onion and green pepper and red pepper and uh all manner of spices. And you can also throw in like eggplant or squash or you know kind of any veg veggie like that and chunk it up. That sounds good and just spice it up real good, throw it in that crock pot. Uh, maybe add a little chicken broth or something. Uh do they have turkey broth? Yeah?

They do? Okay, sure, Well, then don't be weird. I don't check. I don't I don't think chicken broth would clash with turkey too bad, but yeah, probably turkey broth would be better. Well, you may not know something in your mouth might be disturbing and you're just like, something's not quite right. So what's the surprise that you're using chicken broth in a turkey based dish? Is it like a human thumb? The surprise? I tried the thumb, but that's much of us twice twice, yeah, because they only

have two thumbs, got you? Now? I know? The surprises is our lentils. Oh yeah, that's nice. So then you dump a bunch of lentils in there. Um maybe, I mean you could throw it all in there at the beginning if you, but they'll get kind of really gushy, but maybe towards the intoso lentils in there, and then it all just cooks up to a big kind of soupy mess and then you can eat it for a week. Well, the next time there's a house Stuff Works weekly book

club meeting, you've got to bring that to the pot luck. Okay, right, all right, because I want to try it done our lentils seeds because that'd be a great segue. But I'm almost a hundred percent sure that I would be wrong in saying, well, lentils are seeds. I think it's a legum. It is a lagoon, but it is a laguma seed. Well,

you didn't ask me that. I don't have any idea, although they are protecting lagoons and seed banks, so okay, okay, Well then they're probably not seeds, but they're pretty close, so we'll use that as a seguay. How about that? Yeah, And you know what's funny is we uh could have sworn that we did this one, or at the very least did the doomsday vault. And I think we covered the doomsday vault in the video, but we we did touch on it in Well the Moon Safe Humanity. Yeah,

that's a good one. But I went back this is when we had transcripts, and it was a funny one to read because we brought it up without researching it off the top of our head, which always gets us in trouble, and just sort of chatted a minute about the doomsday vault and then said, you know, don't hold us to anything because we this wasn't supposed to be a part of the show, so we didn't really cover it. No, and we certainly didn't do a whole episode on all right,

and we're not going to this time. Because even though the Doomsday Vault better known as the small small Bard Global Seed Bank, which is in small Bard, Norway, which is close to Long Year Be in Norway, which is the closest town to the North Pole, right, Um, this seed bank is hands down the most famous seed bank in the entire world. It's run by technocrats who really know how to work the media, right, But it's far

from the only one. There are a lot of other seed banks out there, and even the whole concept of seed banking in general is pretty interesting. So it's fall Bard will be the star. If we're a band, would be seed Banks featuring the stylings of small Bard Global seed Bank. That's probably that should be the title of this episode. I thought you could say featuring the stylings of small Bard Globalstein and that sounded like a like a a small time magician that's great, or an accordion act.

Good stuff. Um, all right, well, let's get to it. This one, by the way, it was written by my friend Debbie. I noticed you remember Debbie, Debbie Ronka, my buddy from New Jersey and uh so flemental material. You found a really great article on the doomsday vault. What was that from the Guardian or yeah, that was by

um Suzanne Goldenberg in the Guardian from May two fifteen. Yeah, that's one of my favorite kinds of articles is when they profile something and then it's set up as like, you know, the sunrise is early in Norway and and Schfinn gets out of his yurt and trudges across the glacier and so it's sort of couched in this story of the the dude who works there, one of the guys. But then you get all the deats along the way. It's very cool. Yeah, that's that's called a long read

or long form. Yeah. And actually there's two really great sites, ones called long form and one's called long read once a dot Common ones a dot Org. I can never remember which, but if you like that kind of writing, that's all those sites are, just page after page after page of links to articles like that. Yes, and in fact, to our buddy, uh Joshua Bearman, uh huh, great writer of long form. He has his own little shingle called

Epic Magazine. If you're looking for like those really great. Basically, people mind the that site to make movies. They're such good stories. Yeah, yeah, well he he wrote the magazine article that um uh far yeah, not Fargo. Argo, the Ben Affleck movie was based on. Yeah, we would be cool. The funny part about that slip up is the Coen Brothers at the beginning of Fargo say like this is based on a true story, which is not true at all. Right.

