Marketing of Organic Heterogeneous Material: consultation

This would give growers more legal certainty and encourage longer-term investment into heterogeneous material. A temporary experiment has already been carried out with successful results, and it is time to progress to permanent change.

This will enable widespread exploration of resilience through diversity, starting with crops where experience exists (e.g. cereals). Crop-specific protocols could be developed, building on experience gathered in practice and emerging markets.

Current legislation effectively stops the further development of this highly promising area of regenerative farming for no other reason than the fact that it hasn’t evolved quickly enough to respond to new opportunities. We advocate for implementing a permanent change, as this would give growers more legal certainty and encourage longer-term investment into heterogeneous material. There is significant value in creating diverse populations, including opportunities for seed adapted to local farming systems and the contribution diverse seed populations make to resilient food chains and adapting to climate change. They represent immense potential to deal with stressful, variable, and unpredictable production environments as well as important market opportunities.
A temporary experiment has already been carried out, with successful results. Tt created a community with experience in sharing knowledge, gathering information, and ensuring seed health and traceability of the material. The experiment allowed significant progress to be made in taking plot-sized experimental work to a field-scale where sufficient quantities can be produced to carry out the necessary processing and marketing work that enables such crops to find their way into value chains. It is time to progress from this work by implementing a permanent change to legislation.
To enable full exploration of resilience in the face of climate change and with the aim of biodiversity, we need public policies to support and encourage pathways forward across all plant types. It can be assumed that attention will self-select areas with the most potential, focusing less on crops where propagation methods do not easily allow for heterogeneity or where there is unlikely to be market demand for heterogeneity.
Furthermore, we would encourage the consideration to enable non-organic heterogeneous material to be included in this scope to align with the EU currently considering conventional heterogeneous material.