The world’s largest backup library of crop seeds sits inside an Arctic mountain, but Colorado scientists play a key role in preserving plant diversity.
Geoffrey Hawtin, the British Canadian plant scientist who helped create the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway, visited Fort Collins this month. He toured the National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation, a U.S. Department of Agriculture facility that houses about half a million seed samples.
Hawtin, a World Food Prize laureate, spoke with Colorado Matters about why seed banks matter, what they protect and the surprising role they’ve already played in agriculture.
Here are five takeaways from that conversation:
1. The Svalbard vault isn’t about the apocalypse
Despite its popular nickname, Hawtin clarified that the vault “was never designed to provide seeds after Armageddon. It’s provided a backup to the gene banks that are working and being used today.”
Builders carved the facility into Arctic permafrost and keep it at minus 18 Celsius. It acts as a secure deposit box for up to 4 million seed samples from around the world. Each packet carries genetic diversity that plant breeders may need decades or centuries from now.
2. Seeds can last for generations
Under the right conditions, many seeds survive far longer than people expect.
“Seeds of most cereal crops, for example, wheat, barley, maize, will keep for at least a hundred years and considerably more in many cases,” Hawtin said.
That longevity turns gene banks into living libraries, resources scientists can draw on for future crops.
3. Backup storage has already saved crops
Seed vaults are more than just insurance policies, and they’ve already rescued crops, Hawtin said. He recalled his early work collecting peas, beans and lentils across the Middle East in the 1970s. When war destroyed a gene bank in Aleppo, Syria, “the seeds were lost. But most of that seed was backed up in Svalbard,” he said.
Those backups were later used to revive collections in Morocco, where Hawtin saw plants growing in 2024 that he had collected 50 years earlier.
“That material being saved for the future,” he reflected, had come full circle.
4. Fort Collins pushes seed research forward
Colorado may not be the Arctic, but its seed bank plays an equally vital role. The Fort Collins facility functions as an “active gene bank,” Hawtin said. Unlike Svalbard, which serves only as backup, Fort Collins scientists actively study their collections.
“What does this variety have that might contribute something important to a variety of the future?” Hawtin asked.
The lab also tackles the challenge of “recalcitrant” species, like apples, whose seeds die if frozen. Researchers use cryopreservation techniques with liquid nitrogen to conserve buds and tissues that can later regenerate into whole plants.
5. Seed banks guard our food supply but face funding cuts
For all their global significance, Hawtin emphasized that seed banks operate on modest budgets. The Svalbard vault cost about $28 million to build and less than $1 million a year to run. “For that, you can back up essentially the entire genetic diversity of all of our crops,” Hawtin said.
Federal budget cuts reduced staff in Fort Collins by 20 percent over the past decade. Hawtin called the facility “very vulnerable,” noting that the public often doesn’t realize how essential this quiet work is.
“This is our children’s future in many ways,” Hawtin said. “It needs to be invested in.”