He also wrote a really great one um about California surfer gang Um that smuggled pot out of like Coronado Island in the seventies, and it is just begging to be made into a movie. If it hasn't been yet, I think it's optioned. Surely it is that right, Coronado High yep. And I'm pretty sure Barman wrote that back in like two says the internet. Yea, so put down your streaming TV shows for God's saken, I would say, read a book, but at the very least read a

long form article. Yeah. Can can I get on a soapbox for a second, We'll talk about seeds eventually, everybody just be quiet. So the whole concept of their being TV everywhere and like you can take TV to the beach now you don't have to talk to anybody. You can like watch TV on the subway. That's That's that bothers me. Chuck it bothers me, like to my core, And I know that makes me very unpopular. I don't care. I stand with Josh. You know, Emily and I have

been listening. We've been sitting around in a room at night together in silence and listening to s town Oh Cool, which I've I've forgotten how fun it is because I usually listen to podcasts on my own, like in my car. But just to sit around, like with your loved one and listen to something that's kind of neat too, yeah, you have somebody to look at and be like, oh can you believe that? Man? All right, I'll bet everybody thinks we sit around and listen to podcasts together. Can

you believe that? Alright? Alright? Seed banks? Sorry, So, Debbie Ranka makes a really great point that you think of seed banks as this probably something new from you know, the environmental movement, probably something from the nineties, maybe as far back as that, But she says, no, no, seed banks are a concept as old as agriculture. Basically that in the in the cradle of agriculture, Mesopotamia, which is present day Iraq. They have found seed banks um as

old as eighties, seven hundred and fifty years. So, UM, the seeds stores back then, we're protecting, uh, the seeds from animals, from weather, that kind of stuff. Pretty basic stuff, right, But the concepts the same. It's that that you need seed from one harvest to create the next harvest. And so even back then, there's evidence that it was highly ritualized collecting seeds and then protecting them in important places. Yeah, and UH, whether it is certainly something that we're still

guarding against uh to the extreme. That's one of the reasons we we have seed banks today. But UM, one of the main reasons is crop diversity. Um. If you if you think that corn you're eating is just corn, or rice you're eating is just rice, or even you know bosmati rice or jasmine rice or did the Big two or sushi rice. Uh, you'd be in for a big surprise if you knew that there were thousands and thousands of varieties of all of these crops, these staple crops.

And UM diversity is the key because we've seen throughout history when bad things happen when there's blight. Uh, with that, there's a fungus. If there's um just anything that can kill a crop. You want something that is diverse on your hands so you can try something new. Right. Remember in the famine episode where we talked about how one of the reasons that Ireland suffered so tremendously was because the potatoes they had were all basically the same throughout

the whole country. It was the same variety of potatoes, right, So when that potato blight came, it was it was a pathogen that all of the potatoes in Ireland were susceptible to, where if they had had multiple varieties of potatoes, sure a lot of the potato varieties would have been wiped out, but there would have been some that survived to right, Yeah, you know whose fault that was? Who's the English? Well, they definitely didn't make anything easier on

them if I remember correctly. No, of course, but I'm just spoken fun. But But the the idea that there are just tons and tons of different varieties out there, there certainly are. But if you take another order of magnitude step back and look at the global food system, there's really like thirty crops that make up basically all of the food supply, right, and that's not too bad.

Thirties fine, we could survive on just one. Really, the problem is if you go the opposite direction and zoom in a little further, those crops are fairly homogenized these days. And it's thanks to our buddy Norman Borlog. So he fathered the green Revolution in large part, which was there were a lot of predictions that the world's carrying capacity was going to be reached by the nineteen sixties and that a billion people were going to starve to death.

And that was because the agriculture that we had at the time was capable of producing only so much crop yield. So Norman Borlog took it upon himself to say, I'm gonna save the world. And he came up with these new techniques and new varieties of crops and said, here this, this variety is going to get you way better yields. It can survive flooding, it can survive drought, old plant. This and his his varieties that he bred were so successful.

