Stuff You Should Know - How Seed Banks Work

Episode Date: June 20, 2017

Since the advent of agriculture, humans have been storing seeds. But as sea levels rise and climates change around the world, our reasons for banking seeds have become more desperate. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Josh, my friend, if you are a listener of ours and you live in Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, Austin, Brooklyn, Minneapolis, Kansas, or right here in Atlanta, you can come see us on tour starting in August and finishing up in November.

Is that right? Yeah, that's right, man. It's our 2017 North America Monsters of Podcasting tour. That's right, I like the sounds of that. Eddie Van Halen is opening. Yeah, he is. But not really. No.

Not really. But you can find out all the information and all the deets at sysklive.com, our Squarespace live touring home on the web, and we hope to see everyone out there. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles Debbie, Chuck Bryant, and Jerry Rowland. This is us, Stuff You Should Know. I'm just trying new stuff. I mean, we're coming up on a thousand episodes, man. You gotta keep it fresh somehow, so I tried the 18. You've actually done that like 76 times. The same one?

I'm kidding. It's probably true, though. If you were a seed, what seed would you be? I would be a pumpkin seed. Oh, wow. Yeah. Because you know you won't get eaten. Oh, I don't know.

I like pumpkin pie, so. Well, and people toast pumpkin seeds. Oh, yeah. I'm way off base there. Yep. What else you got, huh? Never mind. Nope.

Pumpkin seed. Bam. I would be a watermelon seed because they remind me of my grandfather. That's sweet. How do they grow those seedless watermelons, huh? You're a watermelon seed, you should know. Or the square ones?

Yeah, those are cool, too. They cost, like, $60 in Japan. Really? Yeah, they're really expensive. I would have one just to have it. I would, like, shellack it so it would never die. Right. And just keep it in the fridge for conversation peace.

It's not a bad idea, man. Or actually, I took that back. I'm going to start marketing fake square watermelon seeds. I'm going to start marketing fake square watermelons as conversation starters. Or refrigerator magnets shaped like square watermelons. What about that? All right.

I'd rather take a valuable space in my fridge. They call that running something into the ground. Yeah. I've got something for you. Okay. You, in the Food Fads episode, asked me what my go-to crock pot recipe was, and I told you, and then I was like, okay, moving on.

And upon listening to it, because I don't know if everybody knows this or not, but you and I all listen to the episodes and Jerry before we release them. Sure. And I was like, I didn't ask Chuck what his crock pot recipe was. Chuck? I didn't.

What is your go-to crock pot recipe? Oh, wow. Wow. Do you know what it is? No, I don't. If it's not, no, I'll tell you what it is. It is a turkey goulash surprise. Oh, that sounds good.

So just some ground turkey and some onion and green pepper and red pepper and all manner of spices. And you can also throw in like eggplant or squash or, you know, kind of any veggie like that and chunk it up. It sounds good. Just spice it up real good, throw it in that crock pot, maybe add a little chicken broth or something. Do they have turkey broth?

Yeah, they do. Okay. Sure. Well, then don't be weird. I don't think chicken broth would clash with turkey too bad, but yeah, probably turkey broth would be better. Well, you may not know. Something in your mouth might be disturbing and you're just

like, something's not quite right. So what's the surprise that you're using chicken broth in a turkey-based dish? No. Or is it like a human thumb? Surprise. I tried the thumb, but I only got to do it twice. Twice?

Yeah, because I only have two thumbs. Got you now. No, the surprises are lentils. Oh yeah, that's nice. So then you dump a bunch of lentils in there. Maybe, I mean, you could throw it all in there at the beginning if you, but they'll get kind of really gushy, but maybe toward the end, throw some lentils in there.

And then it all just cooks up to a big kind of soupy mess. And then you can eat it for a week. Well, the next time there's a House of Forks weekly book club meeting, you've got to bring that to the potluck. Okay. All right. All right. Because I want to try it.

Done. Are lentils seeds? Because that'd be a great segue, but I'm almost a hundred percent sure that I would be wrong in saying, well, lentils are seeds. I think it's a legume. It is a legume, but is a legume a seed? Well, you didn't ask me that.

I don't have any idea. Although they are protecting legumes and seed banks. Okay. Okay. Well, then they're probably not seeds, but they're pretty close. So we'll use that as a segue. How about that? Yeah.

