These hands are holding characteristic heads of the rare species of Georgian Zanduri wheat, Triticum timopheevii.

Seeds4All is a census platform aiming to give visibility to all European organisations that collect, enrich, produce, disseminate and sustainably use traditional and new varieties of seeds belonging to the public domain, freely reproducible and not genetically modified.

By presenting a broad range of organisations – NGOs, citizens' initiatives, businesses, formal & informal networks – as well as by exhibiting the number of cultivated plant varieties they keep, Seeds4All wishes to promote this emerging sector, while creating a much needed space for common knowledge and experience sharing.

Seeds4All hopes to become a medium facilitating access to information about seed-swaps and market development opportunities in Europe; as well as to demonstrate how rich and diverse are the kinds of initiatives dedicated to preserve agrobiodiversity and how they can learn from each other, in order to grow and be spread everywhere.

© Adèle Pautrat

The 3 Fonteinen brewery, located in the Pajottenland region of Belgium, finds its origins in a bar and gueuze blendery created in 1887 and reactivated in 1953 by Gaston Debelder, father of the current owner, Armand Debelder. Very closely linked to the cultural and agricultural developments of the region in which it is located, its history and very recent production commitments bear powerful witness to local and traditional varieties of wheat and barley.

We met Lucas Van den Abeele at the brewery on a sunny afternoon, for a tour visit and a nice tasting of some of the flagship lambic beers of the brewery. He's a passionate young man who joined the brewery after researching the gradual disappearance, since the 1950s or so, of the local varieties of wheat and barley that used to be the pride of the region and gave the unique taste of its lambic and gueuze beers.

To carry out his resarch, Lucas chose to meet local farmers who had been living in the region for several decades, and collect their testimonies. That's how he started to build a network of cereal producers willing to test and cultivate traditional varieties of wheat and barley specifically made for beer production, to the benefit of the 3 Fonteinen brewery.

The network coordinated by Lucas and supported by the 3 Fonteinen brewery is now gathering 15 farmers. Some of them grow organically, while others can benefit from their peers' experiences to start transitioning. The whole processof of work is a demonstration of cooperation and solidarity driven by the search for better quality and more diversity within agricultural production.