Number one, he won the Nobel Prize and it's widely credited for saving possibly a billion lives with his work. But secondly, it was so successful that it became basically the only varieties of those crops that were planted. And in the nineteen seventies here in the United States, we came just running smack dab into what a problem that can be when this corn blight hit. Yeah, there was a big fungus in the seventies and Uh, I didn't say what I wanted to say, and it cut the

corn yields in the United States in half. And luckily, UH, we did have some more varieties at our disposal. We had a relative of it was a wild corn was just crazy paint and it was it was fungus for assistance. So in that case we were able to uh save the day UM, which is kind of the whole point of crop diversity and seed banks is to have something on hand in case the worst case scenario happens, so all your your potatoes aren't in one basket, or all

your corn isn't in one basket. So literally with that corn blake too, we learned the hard way. UM. Something like one quarter to one half of the corn yields in the United States were lost UM during the seventies, and it was because something like I think of the corn being grown in the US was identical in this way, Um, that the corn blake could could manipulate and kill. So we said, oh, well, we need to diversify a little more. It was a hard lesson learned, but it was a

lesson learned. And since then this idea, like you said, of of crop diversities become more and more important, and people have said, well, we'll start banking seeds so we can protect the genetic line and protect varieties from dying out in the meantime. Yeah, and so that's um, you know, diversity is a big deal. Climate change as another reason we bank seeds because we're not too certain what's going to happen in the future with the weather. Are actually

not with the weather with climate because it's two different things. Uh. Nice natural disasters, um, like a tsunami or really kind of any kind of natural disaster could cause great harm to crop yield or disease, Yeah, which you would think would be considered a natural disaster too. Well, now it's disease. Well, sure, you gotta you gotta delineate here, you know, uh, man made disaster. And the point uh, the example deb uses here is um war, which yeah, you really think about war,

but there have been uh. And as you'll see even with seed banks during times of war, especially in the Middle East, a lot of the seed banks in the Middle Ease have been looted and rated during war. So that sort of compounds the problem well. Plus also one of the other things that war does is um uproots populations. Right, you have to move because there's a war going on in your town and you can't live there anymore. So if you're a farmer, UM, you may never go back

to farming anymore. And you may be one of the few indigenous people who were farming a specific variety of something and now that variety is lost forever because you moved and stopped farming. Yeah, and there's there's that can happen in more mundane pedestrian ways to where say a family that's farming an indigenous variety of crop UM just moves to the city for better work or something like that. Uh. And then the final way that she lists is UM that we might want us to seed bank is for

research in the future. Plant based medicine has always been

around UM. One and every six wild plants is used for medicine, and we don't know, I mean, we we know so very little still about the uses of plants for medicine, So we don't want to wipe out some thing that could be the cure for cancer one day, you know, right, And that that's kind of like the cornerstone of the idea of seed banks these days is that we need to take the seeds from every plant we can get our hands on today, every variety we can get our hands on, and just store just basically

put them in suspended animation and the under the idea that eventually, because of climate change or because of war, or because we may figure something out in the future and need those plants or need access to their genetic information. And so if we have the the seeds stored away in suspended animation dormant um, then we will say thank you people a hundred years earlier for being so smart

as to create seed banks. That's right, thousands of years earlier in fact, maybe maybe, But there's problems with seed banks, as we'll talk about. You want to take a break, yeah, let's do that, and we'll get to that alright. So as far as what kind of seeds are chosen, it depends. I mean they were there were more than four hundred or right around fourteen hundred seed banks in the world, So I know, uh smar Bald smar Bald, small Bard, small Bard. I really think you can say it either way.

I know, I keep wanting to say key like it just sounds like a dude from there. Oh it does. Who's into like Viking metal? Yeah, he gets all the coverage. Ball Bard got so wasted. There are lost all of the seeds. Uh. There are about four seed banks though, all over the place, and it depends on which one you're talking about, really is to what kind of seeds they're gonna preserve. Um. Smaller seed banks are probably going

to concentrate more on more local indigenous varieties. Uh. It seems like in all cases any kind of the endangered plant is probably looked after. Um first, Yeah, they tend to take priority from what I understand, But there's a great group called the Global Crop Diversity Trust, and their whole jam is to concentrate on priority crops that are

that benefit everyone around the world the most. So those are the people that runs Vollbard, And from what I understand, they've kind of come in and said we we are, we're going to be setting the standards for seed preservation in the world. Now someone had to. Yeah, and there's a guy that was inter jewed in the guardian Um. He was one of the founders of this trust and one of the I think he was the first director of this wall Bard Global Seed Vault. The names Carrie

Fowlers from Tennessee. And he said, we didn't create this seed bank to you know, prevent because we saw this catastrophe coming with like climate change or whatever. The doomsday vault, you know, right right it was. And and but again I think that the media kind of last front of that.

