Borrow seed
Seasonally available vegetable, grain, pulse and herb accessions with regeneration notes.
Living collection / established 2018
Seed is a memory you can plant.
Fieldbank conserves regionally adapted food crops by keeping them in circulation: catalogued, grown, observed, returned and shared again.
2,418 accessions73 active growers11 districts
Specimen / FB-TOM-118
Makhanda Dryland Tomato
About / conservation by use
A seed bank that refuses to become a freezer museum.
Fieldbank is a fictional regional seed library working with home growers, small farms and school gardens. We conserve crop diversity by growing it often enough to keep both seed and knowledge viable.
Every accession has a story, but it also has agronomic responsibilities: population size, isolation distance, harvest timing, storage moisture and return quality. The archive is useful because the field remains connected to the drawer.
Offerings / library drawers
What moves through the collection.
Deposit a variety
Stewardship intake for locally maintained lines with origin history and consent documentation.
Request a grow-out
Schools, gardens and farms can adopt multiplication plots matched to their conditions and skills.
Use the archive
Researchers and growers can consult accession histories, observation sheets and historical donor notes.
Process / one seed cycle
From envelope to field to envelope again.
- 01
Select
Match accession, climate, plot size and isolation capacity.
- 02
Grow
Record emergence, flowering, vigour, pests and notable traits.
- 03
Rogue & save
Remove obvious off-types and harvest from enough healthy plants.
- 04
Return
Dry, label, sample-test and return seed with observation notes.
Projects / active field plots
The archive outdoors.
Fort Beaufort · 2026
Dryland bean recovery
Twelve family lines compared under low-input rainfed conditions, with seed returned separately to preserve identity.
Qonce · 2026
School maize memory plot
Learners grew three locally named maize accessions alongside oral-history interviews with donor families.
Stutterheim · 2025
Winter brassica regeneration
Controlled flowering and insect-net rotation restored germination rates in an ageing community collection.
86%
accessions germinating >80%
612
successful member returns
19
varieties reintroduced
9 yrs
oldest active donor line
People / stewards
Knowledge follows people before it follows labels.
Lerato Goba
Collection steward
Intake, accession records, storage
Peter Mfenyana
Field coordinator
Grow-outs, isolation plans, farmer network
Rina Botha
Seed technologist
Germination, moisture, storage quality
Zinzi Dlamini
Community archivist
Oral histories, donor consent, school programmes
Insights / field notes
Useful detail belongs next to the seed.
Isolation is a distance, not a feeling
A practical note on wind-pollinated crops, insect movement and why garden-scale saving needs a plan.
What germination percentage hides
Uniformity, seedling vigour and storage history can matter even when a basic count looks acceptable.
How to record a locally named variety
Names carry place, language and family history. Our intake sheet starts there before assigning an accession number.
FAQ / stewardship questions
Borrowing implies responsibility.
Can anyone borrow seed?
Yes. Members can request suitable open-pollinated varieties, provided they agree to the basic return-and-record protocol when conditions allow.
Do you store hybrid seed?
Fieldbank focuses on stable, reproducible open-pollinated lines. Commercial F1 hybrids may appear in comparison trials but are not treated as returnable library stock.
How do you prevent accidental crosses?
Each crop record includes isolation guidance, population-size notes and regeneration instructions. Higher-risk accessions are regenerated with partner growers under controlled plans.
Can farmers submit local varieties?
Yes. We document origin, naming, known traits and stewardship consent before accepting material into quarantine and viability testing.
Contact / exchange desk