And you know what's funny is we could have sworn that we did this one or at the very least did the doomsday vault. And I think we covered the doomsday vault in a video, but we did touch on it and will the moon save humanity? Yeah. That's a good one. But I went back. This is when we had transcripts and it was a funny one to read

because we brought it up without researching it off the top of our head, which always gets us in trouble. Sure. And just sort of chatted a minute about the doomsday vault and then said, you know, don't hold us to anything because we, this wasn't supposed to be a part of the show. So we didn't really cover it. No.

And we certainly didn't do a whole episode on it, right? No. And we're not going to this time because even though the doomsday vault better known as the Svalbard Global Seed Bank, which is in Svalbard, Norway, which is close to Longyearbyen, Norway, which is the closest town to the North Pole, right? Wow. This seed bank is hands down the most famous seed bank in the

entire world. Sure. It's run by technocrats who really know how to work the media, right? Yeah. But it's far from the only one. There are a lot of other seed banks out there. And even the whole concept of seed banking in general is pretty

interesting. So Svalbard will be the star if we're a band to be seed banks featuring the stylings of Svalbard Global Seed Bank. That's probably, that should be the title of this episode. You're going to say featuring the stylings of Svalbard Global Steen. And that sounded like a, like a small time magician. That's great.

Or an accordion act. Well, yeah. Good stuff. All right. Well, let's get to it. This one, by the way, was written by my friend Debbie. I noticed. You remember Debbie?

Debbie Ronca, my buddy from New Jersey. Yeah. And supplemental material. You found a really great article on the Doomsday Vault. What was that from the Guardian or? Yeah. That was by Suzanne Goldenberg in the Guardian from May 2015. Yeah.

That's one of my favorite kinds of articles is when they profile something. And then it's set up as like, you know, the sunrise is early in Norway and, and Sven gets out of his yurt and trudges across the glacier. And so it's sort of couched in the story of the, the dude who works there, one of the guys. Yeah.

But then you get all the deets along the way. It's very cool. Yeah. That's, that's called a long read or long form. Yeah. And actually there's two really great sites. One's called long form and one's called long read. Once a dot com and once a dot org.

I can never remember which, but if you like that kind of writing, that's all those sites are just page after page after page of links to articles like that. Yes. And in fact, our buddy Joshua Bearman, great writer of long form, he has his own little shingle called Epic Magazine. If you're looking for like those really great, basically people mine that site to make movies.

They're such good stories. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he, he wrote the magazine article that Fargo, not Fargo, Argo, the Ben Affleck movie he was based on. Yeah. Pretty cool. The funny part about that slip up is the Coen brothers at the

beginning of Fargo say like, this is based on a true story. Right. Which is not true at all. Right. He also wrote a really great one about a California surfer gang. Yeah. That smuggled pot out of like Coronado Island in the 70s.

And it is just begging to be made into a movie if it hasn't been yet. I think it's optioned. Surely it is. I think it's called Coronado High. Is that right? Coronado High. Yep.

And I'm pretty sure Bearman wrote that back in like 2013 says the internet. Yeah. So put down your streaming TV shows for God's sake. I would say read a book, but at the very least read a long form article. Yeah. Can I get on a soapbox for a second?

We'll talk about seas eventually, everybody. Just be quiet. So the whole concept of there being TV everywhere and like you can take TV to the beach now. You don't have to talk to anybody. You can like watch TV on the subway. That bothers me, Chuck. It bothers me.

Like to my core. And I know that makes me very unpopular. I don't care. I stand with Josh. You know, Emily and I have been listening. We've been sitting around in a room at night together in silence and listening to S-Town. Oh, cool.

Which I've forgotten how fun it is because I usually listen to podcasts on my own, like in my car. But just to sit around like with your loved one and listen to something that's kind of neat too. Yeah. You have somebody to look at and be like, oh, can you believe that? Man. No.

All right. I'll bet everybody thinks we sit around and listen to podcasts together. We do. Can you believe that? All right. All right. C-Banks.

Sorry. Yes. So Debbie Ronca makes a really great point that you think of C-Banks as this probably something new from, you know, the environmental movement. Yeah. Probably something from the 90s, maybe as far back as that. But she says, no, no.

C-Banks are a concept as old as agriculture, basically. And in the cradle of agriculture, Mesopotamia, which is present day Iraq, they have found seed banks as old as 8,750 years. So the seed stores back then were protecting the seeds from animals, from weather, that kind of stuff, pretty basic stuff, right? Yeah. But the concept's the same. That you need seed from one harvest to create the next harvest.

And so even back then, there was evidence that it was highly ritualized, collecting seeds, and then protecting them in important places. Yeah. And weather is certainly something that we're still guarding against to the extreme. That's one of the reasons we have seed banks today. But one of the main reasons is crop diversity. Yeah, that's a good one.