He was saying the original intent with why they founded this vall Bard Seed Vault was because the current seed banks were doing such a terrible job keeping their their seeds like alive or intact, that we were losing varieties every day from ones that were stored at seed banks. They were just going away. So he was basically like,

let me to it. He was like at the at the I T guy, Yeah, well, it's kind of scary though, Like when when he talked or when he was interviewed, he was um to say, like, you know, new clear war was in our biggest threat. It's underfunding and sloppy work right or yeah, budget cuts, UM, malfunctions and the

equipment like badly maintained equipment. Uh, there's a lot of stuff they can go wrong with the seed bank and so so the point behind the small Guard seed Bank is to serve as a backup repository to where yeah, you keep your seeds there in your country and will show you the best ways to manage your seed bank, but also put a duplicate set with us and we're just gonna keep it stored. We're not going to do

the science or anything like that. The whole point of the small Guard seed Bank is to just keep it stored under the right conditions so that when you need it it will be here for you. That is correct. So this Global Diversity Crop Trust, they work under a treaty. It's called the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture or PA and UH it was ratified

by in two thousand four by forty different governments. UM. Imagine since then they're probably some more on board, right, I believe, so, although I wonder how much UM that has kind of fallen to the wayside since Crop Trust created this small Bard seed vault. They seem to have kind of taken over from what I understand. Well, I mean I think this treaty is just it's part of

good practices too, you know. Yeah, So what they do is they do permit access for these seeds for research and stuff, not from small Bard because like we said, that's that's the bank that doesn't allow withdrawal, um. But it has to be a benefit to everyone. Basically, you can't just go willy nilly on a whim and pull seeds out and start experimenting. Right, Well, that's the that's

that's for the other seed banks. That's kind of like the process where those are the ones that they're they're keeping so that somebody can come and like grow some stuff off and check out the genetic material of the plants or whatever. With small Bard, it's like you put it in, it stays there and you can't get it out. But it's only you, the depositor that has access to us. Correct.

And so apparently that was they they agreed to that, or they set up that rule that only the the group or the country that put those seeds into the small Barred vault can get them out because there's a lot of worry when they were creating the Global Seed Vault that the whole thing was basically just a ruse for big agriculture to get their hands on heirloom seeds from around the world, which I mean, I can kind of understand that because from what I understand, the big

agriculture UM seed companies are fairly shady. Yeah, and we should do an episode just on that, sure, love. Right, So if you go to one of these banks and again they're not They're all can be very different, but they all have the same kind of concept at heart. UH And I think the one Debbie used as an example was UM the Department of Environment and Conservation UH in Australia UM. But like I said, they kind of

all operate in a similar fashion. What you first need to do is to decide how much room you have and what seeds you want to collect to begin with, right, and we mentioned priority goes to threaten plants obviously first and foremost. But the again to his vol bar, their whole mission is to to preserve every bit of the um corrupt diversity of the global crop supply, which that Carrie Fowler Dude says is about one point four million varieties, and last I saw they were coming up on a million.

I think they had like about nine hundred and forty thousand varieties in their in their care correct. So once you've decided what you need in your in your little local seed vault seed bank, you collect seeds um. It seems like the most of these places start uh, and when when vegetables and fruits are ripe is probably the best time to collect and store these seeds UM. As fruits they release their seeds when they ripe, so that usually works out pretty well. But then you know, it

kind of depends on the plants. Some plants don't give up their seeds so readily so UM, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. Maybe to have a longer time to retain their seeds which allows for longer collection time. UM. But you know, if you're in that position, you know when the best time is to get the seed from each plant. Sure, and then when you're collecting it, you're also making notes of the um soil quality and type, the growing conditions UM, the the ecosystem,

like what kind of ecosystem is growing in. That's like the most important part, almost besides the seed it's extremely important. We read this one article. Let you see the one from um Berry Bay very point, you know, the one

