This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Miles Hillmann will be awarding a $10 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.
The Super Seeders is based on first-hand accounts from the scientists, breeders, and curators who have built the seven pillars of today’s plant genetics revolution. It begins with the guardians of global gene banks, conserving the rare and diverse crop genes that form agriculture’s safety net. From these collections, plant geneticists are now unlocking hidden traits with fast-moving genome technologies, transforming the possibilities of crop improvement.
International research centres and the groundbreaking Plant Treaty have opened the floodgates for the free exchange of genetic material, enabling a new wave of discovery. Crop breeders are translating these breakthroughs into reality, delivering drought-tolerant, disease-resistant, and higher-yielding varieties for farmers.
The book raises a pressing question: will this revolution reach the 70 percent of Africans who still depend on subsistence farming? The answer will shape not only the future of food in Africa, but the future of food security worldwide.
A story of ingenuity and urgency, The Super Seeders captures the hopes and challenges of the women and men driving a genetic transformation of agriculture—and the farmers whose lives depend on its success.
Enjoy an Excerpt
Nikolay Vavilov was born in 1887 in Moscow to a merchant family. His father had endured poverty due to repeated crop failures and food rationing, which fuelled Vavilov’s early obsession with eradicating famine.
At the start of the twentieth century, he established the Plant Institute in a former palace on Leningrad’s Herzen Street. In the 1920s, Vavilov and his young team embarked on global expeditions to collect rare seeds, tubers, roots, and bulbs, which they brought back to the seed bank for sorting, cataloguing, and storage.
More than any other person before or since, Vavilov sampled the bounty across five continents. His expeditions went from interior China to the Pamir highlands and the Afghan plains, through the semi-arid steppes of Iran, Iraq, and Georgia to North Africa and Europe, and in the Americas from the Amazon to Central America and northwards to the USA.
One of Vavilov’s major contributions was his theory of plant origin. His global observations led him to hypothesise that the centre of origin of a cultivated plant could be traced to regions where its wild relatives displayed maximum adaptability. In 1920, he expanded this theory, asserting that the region of greatest diversity for a plant species represents its centre of origin. Ultimately, he identified thirteen world centres of plant origin and established one hundred field stations to conserve and evaluate the world’s plant diversity.
About the Author
Miles Hillmann is a lifelong entrepreneur with a career that bridges scientific curiosity and hands-on innovation, from his early work at the Kabanyolo Agricultural Research Station in Uganda during Idi Amin’s fall to experiencing food shortage and famine in the Ethiopian Central Highlands. His work encompassed everything from agricultural development to building flash flood irrigation food-for-work systems.
His first company developed processes for food industry materials. Concurrently he pioneered real-time organic material analysis. He then created one of the UK’s major pollution control companies supplying specialist materials to companies in Europe, Nigeria and the Middle East. This led him to establish companies in e-commerce, accredited pollution control training and flood control.
This book is the story of the scientists, curators, and plant breeders leading this movement, told in their voices, through his lens.
Buy the book at Amazon.
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