How to grow the organization regionally and internationally?

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I’m interested in seeing adaptation agriculture and gardening grow in several ways: becoming more widespread where it is already present as well as germinating in places where it is less known.

At the moment, I notice most of the members seem to use English as their first language. The center of gravity seems to be the US with some growers south and north of the border. The presence of some European growers have changed the language mix somewhat and from my local perspective (Denmark) it also poses its own challenges for further diffusion.

I would like to collect ideas in this thread for how to grow this style of agriculture and gardening regionally and internationally.

Some initial thoughts, ideas and questions from my local standpoint:

  • Language-based subforums. Most people in my country speak English. But not everyone, esp. not older people - who have lots of time for gardening. Lots of growers might be proficient in English in most contexts, but don’t know what the most important things for gardening (crops, methods, soil organisms, diseases etc) are called in English. Around here we’re not used to terms like “outbreeders” or “culling” or “anthers” etc and “squash” specifically means Cucurbita pepo, not like you Americans who seem to use it for any cucurbits. Other countries, the language barrier poses an even larger challenge.
  • Language-based or regional chapters of Going to Seed. In my own context I have two obvious organizations to try to find partners and further an more genetically diverse, seed-saving, adaptive agriculture. One is a Seed saver association. Most members are focused on preserving heirloom varieties, but not exclusively so and there’s also room for experimentation. Some members have grown diverse seed, grexes and done their own breeding. I’m pretty sure I myself got to know about Joseph Lofthouse’s book through that organization. The other one is a small-scale, regenerative agriculture network. Most members are young or young adults who farm on a market-garden basis and buy 95% of all their seed from the same 3-4 sources and probably half of that from one single German distributor (Bingenheimer). I think it would make sense to work within such organizations to find people that are interested in exchanging seed, or even just takings seed to later grow it out and give some back again. It has been the most convincing strategy for me at least. But then say I do find a number of people who want to shift into a more genetically diverse and adaptive way of growing - it would make sense to get organized across those organizations (compared to two parallel work groups in each of them). We could start an independent initiative inspired by Going to Seed. But personally, I like to incorporate whenever possible and just make sure to keep a level of federation so the organization as a whole doesn’t stifle local initiative. The same logic would apply if we were to initiate a European chapter of Going to Seed - and perhaps this could be a more low-hanging fruit to begin with. Some obvious infrastructure benefits to gain would be: Access to the main webpage (regional landing page, e.g. goingtoseed.eu, with an independent annual seed collection; regionally relevant contact informations, event calendar), sharing of financial resources (donations, funding applications, crowd funding), less need for parallel administration, communication etc.
  • Cross-breeding with folks that have a similar mindset and perhaps just use another word for it: Thread.
  • Subtitling GTS-videos. Begin with the most relevant or basic.
  • Translating Joseph’s book
  • Using Translation plugins to read the forum.

What do you think and where does your mind go when you try to imagine what it would take to make the resources in this community available to more people? Brainstorm away and I’ll try to summarize topics to the list above when they appear.

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Great thoughts! I’ll share my short opinion.

I think one big thing we can do is connect with people doing similar work, regardless of what they’re calling it, and start dialogue and partnership where it makes sense. I found this post so encouraging in that regard.

I’m certain there are many people around the world using this approach but calling it something else. As has been pointed out, what we might call landrace agriculture today was for millennia just agriculture.

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The idea of language based subforums is probably worth exploring. My mother tongue is English but I speak French (I lived in France for five years) so I for one would enjoy participating in a French forum. Whether there are enough participants though is another question but there’s only one way to find out.
My sights are more local. How do I spread the word here in my local area? I’ve tried twice to set up a local seed saving group but there just isn’t the interest. My current idea is to work on landraces myself and when I’m happy with them to start offering the seeds to anyone interested.

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Recently I had an opportunity to share some of this work with a Korean-speaking audience. That led me to go to goingtoseed.org with fresh eyes, as if I knew relatively little and was relying on automated translation of the site.

I regret I haven’t written my thoughts up about this experience yet, but I could suggest trying that for other people who are considering these kinds of questions about reaching more people. I don’t have any revelations or simple ideas after trying this myself, but I’m going to tune into the discussion because this seems like a related line of inquiry.