Importland very botanic garden. I wanted to add something extra, but they basically had a rundown of how they do it, um and and they were saying important record keeping is about as important as having the seed itself, because if you don't have the information you need, including what kind of seed is where, it's just basically useless as far as the seed bank is concerned. Yeah, well I wouldn't say useless, but you would certainly have to grow it and take those records and kind of start over. And

then this be like what is this? It talks? Uh, So you recorded all this information. Um, they're gonna assign it a sample number, very um specific number obviously for that seed. So everything is, you know, it's the record keeping is a huge, huge part of it. So you know what everything is. You don't want to get stuff mixed up in case of, you know, a nuclear apocalypse that sucks so bad. You're like, wait a minute, wait

a minute. I had the wheat in my left hand right, I think I just stink or we thought we were growing corn, but we're growing papaya and we're having a party. Actually, that wouldn't be so bad. That's why you have a party, because you'd be like, oh, I thought this is gonna be corn, and it's a papaya. What a treat, Thank you God. All right, So you've got these seeds, You've got all the data recorded, everything super organized. You've washed your hands very important part. And then you also want

to wash You want to clean these seeds. You can't just take a wet watermelon seed and throw it in a tiny Manila envelope and contest to see who can get it in the manilla envelope. No, you have to clean everything. You've got to make sure it's of really high quality. Um. Some of this is done by hand. Some of this is done by machine these days. Uh. And then you want to get the moisture out of it. Like I said, Uh, moist not only is a gross word,

but it's not good for storing seeds. No, it's really not, because they will start to germinate, which is not what you want going on in your seed bank. Only for storing seeds. Moisture is really good for seeds, sure, yeah, yeah, for storing seeds, it's not good um or they can search a rot to depending on the conditions. So you

want to dry them. And apparently there's a rule of thumb when you're preparing seeds for long term cold storage, where you dry them at about fifteen degrees celsius at about fifteen degrees relative humidity or fifteen percent relative humidity. It's so easy a child could remember it, that's right.

So you're you dry them out like that, usually in the presence of like a desk tant or something like that, like what is it um and and once they're dry, you you put them into cold storage and that's where they stay. And in cold storage, I think you get it down to zero point four degrees fahreh height, which is negative eighteen degrees celsius and um. They can stay there for decades, sometimes depending on the seeds sent a century. And but we should say a chuck. These are specific

types of seeds. There's basically two kinds of seeds in the world as far as categorizing seeds goes. One is the orthodox seed, which can undergo the process we just described, and which if you go to a seed bank, those are the kind of seeds that are there. It's what most people think of as seeds. Right, then there's something called recalcitrant seeds, which are things like um a tuber or acorns or a lot of the fruit out there in the world, typically tropical plants the way that they seed.

You can't do what we just said to recalcitrant seed. It will destroy it and it won't be viable. So seed banks don't typically tend to store recalcitrant seeds unless that's their specialty. Yeah, and in that case, you can't use all these uh, you gotta gotta go low fi. Yeah, it seems like a more old world method of storing

a seed if you're working with the racalcitrants. Um. I was just thinking of a Twilight Zone episode or something like you break into the doomsday vault because everything has been lost, and like, at least we got these seeds, like the guy with the the library and he sits on his glasses. I love that when that was Burgess Meredith. Yeah, but in this case they would find that, uh, they had all gotten moist and grown and died. So the seed vault is just full of dead plants. That'd be

the worst. That'd be pretty sad. Man. Why am I such a downer. I don't know. Uh, did you talk about cryo preservation yet? No, No, that that's actually I was gonna say, with recalcitrant seeds, you you might want to use cryo preservation, which is where you take the living tissue of the plant, like say a banana, and actually like freeze the banana and liquid nitrogen. Well that yeah, that's in vitro storage. Okay, that's not cryo preserve preservation.