If you think that corn you're eating is just corn, or rice you're eating is just rice. Right. Or even, you know, basmati rice, or jasmine rice. Right. Or the big two. Or sushi rice. You'd be in for a big surprise if you knew that there were thousands and thousands of varieties of all of these crops, these staple crops.

And diversity is the key because we've seen throughout history when bad things happen, when there's blight, if there's a fungus, if there's just anything that can kill a crop, you want something that is diverse on your hands so you can try something new. Right. Remember in the famine episode where we talked about how one of the reasons that Ireland suffered so tremendously was because the potatoes they had were all basically the same throughout the whole country.

It was the same variety of potatoes, right? So when that potato blight came, it was a pathogen that all of the potatoes in Ireland were susceptible to where if they had had multiple varieties of potatoes, sure a lot of the potato varieties would have been wiped out, but there would have been some that survived too. Right. Yeah. You know whose fault that was?

Whose? The English. Well, they definitely didn't make anything easier on them if I remember correctly. No, of course, but I'm just poking fun. But the idea that there are just tons and tons of different varieties out there, there certainly are, but if you take another order of magnitude, step back and look at the global food system, there's really like 30 crops that make up basically all of the food supply, right?

Yeah. And that's not too bad. Thirty's fine. We could survive on just one really. It's a little scary though. The problem is if you go the opposite direction and zoom in a little further, those crops are fairly homogenized these days. And it's thanks to our buddy Norman Borlaug, remember him?

Norman. Sure. So he fathered the Green Revolution in large part, which was there were a lot of predictions that the world's carrying capacity was going to be reached by the 1960s and that a billion people were going to starve to death. And that was because the agriculture that we had at the time was capable of producing only so much crop yield. So Norman Borlaug took it upon himself to say, I'm going to save the world.

And he came up with these new techniques and new varieties of crops and said, here, this variety is going to get you way better yields. It can survive flooding. It can survive drought. Go plant this. And his varieties that he bred were so successful. Number one, he won the Nobel Prize. Yeah.

And is widely credited for saving possibly a billion lives with his work. But secondly, it was so successful that it became basically the only varieties of those crops that were planted. And in the 1970s here in the United States, we came just running smack dab into what a problem that can be when this corn blight hit. Yeah, there was a big fungus in the 70s. And I didn't say what I wanted to say. And it cut the corn yields in the United States in half.

And luckily, we did have some more varieties at our disposal. We had a relative of, it was a wild corn. It was just crazy. Right off paint. And it was fungus resistant. So in that case, we were able to save the day, which is kind of the whole point of crop diversity in seed banks is to have something on hand in case the worst case scenario happens. So all your potatoes aren't in one basket or all your corn isn't in one basket.

Right, literally. And with that corn blight too, we learned the hard way, something like one quarter to one half of the corn yields in the United States were lost during the 70s. And that was because something like, I think 80% of the corn being grown in the US was identical in this way that the corn blight could manipulate and kill. So we said, oh, well, we need to diversify a little more. It was a hard lesson learned, but it was a lesson learned. And since then, this idea, like you said, of crop diversities become more and more important.

And people have said, well, we'll start banking seeds so we can protect the genetic line and protect varieties from dying out in the meantime. Yeah. And so that's, you know, diversity is a big deal. Climate change is another reason we bank seeds because we're not too certain what's going to happen in the future with the weather or actually not with the weather with climate because there's two different things. Nice save.

Natural disasters like a tsunami or really kind of any kind of natural disaster could cause great harm to crop yield. Right. Or disease. Yeah. Which you would think would be considered a natural disaster too. Well, no, it's disease. Well, sure.

You got it. You got to delineate here, you know, man made disaster. And the point, the example Debbie uses here is war, which you don't really think about war, but there have been, and as you'll see, even with seed banks during times of war, especially in the Middle East, a lot of the seed banks in the Middle East have been looted during war. Right. So that sort of compounds the problem.

Well, plus also one of the other things that war does is it uproots populations, right? You have to move because there's a war going on in your town and you can't live there anymore. So if you're a farmer, you may never go back to farming anymore and you may be one of the few indigenous people who were farming a specific variety of something. And now that variety's lost forever because you've moved and stopped farming. Yeah. And there's, that can happen in more mundane pedestrian ways too, where say a family that's farming an indigenous variety of crop just moves to the city for better work or something

like that. Yeah. And then the final way that she lists is that we might want to use the seed bank is for research in the future. Plant-based medicine has always been around. One in every six wild plants is used for medicine and we don't know. I mean, we know so very little still about the uses of plants for medicine. So we don't want to wipe out something that could be the cure for cancer one day, you

know. Right. And that's kind of like the cornerstone of the idea of seed banks these days is that we need to take the seeds from every plant we can get our hands on today, every variety we can get our hands on and just store it. And just basically put them in suspended animation under the idea that eventually because of climate change or because of war or because we may figure something out in the future and need those plants or need access to their genetic information.

