Papa Dewi told me about his way of ‘malan’. That means farming in his native Ngaju Dayak language of Central Kalimantan in Borneo, Indonesia. And it’s based on planting seeds according to local wisdom and ancestral customs. Those seeds are inseparable from the Dayak way of life.

But the malan traditions are disappearing as traditional lands are now being planted to palm oil plantations or destroyed through gold mining or limited by government regulations. When farmers are able to farm, they often don’t have access to enough quality seed at the start of each sowing season. The genetic diversity of the seeds the Ngaju preserved for generations is being eroded … as well as their way of life.

The Borneo Institute (BIT) stepped in to help the famers establish ‘huma binyi’ or local seed banks. Farmers selected seeds from their best performing crops and BIT processed them to conserve them not only in their local village but at BIT’s genebank in Palangkraya and the Indonesian National Genebank in Bogor.

Now Papa Dewi’s seeds and those of his neighbours are heading for the icy shelves of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault far above the Arctic Circle in Norway. The Crop Trust, through its BOLD project, is supporting BIT in its task of regenerating enough of the seeds to conserve locally and in Svalbard. And once those seeds are in Svalbard, the Ngaju way of life as expressed through malan can also be preserved, forever.

All images used on this page were photographed by Michael Major for the Crop Trust and used here under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.