It's it's using cryo preservation for in vitro storage, Is that right, Yeah, because that's like in the case of a banana, like you said, there is no seed, so you just gotta you gotta get a piece of that bad boy, right in vitro style. Right. Because so there's this really great, damn interesting article from years ago that is about how bananas are all clones of one another, that they're all a sexual and like every banana in

the world is related to other bananas. Yeah, we've talked about that before, but um, I feel like we have. I think I'm worried about bananas and other people are too, about how they're not actually healthy. Yeah, I mean there's a banana problem, right, is there? I think so what's the problem for some reason, I think there's a shortage, or maybe I'm just making that up. I think they do that from time and times just gild people pay like an extra fifty cents or something, you know what

I mean. Alright, So with these seed banks, UM, they store, like I said, each of them stores different things. But you might think they wouldn't store things like, um, poisonous plants or base of species. But you can kind of find a home for any seed that exists somewhere because you just never know. Um katzoo was an example. Debbie used that, Um, you know, it's a very famous invasive

plant species here in the South. But now and you know it was always just like nothing but a problem, but now there are moves to maybe try and turn it into a biofuel. So it's just trying to not be so shortsighted things that you think, um, you can't use now because you never know what it's gonna be like in five years. It turns out they also um have marijuana seeds and seed banks as well. Yeah, dog,

because who's who's to judge? You know, well, plus it's medicine and UM, they're there trying to you know, all kinds of plant based medicines. So they're not going to discriminate against marijuana. You kid me. It probably has its own little room with beaded doorways and it's all black light. Macromay owls on the wall. Man, Macromay owls are the best, So chuck. Once you have all your seeds in the bank and everything, you just leave them for decades, right,

and then then that's it. Maybe they'll stay forever. No, you got to manage, and you gotta have a caretaker. You do. There's a there's a few things you need to do. One thing is that when you um, when you let seeds go for a while, like their dormant little package waiting to become a plant. Right, But they can die, like even though they're basically they're they're in a state of suspended animation, especially at zero degrees fahrenheight,

they can still go bad. They can still die. They can still age out of being able to produce crops. So every once in a while you want to come in, grab your seeds, take them, plant them, grow more seeds, and and rebank the seeds from the plants you just grew from the seeds you had banked Originally it's kind of a it's kind of pain really if you think about it. But seeds are seeds are worth it, you know, Yeah,

that's what they have on their front door. And then so when you're also doing it, when you're doing that, you're also you want to test the plants DNA. You wanna eventually apparently they don't really do this very much, which I was kind of surprised. You want to basically scan the genome of the plant and maybe store that information. You want to create a database so that all of that genetic information can be can be accessed, so you know what genes are in what plants, and where those

plants are, and what seed bank. And apparently that's the steps that small bards taking, but they're they're nowhere near that now. And I was really surprised to hear it's really supposedly pretty low tech that the seed banks in the world are just tasked with keeping seeds alive and and aren't doing terribly much else unless it's like a research station that that their seed bank is attached to. Well, yeah, I mean, out of i'd say the vast minority of

the murder these super high tech organizations. You know. Yeah. Um, alright, well let's take another break and we'll come back and we'll talk a little bit more about small Bard and his black metal band, as well as the fact that could there be anything wrong with this plan? So check that was that was quite a teaser. Should go ahead and talk about that then? Yeah, well yeah, I mean, like you think, what could possibly be wrong with seed banks?

What's your problem? Just let small Bard have his seeds, right, Yeah, And I kind of was surprised to know that there was any downside, but um, there is a school of thought that is very much um from people that like our hands on with farmers themselves, where they say, like, you know, it's it's great that you're doing this, but um, in a thousand years, those seeds might be worthless. Right.

It was like I was saying, you have to come in and and plant those seeds and get new seeds from those plants, right, You can't just leave them, correct, right, but they could also be worthless, chucking that when you take seeds out of the world and bank them put them in suspended animation, you're halting evolution as well. Well yeah, I mean that's kind of the point, Like plants are are well, they're literally growing things, but they're also evolving things.

And like these farmers are saying, you know, they day to day and year to year and crop to crop, they see changes. So these seeds that you've got for decades and decades may end up not being anything like the seeds that you're growing or that you may lose. I mean, I guess as long as you're keeping it up though, I mean I side with the seed vaulters for sure. Yeah, yeah, well, okay, so there's two there's

two schools of thought. One is banking seeds, right and just protecting the genetic information of every variety of plants you possibly can, right, it can't be for future use, right.

