In agriculture and gardening, seed saving is the practice of saving seeds from open-pollinated vegetables and flowers for use from year to year. This is the traditional way farms and gardens were maintained. In recent decades, there has been a major shift to purchasing seed annually from commercial seed suppliers, and to hybridized plants that do not produce seed that can be reliably saved. Much of the grassroots seed-saving activity today is the work of amateur gardeners, organic farmers, and enthusiasts with environmentalist interests.
Open pollination is the key to seed saving. Plants that reproduce through natural means tend to adapt to local conditions, and evolve as reliable performers, particularly in their localities. The modern trend to hybridized plants interrupts this process. Hybrid plants are artificially cross-pollinated, and bred to favor desirable characteristics, like higher yield and more uniform size. However, the seed produced by the first generation of the hybrid does not reliably produce a true copy of that hybrid (it 'segregates') and often loses much of its yield potential.
While comprehensive figures are hard to come by, one popular view today holds that thousands of varieties of vegetables and flowers are being lost, due to reliance on commercial hybrid seed. Widespread use of a relatively few mass-marketed hybrid seed varieties, in both home gardening and commercial farming, is said to be eliminating many open-pollinated varieties, especially the local variations that were naturally developed, when local seed-saving was the common practice. The concern is that this weakens the gene pool, resulting at some point in less hardy, more vulnerable plants. Countering this trend (an environmental and sustainability issue), and an affinity for variety and tradition, are the principal motivations for many large seed-saving groups.