Semillas Abiertas
On September 11th, Almendra Cremaschi, director of Bioleft, gave a virtual seminar as part of the debate on seed intellectual property on the Organic Seed Alliance platform. The meeting was open to the community of organic, agroecological, and family farmers who produce in the United States, and other people from different parts of the world participated as well.
Read more
Bioleft launched the 2025/2026 tomato campaign with a virtual workshop that brought together evaluators from more than 25 locations across the country. The proposal, based on open science and citizen science, reinforces collaborative recording and the circulation of knowledge to make better decisions on seed selection and multiplication.
Read more
On August 26th, the Bioleft outreach team visited Julia Ríos, tomato evaluator and seed producer at Minka-Semillera (Florencio Varela) to share an assessment of the previous season and plan for the 2024-2025 season. The meeting took place in an atmosphere of trust and closeness, at her own home, where they discussed achievements, difficulties, and next steps.
Read more
As part of the International Colloquium on Perspectives on Ecology in Latin America (see more), Bioleft participated in the roundtable discussion “Towards shared sustainability: lessons learned from collaborative experiences in Latin America,” reflecting on the challenges and lessons learned around the exchange and improvement of open seeds in Argentina.
Read more
During this campaign, we collaboratively carried out a participatory corn evaluation network, with trials distributed in Junín, Entre Ríos, and southeastern Córdoba. The network seeks to generate collective knowledge about the behavior of different corn varieties, focusing on materials developed by farmers and non-transgenic hybrids of interest for organic and agroecological production systems.
Read more
This past April, we held the closing workshop for the 2024–2025 campaign of the collaborative evaluation project of Creole tomatoes. Once again, we came together from different regions and experiences to celebrate a collective process that continues to grow, driven by the commitment of gardeners, agroecological producers, researchers, students, and defenders of open-pollinated seeds.
Read more
As part of the “Al Rescate del Tomate criollo” project [“To the Rescue of Creole Tomato”], which seeks to recover tomato flavour through the collection, exchange and collaborative breeding of creole tomatoes, the Closing workshop of Creole Tomato 2023/2024 season was held virtually on June 26. More than 30 grower-breeders from different regions of the country participated in the workshop”.
Read more
As part of the Bioleft’s participatory breeding experiments, Enrico Cresta, an organic farmer and member of Bioleft, selects and develops his own open-pollinated (OPV) and GMO-free corn variety, adapted and improved to the organic conditions of his “Altos Verdes” establishment, located in the Cordoba province.
Read more
On November 21, the first participatory tomato breeding workshop was held as part of the “Bioleft, participatory innovation in seeds” project, under the Citizen Science program led by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MINCyT). In this project, Bioleft and Minka, an agroecological seed production cooperative, are working to evaluate different varieties of tomato, with the aim of developing seeds that are sustainable and of high quality.
Read more
On Tuesday, October 3, we gathered with our parnters from Minka in his house of seeds at CEDEPO, located in the nearside of Florencio Varela. Minka semillera is an organization of woman who produce seeds on farms in Guernica and Florencio Varela Buenos Aires Province) and, organized as a cooperative, they aim to generate availability of diverse and resilient seeds for family farmers of the peri urban area of Buenos Aires.
Read more