The other school of thought is, no, we need to be working with farmers out in the field to protect protect crop diversity and like like protected by making sure that those varieties are still being farmed and that there's a bunch of different varieties and that these farmers stay farming that they can you know, make their living you know, doing this this farming, and and that's the way to protect bio diversities to keep evolution going, not take the

seeds and ultimately the plants out of evolution for a while and maybe do both, you would think so, But as far as um, as Suzanne Goldenberg says in that that Guardian article, there's just not the funding to do both. So there's a big division in in crop sciences, in in botany and in biology about which route do you take. And svall Bard has been getting a lot of the money lately. So the seed banking way is kind of

the way that people have been going. But there's a there's a lot of people are saying, I don't know if that's such a good idea after all, maybe we should be protecting crops in situ in the fields and in supporting indigenous farmers um instead. So there's a big

debate about which way to go. Still, yeah, I mean, and then like you said at the very beginning, uh, seed banks, and of course the one in Norway is very um it's kind of a it's about the sexiest seeds can get sure as far as the media goes, especially when you have backers like Bill and Melinda Gates and these you know, very wealthy philanthropists kind of backing the idea of these seed banks. Um. You know, I think hopefully that doesn't divert so much funding from the

other that it's you know, a wash. You know, well, that's part of the problem. It is very much. So it's diverting a ton of funding away from the stuff, the campaigns that are carrying out in the field. And I think part of the reason is is because there this division has become pronounced, you know, it's one or the other. Some people are saying, Okay, well I'll choose this side over this side or something. I don't like

a black and white line of thinking. I don't either, And it does seem like this is important enough to try both approaches. But I guess the will is not there. The finances aren't really right. So um, there there's it's becoming a battle. Um. But I'm with you, man. I think I think seed banking is good. I also think working with farmers is good. Um, so let's try both,

is my thing? Agreed? Um. The other The other thing that I'm starting to kind of see about the Crop Trust and small Bard is that they're, like I said, they're coming in. They're saying, here's the standards for seed preservation, and they're kind of carrying out this some social Darwinistic mission where it's like, if you're not up to snuff to our standards we're making, you're you're not getting any

fun anymore. You're gonna wither and die. And we're just going to support the ones that we that we feel are up to snuff, the seed banks around the world, which is fine, but it's also um like, I mean I get it on the one hand, right where you're just kind of like, um, this works. These standards work, But it's the same thing as saying like this, this um strip mall works. You put an old navy here at t J Max here in a grocery store in

the middle that works, builded everywhere. Do you lose something in the irony of it is that we're trying to protect crop diversity by standardizing the way that they're protected, and it just seems like one point is missing the other in that sense. You know, yeah, yeah, I get it. Um so small Bard gets all the headlines, but there are some other fairly high profile seed banks around the world. Um one uh at Q Gardens in London. Well it's a little south London, a few a couple of hours south.

I think, No, I've been there, buddy, Is it really on the map. It looks like it's pretty pretty far south. Well, I mean it's it's South London. Well, London is huge, Yeah, I mean we Emily and I went and it was the Royal Tanical Gardens. It's just one of the loveliest, uh loveliest gardens I've ever seen. I posted pictures on the stuff you should know while I was just so

blown away. But there they have the Millennium Seed Bank Project. Um. And their goal there is to obviously, um store plants for the United Kingdom, but they really want to protect the twenty four thousand global species as well. UM. And I think right now they have all the native plant population covered. It was pretty amazing. England, oh, just of England, not the UK as a whole. Maybe it is the UK as a whole. It probably is the UK as a whole. Careful yeah really. Um. There's one in Russia

which I believe is the oldest seed bank. Yeah. So that one is the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry. It was established in St. Petersburg, right and St. Petersburg was known as Lennon Grad for a while while Stalin was

in power. Um, and if you'll remember correctly, there was a siege on Lennon Grad that lasted like three years, I think, and plant the plant scientists, like apparently large number of the plant scientists who worked at this Institute of Plant Industry starved to death, died of starvation rather than grow these seeds into food because they were so

bent on protecting it. And the guy that they that they named the place after he was he was a great seed banker as well, very smart guy, um who figured out that the genetic diversity was of paramount importance as far as crops go. Um. He died of starvation as well because Stalin made an escapegoat when his collectivists policies caused a famine. So imagine being a seed a guy who's banking seeds to protect against famine and then dying of starvation as a result. No good, No, that's

no good. So you've got anything else? No, I say, hats off to seed vaulters and um good farmers. Yeah they got them all. Oh man, we almost left out the big, the big thing, the big news about sval Bard. What happened? Well back in May there are reports that there is this um that due to climate change, the perma frost melted and small Bard became flooded and the sea bank was threatened. Well, it turns out that that

