Seeds Are Power. A Growing Culture Wants You to Understand Why.
This month’s Planet Positive spotlight: a small nonprofit is using storytelling, grassroots funding, and global coalition building to challenge the corporate takeover of the world’s most fundamental resource. Essential Oxygen signed the declaration. Here’s why.
Essential Oxygen | Planet Positive initiatives
In Ghana, a farmer who shares protected seed varieties with a neighbor can face a minimum ten year prison sentence. In many countries across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, the simple act of saving seed from one harvest and replanting it the next season, something farming communities have done for more than 12,000 years, can now result in fines, prosecution, or the seizure of an entire crop.
This is not hypothetical. It is the current reality in the 80 member countries of UPOV, the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, a legal framework that grants corporations monopoly rights over seeds for 20 to 25 years and restricts farmers from saving, reusing, exchanging, or selling them.
Against this backdrop, a nonprofit called A Growing Culture (AGC) has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in the global fight for seed sovereignty. Founded in 2019 and based in Asheville, North Carolina, A Growing Culture is a nonprofit organization that works to unite the food sovereignty movement through storytelling, grassroots funding, and global coalition building. AGC is not a seed bank. It does not breed varieties or distribute packets. Instead, it does something that may be even harder to pull off: it tells stories. And those stories are changing how millions of people understand the relationship between seeds, power, and justice.
This month, as part of our Planet Positive initiatives, Essential Oxygen donated to A Growing Culture and signed the organization’s Free the Seed declaration, a public commitment to defend seed sovereignty and biodiversity. We wanted to share why this work matters and what AGC is building.
What is seed sovereignty, and why does it matter?
Seed sovereignty is the right of farmers and communities to save, use, exchange, and sell their own seeds. It confronts the corporate enclosure of genetic resources that were once freely shared and challenges legal frameworks that criminalize traditional farming practices. The movement is led by organizations including La Via Campesina, GRAIN, and A Growing Culture, alongside thousands of grassroots seed banks and seed saving networks worldwide.
To understand why this matters, consider what a seed actually is. It is not merely the beginning of a plant. It is the accumulated intelligence of millennia of human cultivation. Every locally adapted variety of rice, corn, wheat, or bean on Earth exists because generations of farmers observed, selected, saved, and shared the best performers from each harvest. Over time, those choices produced extraordinary biodiversity: varieties tuned to specific soils, altitudes, rainfall patterns, and cultural preferences.
Vandana Shiva, the Indian physicist and food sovereignty activist who co-founded the Navdanya seed saving network, has described this inheritance in vivid terms. In a widely cited interview with YES! Magazine, she called the seed the embodiment of culture, explaining that through careful selection, women transformed one grass into 200,000 rice varieties. That, she said, is a convergence of human intelligence and nature’s intelligence.
That convergence is now under corporate control. According to a 2025 report by GRAIN and ETC Group, just four corporations, Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, and BASF, control approximately 56 percent of the global commercial seed market and 61 percent of the pesticide market. In the United States, Bayer and Corteva alone hold roughly 72 percent of the corn seed market, per USDA estimates.
The numbers behind corporate seed control
- 4 companies control 56% of the global seed market (GRAIN/ETC Group, 2025)
- 75% of plant genetic diversity has been lost since the early 1900s (FAO)
- 93% of unique seed varieties have disappeared in the last century
- 80 countries now enforce UPOV seed patent laws
- In Ghana, sharing protected seeds carries a minimum 10 year prison term
Jennifer Clapp, a leading scholar on food system concentration at the University of Waterloo, has described the structural consequence plainly. When a small number of firms control nodes of the food supply chain, she and co author Keldon Bester wrote in 2025, they gain the power to shape what the food system looks like, how much choice exists within it, and whether healthy, sustainable diets remain accessible.
What is A Growing Culture?
A Growing Culture (AGC) is a nonprofit organization founded in 2019 that works to unite the global food sovereignty movement. Based in Asheville, North Carolina, AGC uses storytelling, media production, and grassroots coalition building to confront the root causes of injustice in the global food system. The organization’s mission is captured in seven words: Food sovereignty. For everyone. Everywhere.
AGC operates at the intersection of media, movement building, and direct funding, using narrative as a primary tool for systems change. Through its newsletter Offshoot, published on Substack, along with short films, social media campaigns, and longform journalism, AGC centers the stories of farming communities on every continent.
