School of Sustainability

1,834 trials of rare seed, run from back gardens

Karen Lacy had never given amaranth a thought before the 2025 season. Then a packet of 'Hartman's Giant' arrived from the seed bank, and by autumn she was noting its strong colour and upright flower spikes, saying she would grow it again and wanted to try cooking with it. What she values most is growing varieties she has never seen before, then passing what she learns to her daughter and sharing the seed with her son.

Karen is one of hundreds of growers in ADAPT, a community science programme run by Seed Savers Exchange from Heritage Farm. The idea is plain: rare varieties sitting in a collection are only half alive until someone grows them, so the organisation posts out packets that are not commercially available and asks ordinary gardeners to watch closely. Growers record what matters in a real garden - how a plant stands up to wind, whether it sulks in drought, the colour of its stems.

For the amaranth trials alone, participants uploaded more than 260 photographs, left 715 comments and logged 1,300 trait ratings on SeedLinked, an open-source platform where the results are visible to growers anywhere. Across the whole 2025 season, ADAPT sent out 5,502 packets covering 111 varieties across nine crop types, with 1,834 trials run nationally, some in collaboration with the USDA's own seed bank.

Amaranth was a deliberate choice: it barely exists in the market, so several participants grew it for the first time. In the autumn the organisation ran a cooking demonstration so members could learn what to do with the tiny seeds, which can be popped like corn and, in Mexico, are bound with honey into a sweet called alegria. Amaranth fed the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas, is naturally gluten-free and runs to about 14 per cent protein. Molly, a participant in Philadelphia, plans to grow 'Hartman's Giant' again next season.

Seed Savers Exchange · Read the source

The scrub they called wasteland hides a second tree underground

For three winters, in gales and torrential rain, Aaron Europa and Stu White of the Knepp estate spent their days waist-deep in Sussex clay, firing a lance of compressed air at the ground and hauling thorn bushes out whole. An air spade blasts heavy clay off a root system without tearing a root hair. Between the winters' digging and the spring nesting season that stopped them, they excavated 270 scrub trees entire - oak, sallow, hawthorn, blackthorn and dog rose - crown to root tip.

The digging was fieldwork for Nancy Burrell's doctorate at Oxford. Burrell grew up at Knepp and has watched it change since rewilding began in 2001, as longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies and deer turned former arable fields into browsed parkland. Her question was carbon. Rewilding wins credit for wildlife but is waved aside on climate, and she suspected the missing piece was scrub, the thorny growth long dismissed as wasteland - and as unmeasurable.

She was right about the measurement. Standard carbon tools, built for plantations, predict a tree's mass from height and trunk diameter. But a blackthorn chewed by cattle for years grows nothing like a plantation tree. Below the browse line, roughly two and a half metres, it abandons any orderly reach for the sky and pours effort into thorns, resprouting and roots. Burrell built new equations, species by species, for plants shaped by being eaten.

The 270 excavated plants told the story. Below the browse line, the mean ratio of root to shoot was 1.06, against the 0.26 that standard accounting assumes: for every gram of leaf and thorn above ground, at least as much lay beneath, and that figure is conservative, since roots ran well beyond each plant. Above the browse line, out of the herbivores' reach, ratios settled back towards conventional values.

The implication runs past one estate. Scrub and hedgerow have spent decades written off as wasteland, good for nothing, and written off again as unmeasurable. If browsed scrub across the country carries anything like this weight below ground, the carbon ledger has been misreading one of its commonest landscapes - and the free-roaming animals doing the browsing may be part of the reason the roots are there at all.

Knepp Estate · Read the source

3.8 million baby oysters and a lagoon filling with life again

Native European flat oysters once formed vast reefs across the continent's coastal waters - filtering seawater, sheltering hundreds of marine species, holding seabeds together and helping protect coastlines from erosion. Centuries of overharvesting, pollution, disease and habitat destruction reduced those reefs to a tiny fraction of their former extent. A reef is not a stock you can replant like a forest; it is a structure that has to be rebuilt animal by animal.

George Birch founded Oyster Heaven in the Netherlands in 2021 to do that rebuilding. The company's core device is the Mother Reef: a patented, modular clay structure seeded on land with juvenile oysters raised in mobile nurseries, then lowered onto the seabed as a foundation on which a reef can develop naturally. The engineering problem was never the oyster. It was the cost of giving millions of them a start at once.

In 2024 a €100,000 loan from Rewilding Europe Capital, the rewilding network's enterprise facility, carried the company from pilot scale to its first large deployment. Through 2025, under the name Project Asta, the team installed their seeded clay structures in the Veerse Meer carrying 3.8 million juvenile oysters. After the first growing season, roughly 45 per cent were still alive - a higher survival rate than comparable restoration efforts typically report, and a step towards a naturally reproducing population.

What returned around the survivors arrived faster than the oysters themselves. Monitoring now estimates around 17 million marine organisms living in and around the young reef - fish, crustaceans, sponges - with species richness well above nearby control sites. Birch's commercial ambition rests on the filtering: oysters strip excess nutrients such as nitrogen from the water, and the company plans to sell that measured benefit to organisations investing in nature recovery, so each reef is paid for by performance rather than grants.

Rewilding Europe · Read the source

Keeping mothers breastfeeding for six months, from Oakland to Gaza

Brandi Gates-Burgess had her daughter at twenty-one, while studying at UC Riverside, and breastfed largely because she was broke. Then she learned the numbers: Black mothers in America die from pregnancy-related causes at three times the rate of white mothers, and six months of breastfeeding shifts a child's odds on diabetes, asthma, allergies and obesity. She switched her major to sociology to understand why Black birth goes wrong so often in the US.

In 2023 she founded Breast Friends Lactation in the Bay Area, pairing low-income families with lactation consultants who look like them and know from the inside what Black motherhood in America involves. The service is booked solid. She was brought into this conversation by Sandra Adler Killen, who came to nursing at fifty - her fifth career - and qualified as a lactation consultant after breastfeeding her own two children.

Killen has worked with refugee populations in Syria and Lebanon and deployed to Gaza three times, training neonatologists, paediatricians, midwives and nurses to keep infants fed through famine and mass casualty. The third voice is Dr Cindy Nelly, a midwife and global health consultant who has spent twenty-five years building health systems in conflict zones from Rwanda to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Gaza.

Nelly's first career was in environmental science; she travelled early, noticed the disparities in the places she passed through, and wanted the travelling to mean something. Her great-grandmother was a midwife, and when her own daughter was born - Nelly was twenty-three - she chose a midwife without quite knowing why, then walked out of that delivery room into the profession.

The three resist comparing suffering. What they share instead is a diagnosis: the same failure surfacing at different scales, in institutions that were never designed with the most exposed in mind, propped up by the people nearest the crisis, often unpaid and rarely heeded. Their prescription is unglamorous - get a mother breastfeeding, keep her supported for six months, and the health trajectory of a whole community moves with her.

Bioneers · Read the source