was wildly overblown. That the um there's water intrusion just about every year in small Bard, but it's so cold that the water makes it, you know, a couple of meters down towards the vault, which is a hundred meters long, the tunnel is and then freezes solid. And the world found out about this and they said, no, you need to do something about that. So apparently they're waterproofing it. But it wasn't necessary climate change, it wasn't part. But it was the fact that they built the seed vault

into the perma frost. And when you cut into perma frost you allow for heat intrusion, which keeps the perma apart from becoming well being permanent. So it's not all he's frozen. It will freeze in thaw. So by creating the seed vault, they messed up the perma frost. But it's not It wasn't flooded, the seeds weren't an issue, and it's all under control. It's basically just the media finding something ironic and running with it. I do have

one more interesting little tidbit. I don't think we covered that. This is about small bard. Uh. It is such a serious deal there that like there's there's no one person with like the key, like you have to It only opens for deposits three times a year, and it's sort of like war games, like you have to there. There are multiple people that have to be there to even access this thing. You have to beat it at tic tac toe before it we'll let you in. Pretty neat, man,

it is. It's very neat, and the idea behind it's pretty awesome too. I I say, do it all, do everything we can to protect crop diversity. Uh. If you want a more about seed banks, you can type those words in the search bar how stuff works dot com. And while you're at it, go read the Doomsday Vault colon the seeds that could save a post apocalyptic world in the Guardian. That was a good article as well. Uh. And since I said as well, it's time for listener mail.

I'm gonna preface this email with an offer to you to revise your statement on the magnificence of the Aurora borealis. Man. I I want to say, I want to preface that with I'm never going to read the Independent again. Certainly I won't mention anything I read in the Independent again. So it turns out I read the one, the one

article about how the Aurora borealis actually stinks. And it turns out that something around nineties seven percent of our listeners have seen the Aurora borealis and all of them can tell you that it does not, in fact stink in real life. That this is just the one article on the entire Internet that says that, yes, you are well intended, but boy did we hear about it. This one, This one ranks up there with emails that we've gotten

in the past. Uh. So I'm gonna read this one example from Maya Uruk and Maya is uh in Minnesota, in Minneapolis in fact? All right, so maybe may and her husband can come to our show there. I hope they will. In fact, Maya write us an email and I'll put you on the list. How about that? Yeah? You like that? Whoa sand is coming to town? All right? I feel like we've all been friends for years, guys. After joining your episodes every week, we shared so much together.

It was definitely time to share something with you. My husband and I are in our twenties. Forget it, nothing free for you kidding? Living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He's a band teacher and he plays in a funky rock band called the Confused Brothers Band. That's a great name. The bass and the guitar players are brothers. The brothers, I

guess so. Uh. The brothers parents have a large tract of wild land, A huge tract of land in central Minnesota where each year, over Memorial Day, the brothers invite three hundred of their closest musician friends camp out in the woods put on a music festival. Boy, I want to play in this festival. Yeah, man, that sounds great. Uh. This year, they were walking from the tent to the main stage and a couple of people um asked us to look up and said, do you see those flickering lights?

Or are we just tripping too hard? Uh? Sure enough, the northern lights were dancing across the sky the wilderness with no large towns nearby. The Aurora borealis is moving in sharp relief. Imagine a laser show, but a little more alien and way more breathtaking, mesmerizing moment that made me really be glad to be alive in this amazing world. Your episode on Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis left me so sad that you believe Julia Buckley's experience to be generalizable?

Is that a word it is? Now? She may have had a poor experiencing the Northern lights, but that doesn't mean they always appear as a aggie shadow here to attest that the site could be powerful reminder just how beautiful this planet could be. Thanks for all the knowledge and last you give me over the past few years. Maya Yurick, Uh So, Maya, it's in me an email. Just respond to say I want to go to your show for free. That is quite an offer, ski Ulrich

take him up on it. If you want to get in touch with us, like Maya Skeet did, you can tweet to us at s y s K podcast. I'm at josh um Clark also on Twitter. You can add with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or Stuff you Should Know. Uh. You can send us an email to Stuff podcast at how Stuff works dot com and be sure to say hi to Jerry too because they go to her as well, and then, as always, hang out with us at our luxurious home on the Web Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on

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