Australian film doco to show in France and EU Sept/Oct

[Seed Savers]

Bonjour a tous,


Voici les trois premieres minutes de notre docu de 57 mn sur notre site qui sera projete en Europe cet ete et automne. Youtube.com/seedsavers
Il y a des clips pour les francophones.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPZwgjJW5xs

Michel et Jude Fanton
http://www.seedsavers.net
pour les anglophones now
Since 1978 we, Jude and Michel Fanton, have specialised in biodiversity aspects of Permaculture education, design, implementation and community development.

In 1986 we founded the Australian Seed Savers’ Network to conserve traditional varieties of useful plants to home gardeners.

From the mid 1980s we ran Natural Farming and Permaculture courses in our experimental Fukuoka-inspired food forest (under a canopy of leguminous Acacia species). Bill Mollison co-taught with us, attracting, challenging and entertaining crowds.

At the same time, we worked the media to drive home our seed message for agricultural biodiversity conservation. In 1986 we officially launched Seed Savers so the public could help us maintain a mushrooming seed collection. The gardening public also sent us unusual seeds that we multiplied in our Permaculture garden terraces. You can view one of our designs in Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual by Mollison, figure 10.11, page 260.

We were developing gardener-based maintenance and conservation seed systems without long-term gene banks. See details in Projects. It was Mollison who coined our motto: “Preserving the Genetic Basis of Tomorrow’s Food”.

Twenty-five years later (2010) we host Seed Savers in our one-acre suburban Permaculture gardens with 800 perennial species. We are situated in Byron Bay, a small coastal town in Eastern Australia, latitude 28° south.

We are often asked what motivated us? We took the specific seed path within the Permaculture framework because of the difficulty finding open-pollinated seed bred for local conditions. The proliferation of patenting legislations facilitated mega-pesticide and pharmaceutical corporations worldwide to absorb hundreds of seed companies, plant breeding facilities and their genebanks.

In the late 1980s and 90s we taught a number of Permaculture Design Certificate courses in Australia and other countries such as South Africa, Cuba, UK and Palau in Micronesia. In 1992 we proudly received the Permaculture Community Services Award from Bill Mollison for services around the world.

We multiplied thousands of varieties both in our gardens and with gardeners around Australia. This gave us the background to write and publish The Seed Savers’ Handbook (1993), The Local Seed Network Manual (2004) and Seed to Seed Food Gardens in Schools (2007). From our work with tribal subsistence farmers, we produced in 2008 “Our Seeds”, a one-hour documentary on seed issues for the people of the Pacific; it is in English, French and Pigin English. In 2009 we filmed “Our Roots”, a one-hour documentary for the French International Centre for Research in Agronomy and Development (CIRAD), in English and French.

From the mid 1990s we travelled to help start community seed networks in several dozen countries with countless prior emails, strategic meetings, presentations and inspirational and how-to courses. We collaborate with large and small NGOs, civil societies, and at times government departments in war and reconstruction areas (Cambodia, East Timor, Serbia, Solomon Islands, Afghanistan and Iran) and also newly industrialised societies like Japan, Taiwan and Italy where our books and documentary are translated.

We have developed a multi-pronged approach with community seed mapping, seed exchanges, short-term seed banks and local and bioregional seed networks. People in these groups meet and eat together, collect, multiply and freely redistribute seeds and other propagules. We also give training toward small-scale seed enterprises.

Our 'master plan' is to open new countries to network original seeds from suitable climates and altitudes.

And finally we look forward to meeting you, fired-up, bright people and community organisations with the capacity to bring seed consciousness and practices to their bio-regions.

[hardworkinghippy]

Salut Michel,

Bienvenue sur le forum.

J'ai passé environ un an en Polynésie française, les îles Cook et Samoa, en travaillent avec les agriculteurs et les jardiniers, j'ai entendu parler de Seedsavers. Travaillez-vous avec Seedsavers en Amérique du Nord à l'Iowa ?

Irene