And so if we have the seeds stored away in suspended animation dormant, then we will say thank you people a hundred years earlier for being so smart as to create seed banks. That's right. Thousands of years earlier in fact. Maybe. Maybe. But there's problems with seed banks as we'll talk about. You want to take a break?

Yeah, let's do that. We'll get to that. On the podcast. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show. Bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

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you listen to podcasts. All right. So as far as what kind of seeds are chosen, it depends. I mean, there are, there are more than 1400 or right around 1400 seed banks in the world. So I know, uh, Svarbald, Svarbald. I really think you can say it either way. I know. I keep wanting to say ki.

Like it just sounds like a dude from there. Oh, it does. Who's into like Viking metal. Yeah. He gets all the coverage. Svarbald got so wasted. There are lost all the seeds. There are about 1400 seed banks, so all over the place.

And it depends on which one you're talking about really as to what kind of seeds they're going to preserve. All our seed banks are probably going to concentrate more on more local indigenous varieties. It seems like in all cases, any kind of endangered plant is probably looked after first. Yeah. They tend to take priority from what I understand. But there's a great group called the Global Crop Diversity Trust. And their whole jam is to concentrate on priority crops that are that benefit everyone around

the world the most. So those are the people that runs Svarbald. And from what I understand, they've kind of come in and said, we are going to be setting the standards for seed preservation in the world now. Someone had to. Yeah. And there's a guy that was interviewed in The Guardian. He was one of the founders of this trust.

And one of the, I think he was the first director of this Svarbald global seed vault, the same names, Kerry Fowlers from Tennessee, and he said, we didn't create this seed bank to prevent because we saw this catastrophe coming with like climate change or whatever. It was called the Doomsday Vault. You know. Right. Right. It was.

But again, I think the media kind of latched onto that. Sure. He was saying the original intent with why they founded this Svarbald seed vault was because the current seed banks were doing such a terrible job at keeping their seeds like alive or intact that we were losing varieties every day from ones that were stored at seed banks. They were just going away. So yeah, he was basically like, let me do it. He was like the IT guy.

Yeah. Well, it is kind of scary though, like when he talked or when he was interviewed, he was to say like, you know, nuclear war was in our biggest threat. It's underfunding and sloppy work. Right. Or yeah, budget cuts, malfunctions in the equipment, like badly maintained equipment. There's a lot of stuff that can go wrong with the seed bank. So the point behind the Svarbald seed bank is to serve as a backup repository to where,

yeah, you keep your seeds there in your country and we'll show you the best ways to manage your seed bank, but also put a duplicate set with us and we're just going to keep it stored. We're not going to do the science or anything like that. The whole point of the Svarbald seed bank is to just keep it stored under the right conditions so that when you need it, it will be here for you. That is correct. So this global diversity crop trust, they work under a treaty. It's called the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture

or Pergurfa and it was ratified in 2004 by 40 different governments. I imagine since then, there are probably some more on board, right? I believe so. Although I wonder how much that has kind of fallen to the wayside since crop trust created this Svarbald seed vault. They seem to have kind of taken over from what I understand. Well, I mean, I think this treaty is just part of good practices too. Yeah.

So what they do is they do permit access for these seeds for research and stuff, not from Svarbald because like we said, that's the bank that doesn't allow withdrawal. But it has to be a benefit to everyone basically. You can't just go willy-nilly on a whim and pull seeds out and start experimenting. Right. Well, that's for the other seed banks, that's kind of like the process where those are the ones that they're keeping so that somebody can come and like grow some stuff and check out the genetic material, the plants or whatever.

With Svarbald, it's like you put it in, it stays there and you can get it out, but it's only you the depositor that has access to it. Correct. And so apparently they agreed to that or they set up that rule that only the group or the country that put those seeds into the Svarbald vault can get them out because there's a lot of worry when they were creating the global seed vault that the whole thing was basically just a ruse for big agriculture to get their hands on heirloom seeds from around the world. Which I mean, I can kind of understand that because from what I understand, the big agriculture

seed companies are fairly shady. Yeah. We should do an episode just on that. Sure. I love hate mail. So if you go to one of these banks, and again, they're all can be very different, but they all have the same kind of concept at heart. And I think the one Debbie used as an example was the Department of Environment and Conservation

in Australia. But like I said, they kind of all operate in a similar fashion. What you first need to do is to decide how much room you have and what seeds you want to collect to begin with. Right. You mentioned priority goes to threatened plants, obviously first and foremost. But again, to hit Svalbard, their whole mission is to preserve every bit of the crop diversity of the global crop supply, which that Kerry Fowler dude says is about 1.4 million varieties.