Justin Sardo, AGC’s Creative Director, has spoken about the philosophy behind this approach. In an interview with Shroomer, he described wanting to understand the world through the lens of food. What drew him was not abstraction but the humility of farming itself, the experience of being part of an ecosystem and figuring out how to nourish it.
The distinction between food security and food sovereignty is central to AGC’s framing. Food security, Sardo has argued, tends to be about centralization and top down mechanisms. It has been a vehicle for the consolidation of corporate power, allowing countries like the United States to generate surpluses through subsidies that collapse production in other nations. Food sovereignty, by contrast, puts decision making in the hands of the people who actually grow food.
What is AGC’s Seed is Power fund?
Seed is Power is a fund created by A Growing Culture to support seed savers around the world on their own terms. The fund directs financial resources to seed keepers, community seed banks, and Indigenous seed networks, and is designed to disrupt conventional philanthropy by eliminating the top down conditions that often accompany institutional grants.
AGC describes Seed is Power as a reciprocal system that redistributes power, building equity and community among seed savers. Rather than imposing reporting requirements or Western accountability frameworks, the fund trusts communities to determine how resources are used. The approach reflects a growing recognition that traditional grant making can inadvertently harm the very communities it claims to help.
The underlying premise is both ecological and cultural. Living seed systems are vital to sustaining biodiversity and culture, AGC writes. Industrial agriculture threatens these systems. The fund is an intervention against that threat, providing material support so that the farmers, Indigenous communities, and peasant networks already doing the work of seed conservation can continue to do it.
What is the Free the Seed campaign?
Free the Seed is an alliance launched in 2026 by A Growing Culture and the Non GMO Project that unites the natural products industry in public solidarity with seed sovereignty and biodiversity. The campaign invites brands, retailers, nonprofits, and distributors to sign a declaration committing to defend seed rights, amplify farmer-led stories, and contribute to a Seed Solidarity Fund.
The campaign’s declaration is striking in its directness. It names corporate control over seeds as extraction, not innovation. It calls seed not a product to be owned but a relative stewarded across generations. And it defines the role of participating businesses not as leaders but as listeners: standing beside the farmers, peasants, Indigenous peoples, and seed keepers who have safeguarded life across generations.
Signatories include natural food brands like Alter Eco and Lotus Foods, organizations like Naturally Network, and companies across the natural products space that see biodiversity as inseparable from their mission. Essential Oxygen is proud to be among them. Each participating company commits to three pillars: amplifying farmer-led stories of seed sovereignty, contributing to a Seed Solidarity Fund, and using their public voice and influence to stand openly with those defending seed and biodiversity.
AGC’s program portfolio at a glance
- Seed is Power: A fund that supports seed savers globally on their own terms, redistributing financial resources directly to the grassroots.
- Free the Seed: A 2026 alliance uniting the natural products industry in public solidarity with seed sovereignty, in partnership with the Non GMO Project.
- Stop UPOV: A global campaign, launched December 2025, uniting over 400 groups to confront corporate seed patent laws. Website: stopupov.org.
- Hunger for Justice: A platform connecting food sovereignty movements worldwide to share stories and collaborate.
- Peasant and Indigenous Press: A program centering the voices of farming communities in global media narratives.
- Offshoot: AGC’s newsletter on the future of food, published on Substack.
What is UPOV, and why is AGC fighting it?
UPOV (the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants) is an international legal framework that gives corporations monopoly rights over seeds. Established in 1961 and most aggressively expanded in its 1991 revision, UPOV grants companies that develop or modify a plant variety exclusive rights for 20 to 25 years. Under UPOV, farmers can be fined, prosecuted, or imprisoned for saving, reusing, exchanging, or selling protected seed varieties.
Perhaps the most structurally ambitious piece of AGC’s work is the Stop UPOV Alliance, launched in December 2025 alongside longtime partner GRAIN. The alliance unites more than 400 groups, including grassroots farmers’ organizations, Indigenous and peasant networks, environmental activists, and seed sovereignty advocates, across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe.
As AGC detailed in its December 2025 Offshoot newsletter, UPOV’s founding countries have used trade agreements, neoliberal reforms, and corporate pressure to force Majority World countries into the framework. Today, the treaty encompasses 80 member countries across five continents. In many of those nations, farmers risk criminal penalties for practicing what their ancestors did freely for generations.
