Improving Food Security and Promoting Biodiversity With Locally Sourced Heirloom Vegetable Seedlings.

The CultivarX mission is improving food security and promoting biodiversity. The CultivarX believes that these two concepts are inextricably linked. With greater biodiversity comes greater resilience of crops to tolerate and adapt to changing conditions, thus creating safer and stronger food supplies. Heirloom vegetables represent a great reserve of biodiversity that we can all access and promote from our own backyards. But there’s always a catch. The current structure of the commercial seed and seeding industry chooses to put a greater value on uniformity, and yield, at the expense of flavor, taste, and biodiversity. We find ourselves trapped in a model that treats seeds like single-use products, requiring us to go back to the commercial seed sellers to grow plants every year, and every year we get the exact offering of seeds. The system is largely static and stacked against heirlooms. The CultivarX strives to preserve the vast assortment of locally-adapted seeds by collecting and propagating them into seedlings for the next season’s gardens, so that home gardeners can benefit from the natural adaptation that leads to better vegetable plants.