And last I saw, they were coming up on a million. I think they had like 940,000 varieties in their care. Correct. So once you've decided what you need in your little local seed vault, seed bank, you collect seeds. It seems like the most obvious place to start. And when vegetables and fruits are ripe is probably the best time to collect and store these seeds as fruits, they release their seeds when they're ripe.

So that usually works out pretty well. But then it kind of depends on the plant. Some plants don't give up their seeds so readily, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. Maybe they have a longer time to retain their seeds, which allows for a longer collection time. But if you're in that position, you know when the best time is to get the seed from each plant. Sure.

And then when you're collecting it, you're also making notes of the soil quality and type, the growing conditions, the ecosystem, like what kind of ecosystem it's growing in. That's like the most important part almost besides the seed. It's extremely important. We read this one article, did you see the one from Berry Bay, Berry Point? You know, the one in Portland. Berry Botanic Garden. I wanted to add something extra, but they basically had a rundown of how they do it.

And they were saying important record keeping is about as important as having the seed itself. Because if you don't have the information you need, including what kind of seed is where, it's just basically useless as far as the seed bank is concerned. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't say useless, but you would certainly have to grow it and take those records and kind of start over. And then it's to be like, what is this? It talks.

So you recorded all this information. They're going to assign it a sample number, very specific number obviously for that seed. So everything is, you know, the record keeping is a huge, huge part of it. So you know what everything is. You don't want to get stuff mixed up in case of, you know, a nuclear apocalypse. That sucks so bad. You're like, wait a minute, wait a minute. I had the wheat in my left hand, I think, just stink.

Or we thought we were growing corn, but we're growing papaya. And we're having a paparty. Actually, that wouldn't be so bad. No. That's why you'd have a party. That's right. Because you'd be like, oh, I thought it was going to be corn and it's papaya. What a treat.

Thank you, God. All right. So you've got these seeds. You've got all the data recorded. Everything's super organized. You've washed your hands. Yeah. Very important part.

And then you also want to wash. You want to clean these seeds. You can't just take a wet watermelon seed and throw it in a tiny manila envelope and throw it in a box. Or you have a spitting contest to see who can get it in the manila envelope. No. You have to clean everything. You've got to make sure it's of really high quality.

Some of this is done by hand. Some of this is done by machine these days. And then you want to get the moisture out of it. Like I said, moist not only is a gross word, but it's not good for storing seeds. No. It's really not because they will start to germinate, which is not what you want going on in your seed bank. Yeah.

I guess it's only for storing seeds. Moisture is really good for seeds. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. For storing seeds, it's not good. Right. Or they can start to rot too, depending on the condition.

So you want to dry them and apparently there's a rule of thumb when you're preparing seeds for long-term cold storage where you dry them at about 15 degrees Celsius at about 15 degrees relative humidity or 15% relative humidity. It's so easy a child could remember it. That's right. So you dry them out like that, usually in the presence of like a desiccant or something like that. Like what is it?

Silicone. Yeah. And once they're dry, you put them into cold storage. And that's where they stay. And then cold storage, I think you get it down to 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit, which is negative 18 degrees Celsius. And they can stay there for decades, sometimes depending on the seeds, a century. Yeah.

But we should say to Chuck, these are specific types of seeds. There's basically two kinds of seeds in the world as far as categorizing seeds goes. One is the orthodox seed, which can undergo the process we just described, in which if you go to a seed bank, those are the kind of seeds that are there. It's what most people think of as seeds, right? Then there's something called recalcitrant seeds, which are things like a tuber or acorns or a lot of the fruit out there in the world, typically tropical plants. The way that they seed, you can't do what we just said to a recalcitrant seed.

It'll destroy it and it won't be viable. So seed banks don't typically tend to store recalcitrant seeds unless that's their specialty. Yeah. And in that case, you can't use all these. You got to go low-fi. Yeah. It seems like a more old-world method of storing a seed if you're working with the recalcitrants. Right.