The consequences are concrete and documented. In Kenya, 15 smallholder farmers supported by organizations including Greenpeace Africa and Seed Savers Network successfully overturned provisions that had criminalized the sharing of traditional seeds. That legal victory, won against active corporate lobbying, has become a model for resistance movements elsewhere.
On the international stage, the 2018 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP), championed by La Via Campesina, formally codified the right of rural communities to maintain, control, protect, and develop their own seeds. But as AGC’s work makes clear, declarations need enforcement, enforcement needs political will, and political will needs public pressure. That is where storytelling becomes strategy.
Why does storytelling matter for seed sovereignty?
Storytelling matters for the seed sovereignty movement because the communities most affected by seed privatization are also the most systematically excluded from global media narratives. A Growing Culture exists to close that gap.
Two quotes from AGC team members capture the challenge. Dimah Mahmoud, AGC’s Programs Director, has put it this way in an interview with Shado Magazine: Farmers are here. They have always been here. The world is just not listening to them. Not because farmers are voiceless, but because they are being actively silenced and pushed out of the frame.
And Thea Walmsley, AGC’s Communications Director, has posed a question that strikes at the root of why Western audiences often miss the urgency: What does sovereignty mean, if you have never had your sovereignty taken from you?
That question is the reason AGC invests so heavily in narrative. For consumers and voters in wealthy nations, the idea that a seed could be privatized, that a farmer could go to prison for planting grain her grandmother saved, feels distant and implausible. AGC’s job is to close that distance. Through design, film, journalism, and social media, it makes the global seed crisis legible to people who have never thought about where their food begins.
The organization’s vision statement reads like a manifesto: Food sovereignty is a human right. Healthy, accessible, and culturally appropriate food is a human right. Living wages, living environments, living traditions are human rights. Dignity. Diversity. Culture. All human rights. It is an expansive frame, connecting seed sovereignty to a broader set of social justice commitments rather than siloing it as an agricultural niche.
How can you support seed sovereignty?
If you eat, you have a stake in seed diversity. Here are tangible ways to engage with the issues A Growing Culture is working on.
Follow AGC’s work and share it. Subscribe to Offshoot, their Substack newsletter, and follow @agrowingculture on social media. Their content is designed to be shared widely, and narrative reach is one of the most powerful resources the movement has.
Support the Seed is Power fund. Contributions go directly to seed savers and community seed banks around the world. Visit agrowingculture.org/seed-is-power to learn more.
Learn about UPOV and take action. Visit stopupov.org to understand how international seed patent laws affect farmers near you and around the world. The site includes toolkits for spreading awareness and supporting frontline campaigns.
If you run a brand in the natural products space, sign the Free the Seed declaration. The campaign at freetheseed.org is explicitly designed for businesses that want to align their supply chains and public voices with seed sovereignty.
Start saving seeds at home. Even a single tomato plant or a row of beans connects you to the practice that sustains the movement. Save seeds from open pollinated and heirloom varieties. Each generation adapts further to your soil and climate, producing stronger, more resilient plants. The Community Seed Network (communityseednetwork.org) connects local seed libraries and exchanges across the country.
Buy from independent and open source seed companies. The Open Source Seed initiatives produces seeds with a pledge that they can be freely saved, shared, and bred, and that no one can patent them in a way that restricts others. Choosing these varieties over corporate seeds is a small purchasing decision with structural implications.
Vandana Shiva once wrote that seed is not just the source of life but the very foundation of our being. A Growing Culture takes that premise and extends it into a theory of change: if seeds are power, then who holds the seeds determines who holds the power. Right now, four corporations hold most of it. AGC is working to make sure that is not the end of the story.
Essential Oxygen is honored to support that work through our Planet Positive initiatives. We signed the Free the Seed declaration because we believe that defending the diversity of life on this planet is not a sidebar to our mission. It is the mission.
As the declaration puts it: every seed saved holds both inheritance and imagination. To defend seed is to defend possibility itself.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is A Growing Culture?
A Growing Culture (AGC) is a nonprofit organization founded in 2019 and based in Asheville, North Carolina. AGC works to unite the global food sovereignty movement through storytelling, media production, grassroots funding, and coalition building. Its programs include Seed is Power, Free the Seed, the Stop UPOV Alliance, Hunger for Justice, and the Peasant and Indigenous Press.
