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Member Profile: Real Seeds

Real Seeds is a family-owned company producing high quality seeds for over 25 years, now supplying 400,000 packets a year all over the UK. Based on a small farm in Wales, they are Soil Association registered and only sell open pollinated, non-GM seeds. Their well-curated catalogue of tried and tested produce includes many unusual and heirloom varieties. They encourage their customers to save their own seeds too.

Isy at GM Freeze caught up with Kate McEvoy to chat about their work and decades-long experience of a changing agricultural sector. 

Kate during an interview with the Seed Sovereignty Programme.

Image credit: The Gaia Foundation.

Please tell us a bit about Real Seeds and its history.

Two of us started Real Seeds in the late 1990s. We’d been growing our own vegetables and realised that most modern varieties had been bred for the needs of large-scale chemical farming. We started swapping and saving seeds of older varieties and others that worked well in a low input organic system, and this developed into a small seed company. Since then we’ve grown with the addition of more people, and we’re now based on a small farm in Pembrokeshire.

What is the key motivation for Real Seed’s activities? In what ways do you feel you are contributing to a more sustainable food system?

All of our seeds are open pollinated, we don’t offer any hybrids. Our key aims are to provide gardeners with really good seed, of varieties that are suited to small scale low input production, but also very importantly to educate and encourage them to start saving seeds themselves at home. When we started there were some local seed swaps, the Heritage Seed Library, us, and not much else going on around seed saving. We’re now seeing a proliferation of organisations and initiatives, and a growing interest in heritage grains, constructed landraces and similar. It feels very inspiring. The only downside is that while these are very active and dynamic, they are still small scale, which means that the impact on the wider market for seed is limited and there is still a lot of work to be done.

How is the issue of genetic modification relevant to your organisation?

​​​​​​​It was once a huge rallying point, with a lot of public concern, activists pulling up GM crops, and mainstream media being alarmist – for once in a useful way. Companies waited for the concern to quieten and are now pushing back with supposedly different but ultimately the same technologies, and it seems the public have stopped worrying about it. Our belief remains, though, that genetic modification isn’t just the wrong answer to the problems of our agricultural system, it’s not even answering the right question. We need to be looking at genetically diverse, resilient open pollinated varieties and populations that will be able to survive and adapt in an increasingly uncertain climate. That’s where we come in.

Do you have any particular success stories, inspirations or reflections you’d like to share?

We’ve been involved in the UK Seed Sovereignty programme from the start, with the aim of encouraging more small-scale commercial production of organic / agro-ecological vegetable seed in the UK. Founded in 2017 with regional arms varying in focus and levels of activity, they’ve been doing a lot of work around training and raising awareness of the importance of open pollinated seed. They have successfully driven the movement out beyond home gardeners, and into the smaller scale, organic commercial sector. Their Wales co-ordinator Katie Hastings, along with others including Sue Stickland (who was previously involved in the early days of the Heritage Seed Library), have got some fantastic projects under way. These include supporting the new co-operative Wales Seed Hub, and the Llafur Ni project, working with heritage grains.  ​​​​​​​

What are your organisational aspirations? Where would you like to be in five years’ time? 

Over the next 5 years, we hope to see the increasing network of small-scale organic seed producers in the UK continue to thrive and grow. Perhaps more optimistically, we would love to see a move in the direction of agriculture policy away from big-ag, and GM as a false solution to climate change, and towards small scale agro-ecological food systems. It’s hard to imagine much change coming at government level, considering the parties’ positions on sustainable agriculture, and we aren’t feeling optimistic. Even with the devolved Welsh government and the promises made after years of consultation, a new Sustainable Farming Scheme has just been pushed back to 2026 and it looks like some of the most positive aspects of the scheme may be diluted.

But we’ll continue to work with organisations like GM Freeze, the Landworkers’ Alliance and the Organic Growers Alliance to try to make the case for this shift at UK level and at home in (still officially GM free) Wales. ​​​​​​​At a more immediate level, we’ve taken on an additional field a couple of miles away from our main site that gives us more space for seed production, and also more isolation options.   Getting our first crops of the year in the ground  is always pretty exciting!

Anything else you’d like to add?

I’d like to highlight the devolution issues and the contradictions between Welsh GM legislation and the Internal Markets Act. This means that although new-style GMOs (so-called “precision bred organisms” according to the UK government) should be treated as old-style GMOs according to Welsh legislation, if they are sold into Wales from England none of the normal controls (labelling etc) will apply. These two articles explain a bit more:

  • thenational.scot/politics/24391023.genetically-modified-foods-must-clearly-labelled/
  • gmfreeze.org/2024/03/29/arguments-and-awareness/#CS-Westminster

The Real Seeds operations

Tam cleaning seed.
Real Seeds’ drying room.
Real Seeds’ perennials terrace.
Kate with stakes.

Photo credits: Real Seeds