I was just thinking of a Twilight Zone episode or something like you break into the doomsday vault because everything has been lost and you're like, at least we got these seeds, like the guy with the library and he sits on his glasses. I love that one. That was Burgess Meredith. Yeah. But in this case, they would find that they had all gotten moist and grown and died so the seed vault is just full of dead plants.

Isn't that be the worst? That'd be pretty sad. Man, why am I such a downer? I don't know. Did you talk about cryopreservation yet? No, no. I was going to say with recalcitrant seeds, you might want to use cryopreservation, which is where you take the living tissue of the plant, like say a banana, and actually freeze

the banana in liquid nitrogen. Well, yeah, that's in vitro storage. Okay. But that's not cryopreservant, or it's using cryopreservation for in vitro storage. Is that right? Yeah, because in the case of a banana, like you said, there is no seed, so you just got to get a piece of that bad boy in vitro style. Right.

Because so there's this really great damn interesting article from years ago that is about how bananas are all clones of one another, that they're all asexual and like every banana in the world is related to other bananas. Yeah. We've talked about that before, but I think I'm worried about bananas and other people are too. About how they're not actually healthy. Yeah.

I mean, there's a banana problem, right? Is there? I think so. What's the problem? For some reason, I think there's a shortage, or maybe I'm just making that up. I think they do that from time to time, just get people to pay like an extra 50 cents or something. You know what I mean?

All right. So with these seed banks, they store, like I said, each of them stores different things, but you might think they wouldn't store things like poisonous plants or invasive species, but you can kind of find a home for any seed that exists somewhere, because you just never know. Kudzu was an example, Debbie used that, you know, it's a very famous invasive plant species here in the South, but now, and you know, it was always just like nothing but a problem. But now there are moves to maybe try and turn it into a biofuel.

So it's just trying to not be so short-sighted with things that you think you can't use now, because you never know what it's going to be like in 500 years. Well put. It turns out they also have marijuana seeds in seed banks as well. Yeah, dog. Because who's to judge, you know? Well, plus it's medicine, and they're trying to, you know, keep all kinds of plant-based medicines.

Yeah, sure. They're not going to discriminate against marijuana, you kidding me? There you go. It probably has its own little room with beaded doorways and it's all black light. Macrame owls on the wall. Man, macrame owls are the best. So Chuck, once you have all your seeds in the bank and everything, you just leave them for decades, right?

And then that's it. Maybe they'll stay forever. No, you've got to manage and you've got to have a caretaker. You do. There's a few things you need to do. One thing is that when you let seeds go for a while, like they're a dormant little package waiting to become a plant, right? But they can die, like even though they're basically, they're in a state of suspended

animation, especially at zero degrees Fahrenheit, they can still go bad. They can still die. They can still age out of being able to produce crops. So every once in a while, you want to come in, grab your seeds, take them, plant them, grow more seeds, and then re-bank the seeds from the plants you just grew from the seeds you had banked originally. Yes. Kind of a pain, really, if you think about it, but seeds are worth it, you know?

Yeah. That's what they have on their front door. And then so when you're also doing it, when you're doing that, you're also, you want to test the plant's DNA, you want to, eventually, apparently they don't really do this very much, which I was kind of surprised. You want to basically scan the genome of the plant and maybe store that information. Yeah, you got to science it up. You want to create a database so that all of that genetic information can be accessed.

So you know what genes are in what plants and where those plants are and what seed bank. And apparently that's the steps that Svalbard's taking, but they're nowhere near that now. And I was really surprised to hear it's really supposedly pretty low-tech that the seed banks in the world are just tasked with keeping seeds alive and aren't doing terribly much else unless it's like a research station that their seed bank is attached to. Well, yeah. I mean, out of the 1400, I'd say the vast minority of them are the super high-tech organizations, you know?

Yeah. All right. Well, let's take another break and we'll come back and we'll talk a little bit more about Svalbard and his black metal band, as well as the fact that could there be anything wrong with this plan? We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. It was an AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist.

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

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So check those. That was quite a teaser. Should we go and talk about that then? Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, like you think what could possibly be wrong with seed banks? What's your problem? Just let small bar have a seat, right? Yeah.

And I kind of was surprised to know that there was any downside, but there is a school of thought that is very much from people that like are hands on with farmers themselves, where they say, like, you know, it's great that you're doing this, but in a thousand years, those seeds might be worthless. Right. It was like I was saying, you have to come in and plant those seeds and get new seeds from those plants, right? You can't just leave them.

Correct. Right. But they could also be worthless, Chuck, in that when you take seeds out of the world and bank them, put them in suspended animation, you're halting evolution as well. Well, yeah. I mean, that's kind of the point. Like plants are, well, they're literally growing things, but they're also evolving things.

