ABSTRACT
‘Because it is ours’ is an assertion of farmers’ custodianship of their agricultural biodiversity, the knowledge and innovation that underpins it and an expression of their identity. Hence, to be a farmer is a statement of practice and place that is both relational and contextual in which seeds are embodied with cultural meaning as well as being instrumental in food and farming outcomes – seeds that are the direct product of farmers’ actions. In referring to these as ‘seeds of the people’, farmers reaffirm their collective ownership of their agricultural biodiversity and the inter-subjective meaning that is its accompaniment. Yet farmers are eclectic in their choice of seeds, for example: replacing one crop with another due to labour availability, the likelihood of drought or market opportunities, or indeed choosing an off-farm opportunity rather than an agricultural one. This eclecticism reveals farmers’ innovation and improvisational capacities in which agricultural bio-diversity is utilised in agricultural ecosystems which mimic the ecosystems they have replaced. In this process, nature is socially constructed while culture is naturalised. In this chapter, I discuss how agricultural biodiversity is situated in the interstices of these two trends as farmers reinvent their identities in the process of seed conservation, and in the creation of crop diversity.