What is seed sovereignty?
Seed sovereignty is the right of farmers and communities to save, use, exchange, and sell their own seeds. It confronts the corporate enclosure of genetic resources that were once freely shared and challenges legal frameworks like UPOV that criminalize traditional seed saving practices. The seed sovereignty movement is led by organizations including La Via Campesina, GRAIN, and A Growing Culture.
What is the Free the Seed campaign?
Free the Seed is an alliance launched in 2026 by A Growing Culture and the Non GMO Project. It unites brands, retailers, nonprofits, and distributors in the natural products industry around a public commitment to defend seed sovereignty and biodiversity. Signatories commit to amplifying farmer led stories, contributing to a Seed Solidarity Fund, and using their public influence to stand with seed keepers worldwide. Essential Oxygen is a signatory.
What is the Seed is Power fund?
Seed is Power is a fund created by A Growing Culture to support seed savers around the world. The fund directs resources to seed keepers, community seed banks, and Indigenous seed networks on their own terms, without imposing the conditions typical of institutional philanthropy. AGC describes it as a reciprocal system that redistributes power and builds equity among seed savers.
What is UPOV?
UPOV (the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants) is an international legal framework established in 1961 that gives corporations monopoly rights over seed varieties for 20 to 25 years. Under UPOV, farmers can be fined, prosecuted, or imprisoned for saving, reusing, exchanging, or selling protected seeds. The framework now operates in 80 countries. The Stop UPOV Alliance, co-led by A Growing Culture and GRAIN, unites over 400 groups working to dismantle the system.
How many companies control the global seed market?
According to a 2025 report by GRAIN and ETC Group, four corporations, Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, and BASF, control approximately 56 percent of the global commercial seed market and 61 percent of the global pesticide market. In the United States, Bayer and Corteva alone hold roughly 72 percent of the corn seed market, per USDA estimates.
How is Essential Oxygen involved?
Essential Oxygen donated to A Growing Culture as part of its Planet Positive initiatives and signed the Free the Seed declaration, a public commitment to defend seed sovereignty and biodiversity. EO joins other natural products companies including Alter Eco and Lotus Foods as signatories of the alliance.
How can I support seed sovereignty?
You can support seed sovereignty by following A Growing Culture’s work at agrowingculture.org and subscribing to their Offshoot newsletter. Donate to the Seed is Power fund. Visit stopupov.org to learn about international seed patent laws. Save seeds from open pollinated and heirloom varieties at home. Buy from independent seed companies like the Open Source Seed initiatives. If you run a business in the natural products space, sign the Free the Seed declaration at freetheseed.org.
Sources
Primary organization:
- A Growing Culture (AGC) — agrowingculture.org
- Free the Seed campaign — freetheseed.org (launched 2026, in partnership with Non GMO Project)
- Seed is Power fund — agrowingculture.org/seed-is-power
- Stop UPOV Alliance — stopupov.org (launched December 2025)
- Offshoot newsletter — agrowingculture.substack.com
Data and research cited:
- GRAIN and ETC Group, 2025 report on seed and agrochemical market concentration
- USDA, Concentration and Competition in U.S. Agribusiness, 2023
- UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) — plant genetic diversity statistics
- D. Raghunandan, Titans of Industrial Agriculture (MIT Press, 2025)
Expert voices cited:
- Justin Sardo, AGC Creative Director — Shroomer interview (2024)
- Dimah Mahmoud, AGC Programs Director — Shado Magazine interview (2023)
- Thea Walmsley, AGC Communications Director — Shado Magazine interview (2023)
- Jennifer Clapp and Keldon Bester, 2025 publication on food system concentration
- Vandana Shiva — YES! Magazine interview; Navdanya publications
Allied organizations referenced:
- GRAIN — grain.org
- ETC Group — etcgroup.org
- La Via Campesina — viacampesina.org
- Navdanya — navdanya.org
- Non GMO Project — nongmoproject.org
- Open Source Seed initiatives — osseeds.org
- Community Seed Network — communityseednetwork.org
- Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA)
Legal frameworks referenced:
- UPOV Convention (International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants), 1961/1991
- UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP), 2018
- Ghana Plant Variety Protection Act, 2020
essentialoxygen.com | Planet Positive initiatives