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Yes, I would say that in France, like -I believe- in most southern countries of Europe, our english is pretty bad. There are existing seed networks, but they cannot connect with GtS, due to the language barrier. Which is very strong in my opinion.
When explaining what we do I feel like we talk like theorists whereas we are practitionners… Because we don’t have that much to SHOW.
So to me, thinking in terms of outreach, the easiest way to make the first connection seems:

  • do proper translations of the most relevant going to seed youtube videos (and that’s a fair amount of work already)
    Then :
  • work on translating Joseph’s book (huge work)

Apart from that question of tools for connecting networks, and more globally outreaching, why not doing language subforums. This may help… At this point I believe it would not be useful (as we already exchange informely), but once we have serious translations, why not.

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Thomas , i feel what you’re saying that we don’t have something to show. We might not have finished landraces a la Lofthouse in all kind of veggies, but grown out grexes are pretty impressive stuff. Everybody loves the colors and they’re really impressed bythe seeds of beans and favas mixed.
In a way, i can imagine that people would be more impressed by the diversity of a starting grex then the rather normal look of an amazingly well adapted variety, that’s tested by local cooks over the years and which needs no pesticides, but has become rather monotonous looking.
It would be unstoppable ones we reach the illuminate state of selfseeding as well. Plants would escape into the wild. Getting loads of seeds to germinate at the spot and grow into plants without minding weeds and grasses too much would already be so great.
But to get there we need many more people to join in and a lot of different types of growers. I mean, whereas some people are better positioned to select for taste (hi Malte), others like yourself who try to grow into flattened down cover crops by throwing tons of seeds down and hope for the best. You’ll both be wanting to exchange seeds after a few generations and hope something like Joseph has reached appears. And others will all have differing selection criteria all adding to achieving apparent perfection when combined.

With the rising costs of living and the EU set on diminishing farmed food inside the EU. Flying food in from far to safe the environment in Europe, which has the highest standards of environmental legislation, makes no sense to most people. But it’s the hard reality we have to face. I don’t believe kerosine prices will stay as low as they are. Hiking food prices further. The CO2 taxes on fuel will further increase prices of food. Climate extremes and weather weirding will increase crop failures and prices therefore. The war on water is set to intensify and will up the prices of food. The annihilation of top soils and flushing in super rain events will make food scarcer, scarcity= rising prices . The degradation of the biodiversity and insects and bees will increase the need of pesticides and labor, which will in turn drive the price of food up. In six years a third of the farmers in France will retire, the young are less interested in becoming farmers (living below minimum wages forever is not very appealing for most) , and especially with prices of these days… No farmers, no food.
Prices are not going down, but are getting higher.
So hopefully more people will turn to small scale farming and low input gardening and embrace diversity, seed saving and crop breeding.

Further if the book will be published when translation into French is completed, of which Joseph said some month ago, they were not far of, it will boost things.
I think of ordering a few of those and arming myself with those when travelling to a seed exchange. I believe it’s best done from the bottom up.
Although i love the idea of an organization, i doubt it’s worth the effort. There are quite some organizations already competing for public attention.
Some i think is amazing FMNR, Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration started by an Australian Tony Rinaudo, they do great work in Africa mainly, they’ve reforested millions of acres. Their method is simple, like ours, emberassingly simple even. Regrow trees from stumps refusing to die since the British had them cut down and enjoy the advantages of trees in an environment devoid of them.
They do good work, they send farmers out who changed their methods to tell other farmers how great it worked for them.
One might think governments around the world would put their weight behind finally something that works, and media attention would appear in droves to cheer on the farmers, showing the world that something positive is possible in this world. You’d be sadly mistaken.
Zero interest. None, crickets since forever, not a GMO replanting schedule organaisation sending letters out writing to their fanbase…
Willie Smits, the one man wonder organisation, has the biggest Uran-Utan conservatry in the world in Indonesia, he has reforested on dead soil hundreds of hectares with the local people who were in a poor state before he came with his method and changed it. Rainfall increased, they harvest sugar-palm-sugar, sell water to the nearby city because the streams are back. Have restored the biodiversity and people live in relative peace.
You’d think this permaculture God would get all the nobel peace prices, every news anker would hang on his lips, biographies written about his life. No… Nothing. Crickets.
He has survived countless attempts to take his life. He’s old now, but managed to get quite some influence over time.
Joel Salatin has improved his pastures enormously, farmer who knows how to make money, farming with nature. I don’t know if he has an organization. He got invited at Joe Rogan’s and still even then no serious uptick.

And these are proven life changing ideas, they have made organizations along the way. But in no way is it a agrantee for growth, they’re still pretty obscure.
Same with permaculture. Tons of permaculture organizations, no break throughs.

