Secure seed and breeding stock
Protect the genetic capital that everything above this tier is built on.
Everything for this step
- Field guide
- Livestock husbandry → 6 sections The sciences → 15 sections Soils and plant nutrition → 4 sections Seeds and the growing year → 5 sections Biology → 19 sections
- Builds
- None yet.
- Reference sheets
- None.
- Sciences it rests on
- Genetics · Agricultural science
- Track
- Crops and soil, level 1 of 7 · next: Read the year
Why this matters
This is the most time-critical and most commonly missed step in the whole tier. Seed and breeding animals are irreplaceable and perishable, and the window to collect them closes fast. A group that eats its seed stock has capped its own ceiling permanently.
The shape of it
- Collect immediately and indiscriminately. Garden centres, agricultural stores, feed merchants, kitchen cupboards, standing crops, wild stands. Seed viability drops every year you wait.
- Prefer open-pollinated varieties over hybrids. F1 hybrid seed will grow this year but its offspring will not breed true, so it is a one-season asset. Heirloom and open-pollinated seed reproduces itself indefinitely — that difference decides whether you have agriculture in year five.
- Prioritise calories and storage life: potatoes, beans, wheat, barley, maize, squash, brassicas, onions, carrots. Then oil and fibre: flax, hemp, sunflower.
- Dry it hard, then seal it cold. Seed dies from moisture and heat. Dry to brittle, store in sealed vessels with ash or charcoal as a desiccant, in the coolest dark place available. Well-stored seed holds for years.
- Split the store across separate locations. One fire, one flood or one rodent breach must not be able to take all of it.
- Ring-fence it absolutely. Seed stock is not food, in any circumstance, at any level of hunger. Make this a rule the group agrees to while it is well fed, because it cannot be agreed to while hungry.
- For animals: keep breeding pairs and young females alive above all. Eat males and surplus. A herd is rebuilt through females.
Doing it, step by step
The summary above says what has to happen. This says how, with the numbers that decide whether it works.
1 · Collect now, indiscriminately, because viability falls every year
Seed dies slowly and invisibly, and the store you build in year one is the store you live on. Take everything, from everywhere: garden centres and agricultural merchants, feed stores, kitchen cupboards and spice jars, standing crops, wild stands, other people's gardens.
Sort later. The cost of collecting a variety you never plant is a jar; the cost of missing one is a crop you cannot grow.
2 · Separate open-pollinated seed from hybrids before you store it
F1 hybrid seed grows this year and does not breed true next year. Its offspring segregate into a mixture of plants unlike the parent, most of them worse. A packet marked F1 or hybrid is a one-season asset; one marked open-pollinated, heirloom or standard renews itself indefinitely.
Store the two separately and label them. Hybrids are worth planting — they often yield well — but only open-pollinated seed makes you independent, and mixing the two up is discovered a year too late.
3 · Prioritise by calories per hectare and by storage life
In rough order of what a group actually needs:
- Staple carbohydrate — potatoes, wheat, barley, rye, oats, maize, rice.
- Pulses — beans, peas, lentils: protein, and they fix nitrogen for the rotation.
- Keeping vegetables — squash and pumpkins, brassicas, onions, carrots, turnips, beets.
- Oil and fibre — flax, hemp, sunflower, rape.
Then quantity: a single variety of each is a single point of failure. Two or three varieties of each staple, chosen to differ in when they ripen, is what survives a bad season.
4 · Dry it hard — this is what decides how long it lives
Two rules of thumb govern seed storage, and they compound:
- Every 1% fall in seed moisture doubles its storage life (between about 5% and 14%).
- Every 5 °C fall in temperature doubles it (between 0 and 50 °C).
So seed dried from 12% to 8% and stored at 10 °C instead of 25 °C lives roughly a hundred times longer. Aim for 5–8% moisture: spread thin in shade with moving air for 1–3 weeks, then sealed for a week with dried silica gel or oven-dried rice to pull it drier still.
The test for large seed: a bean or a pea at the right moisture shatters under a hammer blow rather than denting.
5 · Seal it, cool and dark, and label every container
Airtight, cool, dark. Glass jars with good lids, sealed tins, or thick bags inside a tin. Seed sealed damp rots; seed sealed dry keeps for years. A cellar, a buried pot or a north wall beats a shed roof by a wide margin. A refrigerator, if one exists, is a seed vault for well-dried seed.
Label every container with crop, variety, year and where it was grown. An unlabelled jar of brassica seed is an unknown plant, and by the time you find out which, you have spent a season and a bed on it.
6 · Split the store across at least two places
One fire, one flood, one rodent breach or one theft must not be able to take the genetic capital of the whole group. Divide every crop's seed between at least two locations, far enough apart that the same event cannot reach both, and record what is in each.
This is the principle a national seed vault is built on, at the scale of a settlement — and it is the cheapest insurance on this page, costing nothing but a second container and a walk.
7 · Test germination before every sowing season
Seed looks identical dead and alive, and the first sign of a dead store is a bed that does not come up — a month into a season that cannot be restarted.
- Count out 100 seeds (20 or 50 if seed is scarce).
- Lay them on a damp cloth, roll it loosely, keep it in a covered container so it stays moist but not wet.
- Hold it at 20–25 °C.
- Count the healthy sprouts at 7–14 days.
Above 80%, sow normally. 50–80%, sow proportionally thicker. Below 50%, sow very thickly and grow that crop this season specifically to replace the seed, because next year it will be worse. The seeds guide carries the storage life of each crop.
8 · Ring-fence it: seed stock and breeding females are not food
Agree this rule while the group is well fed, out loud, and write it down. It cannot be agreed to in March by hungry people, and the moment it breaks a survivable year becomes a terminal one — eating the seed corn is the classic mechanism by which settlements die a year after the crisis that started it.
The same rule covers animals: breed females, eat males. A herd rebuilds through its females, and slaughtering them in a hard autumn is spending the capital to pay the interest. Keep the best male only; eat or trade the rest.