Twenty-two women make up a farming cooperative in El Crucero, Nicaragua, a municipality nestled on the slopes of the Sierras de Managua. For the last 15 years, they have banded together to grow what their rural community needs to eat. Coffee, corn, beans, tomatoes, lemons, carrots, and apples are among those food staples.
When harvesting the crops that help sustain the roughly 83 families living in the Santa Julia area, the Gloria Quintanilla Cooperative makes sure to set aside seeds for the long term. All producers work together to operate a seed bank, made up of two central silos where they deposit and naturally preserve backup seeds.
This ancient agricultural practice is known as seed-keeping or seed saving, where a community builds a cache of seeds to safeguard the crops that are crucial to their way of life.