I don’t know what i’m trying to say really, but having a good organization doesn’t change that much if people are blind or misguided or just don’t care. It’s that what must change, people must change, wake up, look for truth, look for what works, what is logical, what makes sense.

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Great topics for exploration, this is so important. And a giant project.
Let us know if there is anything we can share that would make this process easier.

  • Access to the youtube channel for working on translations of any video subtitles/corrections. I have some experience working on this so I’m happy to share what I learned.

  • Any files like google/word docs. we’ve used.

  • Figuring out how to do language subforums-- I don’t have capacity to take anything on just for supporting somebody who wants to figure this if it happens in Discourse.

  • Do you want to schedule a zoom call with anyone here who wants to talk more about it?

Any other support/suggestions you can think of please reach out.

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Thanks for chipping in and working with the ideas.

Hugo, think of it like this: Could we gain something personally and collectively by getting more organized? Forget about “the organization”, which is secondary. It’s not so different from the conversation we’re already having as an outgrowth of the seed chain. Organizations mean nothing if they don’t help people getting organized - distributing useful resources (seed, knowledges etc), relieving us of work (administrative - at the moment there’s very little to keep the seed chain going, but imagine us being 100 people) etc. The exercise is simply: What would it take to make the movement grow 10 fold from 30 people in EU to 300? And so on. I think most of it is just doing what we’re already doing with some added benefits and resources we could get from the US folks.

Julia, thanks for jumping in and offering your ideas. I would like to just let this thread go and stay explorative. I’m not ready to jump into any actions. We’re doing the Serendipity Seed Swap and it fill the its role at least for the next six months. In the meantime we can discuss, give feedback, imagine and criticize ideas, re-evaluate etc. how to take the next steps here.

And then there are the questions about other places. I’m just thinking about my own local and regional context.

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I would happily hop on a call to discuss. I really think it’s important to focus on genetic diversity as an asset, collaborative community as a necessity, and really just not get too bogged down in the GTSness of anything. I recognize there’s a level at which the organization is a very important tool to spread the message and facilitate the practices that go with it, but it seems to me the most important thing is just spreading the message and convincing, encouraging, and learning together and from people who are practicing the core practices, no matter what they call it or what acronyms might be in their e-mail signature.

This feels like a useful step in making the GTS forums more accessible and discoverable. One of the quickest and dirtiest (edit: American for “fast and cheap”) ways to do this would probably be to just create another category on the current discourse instance for French discussion. We could then wait and see if this attracted enough interest to justify other forms of organization. This usage data would also give us at least some clues as to what those might look like.

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No no I was not talking about the quality of what we do, and of our seeds of early moden landraces, i.e. diversified grexes. Was just saying that what put me on this track 3 years ago is a great podcast (Podcast #6: Joseph Lofthouse - Cultivariable), accessible to me because my english is not too bad, whereas more than 95% of people from southern europe would not have got what Joseph is talking about.
Then I say that I believe that some videos of GtS are great educational videos and - if I got time - after we publish the book, I would like to focus on getting right translations of some of these videos. I believe it is an accessible priority of work to “show” a condensed knowledge and understanding.
Then obviously, a translation of the going to seed course would be great! It is a lot more exhaustive than this really excellent introductory video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SyXaSeCIl2A

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I wonder if there are any plugins for the forum software that lets you do a side by side viewing of the posts here with Google translate, etc. I love separate language sections but sometimes nuggets of information can get lost in a language subforum and unavailable to all the other language subforums.

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If you are on desktop, you can translate directly all the words on the forum with the browser.

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We can do some type of planflet, we can send it digital, translate to multiple languages. Encoraging saving seeds and explaining a little bit of adaptative agriculture.

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On the “language” subforums sometimes “regional” subforums. Consider this: For some people it might be a necessity to communicate in other languages than English. For other people it might just be another word for their region. Most people want to talk more with other people in their own region. Like mine - Scandinavia. I think the “language” forum (or “regional” subforum) could be called Scandinavia. You see how in some parts of the world it’s tending to be the same thing. There are 4-5 main languages in that region of which three of them are similar enough that people can understand each other. The world is a mixed bag of language and regional divisons.