And like these farmers are saying, you know, they day to day and year to year and crop to crop, they see changes, so these seeds that you've got for decades and decades may end up not being anything like the seeds that you're growing or that you may lose. Right. I mean, I guess as long as you're keeping it up, though, I mean, I side with the seed vultures for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, okay. So there's two schools of thought. One is banking seeds, right? And just protecting the genetic information of every variety of plant you possibly can, right? It can't be a bad idea. For future use. But the other school of thought is, no, we need to be working with farmers out in the

field to protect crop diversity and protect it by making sure that those varieties are still being farmed and that there's a bunch of different varieties and that these farmers stay farming, that they can make their living doing this farming. And that's the way to protect biodiversity is to keep evolution going, not take the seeds and ultimately the plants out of evolution for a while. Yeah. And maybe do both. You would think so.

But as far as Suzanne Goldberg says in that Guardian article, there's just not the funding to do both. So there's a big division in crop sciences, in botany and in biology about which route do you take? And Svalbard's been getting a lot of the money lately. So the seed banking way is kind of the way that people have been going. But there's a lot of people are saying, I don't know if that's such a good idea after all.

Maybe we should be protecting crops in situ, in the fields, in supporting indigenous farmers instead. So there's a big debate about which way to go still. Yeah. I mean, and then like you said at the very beginning, seed banks and of course the one in Norway is very, it's about as sexy as seeds can get as far as the media goes, especially when you have backers like Bill and Melinda Gates and these very wealthy philanthropists kind of backing the idea of these seed banks.

I think hopefully that doesn't divert so much funding from the other that it's a wash. Well, that's part of the problem, it is very much so. It's diverting a ton of funding away from the stuff, the campaigns that are carrying out in the field. And I think part of the reason is because this division has become pronounced. It's one or the other. So people are saying, OK, well, I'll choose this side over this side or something. I don't look at black and white line of thinking.

I don't either. And it does seem like this is important enough to try both approaches, but I guess the wills not there. The finances aren't really right. So there's it's becoming a battle, but I'm with you, man. I think I think seed banking is good. I also think working with farmers is good. So let's try both is my thing.

Agreed. The other thing that I'm starting to kind of see about the crop trust in Svalbard is that they're like I said, they're coming in and they're saying, here's the standards for seed preservation. And they're kind of carrying out this social Darwinistic mission where it's like, if you're not up to snuff to our standards, we're we're making you you're not getting any fun anymore. You're going to wither and die, and we're just going to support the ones that we that we feel are up to snuff the seed banks around the world, which is fine.

But it's also like, I mean, I get it on the one hand, right, where you're just kind of like, this works, these standards work. But it's the same thing as saying, like this, this strip mall works, you put an old Navy here, a TJ Maxx here, and a grocery store in the middle, that works, build it everywhere. You lose something. And the irony of it is that we're trying to protect crop diversity by standardizing the way that they're protected. And it just seems like one point is missing the other in that sense, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, I get it. So Svalbard gets all the headlines, but there are some other fairly high profile seed banks around the world. One at Q Gardens in London. Well, it's a little south of London a couple hours south, I think. No, I've been there, buddy. Is it really on the map?

It looks like it's pretty pretty far south. Well, I mean, it's it's south London. Oh, okay. Wow. London's huge. Yeah. I mean, Emily and I went and it was the Royal Botanical Gardens. It's just one of the loveliest, loveliest gardens I've ever seen.

I posted pictures on the stuff you should know while I was just so blown away. But nice. There they have the Millennium Seed Bank Project. And their goal there is to obviously store plants from the United Kingdom, but they really want to protect the 24,000 global species as well. And I think right now they have all the native plant population covered, which is pretty amazing. England.

Oh, just of England, not the UK as a whole. Maybe it is the UK as a whole. It probably is the UK as a whole. Careful. Yeah, really. There's one in Russia, which I believe is the oldest seed bank. Yeah. And that one is the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry.

It was established in 1894 in St. Petersburg, right? Yeah. And St. Petersburg was known as Leningrad for a while while Stalin was in power. And if you'll remember correctly, there was a siege on Leningrad that lasted like three years, I think. And the plant scientists, like apparently a large number of the plant scientists who worked at this Institute of Plant Industry, starved to death, died of starvation rather than grow these seeds into food because they were so bent on protecting it.

And the guy that they named the place after, he was a great seed banker as well, very smart guy who figured out that genetic diversity was of paramount importance as far as crops go. He died of starvation as well because Stalin made him a scapegoat when his collectivists' policies caused a famine. So imagine being a guy who's banking seeds to protect against famine and then dying of starvation as a result. No good.

No, that's no good. So you got anything else? No. I say hats off to seed vaulters and good luck. Farmers. Yeah, there you go. You got them all. Oh, man, we almost left out the big thing, the big news about Svalbard.

Oh, what happened? Well, back in May, there were reports that due to climate change, the permafrost melted and Svalbard became flooded and the seed bank was threatened. Well, it turns out that that was wildly overblown, that there's water intrusion just about every year in Svalbard. But it's so cold that the water makes it a couple meters down toward the vault, which is 100 meters long, the tunnel is, and then freezes solid. And the world found out about this and they said, no, you need to do something about that.

So apparently they're waterproofing it. But it wasn't necessarily climate change. It was in part, but it was the fact that they built the seed vault into the permafrost. And when you cut into permafrost, you allow for heat intrusion, which keeps the perma part from becoming, well, being permanent. So it's not always frozen, it will freeze and thaw. So by creating the seed vault, they messed up the permafrost. But it wasn't flooded, the seeds weren't an issue and it's all under control.

It was basically just the media finding something ironic and running with it. I do have one more interesting little tidbit I don't think we covered. This is about Svalbard. It is such a serious deal there that there's no one person with the key. It only opens for deposits three times a year and it's sort of like war games. There are multiple people that have to be there to even access this thing. You have to beat it at tic-tac-toe before it will let you in. Pretty neat, man.

It is. And the idea behind it is pretty awesome, too. I say do it all. Do everything we can to protect crop diversity. Yay. If you want to know more about seed banks, you can type those words in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com and while you're at it, go read the Doomsday Vault colon, the seeds that could save a post-apocalyptic world in the Guardian.

That was a good article as well. And since I said as well, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to preface this email with an offer to you to revise your statement on the magnificence of the Aurora Borealis. Man, I want to say, I want to preface that with, I'm never going to read the Independent again. Certainly, I won't mention anything I read in the Independent again. So it turns out I read the one article about how the Aurora Borealis actually stinks.

And it turns out that something around 97% of our listeners have seen the Aurora Borealis and all of them can tell you that it does not, in fact, stink in real life, that this is just the one article on the entire Internet that says that. Yes, you were well intended, but boy did we hear about it. This one ranks up there with emails that we've gotten in the past. So I'm going to read this one example from Maya Eurek, and Maya is in Minnesota, in Minneapolis in fact. All right.

So maybe Maya and her husband can come to our show there. I hope they will. In fact, Maya, write us an email, and I'll put you on the list. How about that? Whoa. Yeah, you like that? Whoa. Sand is coming to town.

All right. I feel like we've all been friends for years, guys, after enjoying your episodes every week. We shared so much together, it was definitely time to share something with you. My husband and I are in our 20s. Oh, forget it. Nothing free for you. Kidding. Living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he's a band teacher, and he plays in a funky rock

band. Nice. Called the Confused Brothers Band. That's a great name. The bass and the guitar players are brothers. But they're confused. I guess so. The brothers' parents have a large tract of wild land, a huge tract of land in central

Minnesota, where each year over Memorial Day, the brothers invite 300 of their closest musician friends to camp out in the woods, put on a music festival. Boy, I want to play in this festival. Yeah. Man, this sounds great. This year, they were walking from the tent to the main stage, and a couple of people asked us to look up and said, do you see those flickering lights? Or are we just tripping too hard?

Ha-ha. Sure enough, the northern lights were dancing across the sky. The wilderness with no large towns nearby, the Aurora Borealis is moving in sharp relief. Imagine a laser show, but a little more alien and way more breathtaking. It was a mesmerizing moment that made me really be glad to be alive in this amazing world. Your episode on Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis left me so sad that you believe Julia Buckley's experience to be generalizable.

Is that a word? It is now. She may have had a poor experience in the northern lights, but that doesn't mean they always appear as a foggy shadow. I'm here to attest that sight can be a powerful reminder of just how beautiful this planet can be. Thanks for all the knowledge and laughs you've given me over the past few years. Maya Yurek, so Maya, send me an email, just respond, say, I want to go to your show for

free. That is quite an offer, Skeet Ulrich. Take him up on it. If you want to get in touch with us like Maya Skeet did, you can tweet to us at SYSKPodcast. I'm at Josh M. Clark also on Twitter. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or Stuff You Should Know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and be sure to say hi to Jerry too because

they go to her as well. And then, as always, hang out with us at our luxurious home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. Get a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.