On not understanding what people communicate about in language subforums. I think this is something that English-speakers need to accept haha. In my world, utopia is not that every one necessarily speaks English. That would be most probably entail a loss of biodiversity (language diversity). Some languages have lots of names for some plants, certain ways of growing (and living!) that do not exist in English. I’m not trying to be sentimental, just stating something obvious. If we want to create movements that span the globe, we need to do allow diversification along the way, incl. some personal linguistic cross-pollination and all become polyglots to some extent. Les français seront les premiers à être d’accord, men det vil blive blive endnu mere mærkeligt - bare vent.

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if it can advance the conversation and strategy, I really progressed and arrived among you thanks to the tools google translate… it’s ugly to be so dependent on a multinational but thanks to this tool I was able to translate into French the book of Joseph that I bought in pdf in 2 clicks, in 1 right click I have access to this forum all translated into French… the language barrier is no longer a concern for me
What is generally a big limiting factor I find is the propensity of humans to reinvent everything, start again…
I have thanks to some cunning and circumvention of the world trading system and luck at customs managed to opt for landrace seeds from Jospeh and other American growers who do a huge job. And on the other hand, people here are doing the same work from the beginning, while these landraces are so good that it is enough just to continue this adaptation work locally.
All this time lost on a global scale “to reinvent the wheel”, could be invested in the dissemination of knowledge, communication, green lobbying with our policies and especially the cultivation on a larger scale of these plants… so that the world finally changes.
The proof for example is what works best, in our association we got hold of perennial wheats such as Salish Blue from the usa. On our social network page we announced the good news, We got a shield from the local farmers who say, "Hey, guys, there’s not enough wheat seed or old varieties to save here? and I put my hand to cut that in 2/3 years when we will make visits of the first plot the same types will come to ask us to provide them with seed;-)

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There is a lot about this quote I would like to reply to. First, I like the fact you used the term limiting factor. It’s a very useful construct. Also, just so you know where I am coming from, I slept through 9th grade biology class when they covered mendelian genetics. Plant breeding has been going on since the time of the invention of the wheel. It’s quite easy and natural. Even a cave man can do it. I think science has intentionally been made boring so the masses will be dumb.

Also, reinventing the wheel is my favorite pastime.

I have pasted a link to a description of a variety worked on by Carol Deppe. First part of description: “This is a dehybridization of Ultrabutternut HP Hybrid.”

She obviously saw something with this hybrid that had value. I saw that as something to note. Therefore, I ordered her seeds and also the hybrid seeds that are the ancestors to her variety. I did this because as she worked on the seed in her climate, she may have inadvertently lost some genetics that had value to my climate. Additionally, the seed I am using for the HP hybrid may have changed in minor ways under the care of the seed producer. Something else may be in there that I need.

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This is a great and simple advice, thanks! I don’t know if this could be integrated to the Discourse platform, but might make it easier for new users that struggle with the English language if they could have automatic translations.

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just add google translation in the web browser used, then on each website consulted including this formum a simple right click translates everything in its language. It may not be worth adding a translator on the forum.
The translations are not perfect but 95% is very good, so sometimes I write in French believing me on a French forum lol

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I understand. I use the Google Translate plugin myself when browsing French fruit tree forums. My suggestion was to see if there’s a built-in plugin to Discourse that can do the very same thing for users without them having to install the plugin in their browser.

Just did a quick search and yes, it does exist: Discourse translator | Discourse - Civilized Discussion

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I support this idea to use the translator @stephane_rave is speaking off, to speak amongst people from different languages. It will emancipate people who don’t have English as a second language and lack the courage to make errors. We as a community are missing out on the information these folks on the shy side of life have to offer.
Is it an idea to notify new users on the forum of this possibility from now on?

I do realize that the translator has it’s limits, especially towards proverbs or old ways people speak. Sometimes it comes up weirdly, it just doesn’t match and i can’t fully understand what people say. I’ll have to read twice to be happy.
In atext as short as this one it doesn’t happen, but if it’s a bit longer and people get carried away there’s always a “challenge”.

As an immigrant i’ve learned to think in three languages and have quite a bit to say on the matter.

I think to deepen the knowledge base it’s good to stick together at the forum with English , because it’s the world’s most spoken language. And if people go all speak in smaller circles that is great too, but please follow the main subjects to inject just this or that info into the hivemind.

It’s such an amazing improvement anyway, it used to be that farmers for millenia could only speak to other farmers. And they hated each other and lied and had all kinds of weird superstitions. Now if i say something that’s wrong, people will challenge me politely hopefully and then things get corrected. That leads to an incredible evolution of knowledge, the bigger the group, the faster it is.

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