Laying aside the question of whether saving seeds in freezers is the most promising long-term solution to prevent the loss of plant biodiversity and secure our access to food in a troubled future climate, this article draws attention to the conditions of possibility that scaffold the seed bank world. Oft relegated to "tech" work that is unworthy of observation, this article focuses on the labor practices of seed curators as they prepare the seeds for their ultimate storage at the largest seed bank of wild plants-the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership in West Sussex, England. Contributing to the growing scholarship on care in technoscientific practice, I investigate how scientists summon their bodies, imaginations, and feelings to clean, screen, and count seeds, all the while producing knowledge that renders the seeds legible in the bank. By following the seeds through the experimental care practices espoused by scientists involved from the moment seeds arrive at the bank until they are ready for storage, I study how seemingly mundane tasks radically influence how "life" is being prepared for the future. [seed banking, gene banking, Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, care practice, laboratory studies, affective labor].

Farmers’ Rights formally appeared in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) as a means of recognising the past, present, and future contributions of farmers in conserving, improving, and making available the plant genetic materials that are important for food and agriculture. Discussions have been underway under the auspices of the ITPGRFA’s Governing Body with the recent Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on Farmers’ Rights (AHTEG-FR) collecting together views, experiences, and best practices to produce an inventory and options for encouraging, guiding, and promoting the realisation of Farmers’ Rights. While this is useful, this article reports on the outcomes of a workshop that applied a different methodology. Our purpose was to identify what could be and should be the substance of Farmers’ Rights so that the policy substance drives the implementation rather than the AHTEG-FR’s retro-fitting Farmers’ Rights to existing views, best practices, and measures. The contribution of this article is to develop and set out a list of possible substantive Farmers’ Rights as a contribution and foundation for further consultations and negotiations.

In the early twentieth century, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) funded international expeditions with the aim of finding plant specimens for introduction into the agricultural landscape and the new experimental projects in hybridization. One such agricultural explorer, noted for his eponymous lemon, was Frank Nicholas Meyer, an immigrant from the Netherlands whose expeditions in Asia have brought to the United States celebrated fruit and toxic weeds. Neither professional botanists nor farmers, plant hunters like Meyer worked by taking advantage of historical allegiances to academic programs, while leaning on the authority of their newer national institutions. In addition to plants, through photographs that transposed Chinese landscapes to U.S. environmental counterparts, Meyer contributed to the imagination of the agricultural promise of the American West. The era of these plant explorers has ended but their material trace remains in a variety of spaces and modes of existence that have hitherto been disregarded. Reading Meyer's letters shows the authority and discipline behind his transformation from gardener's apprentice to professional plant collector. I argue that photographs and plants are understudied material traces that enable historians to re-examine the means by which credit was received, given, and exchanged. By drawing together these traces, I chart the continued importance of exploration and collection in the twentieth century and show the epistemic continuity between nineteenth-century natural history and twentieth-century experimental science.

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This Special Section broadens and qualifies the terms through which the relationship between home and militarization has been understood. We do this by joining a vibrant and growing field of transdisciplinary scholars who address the militarization of everyday life by attending to domesticity and practices of domestication. We grapple with how the home naturalizes and becomes a catalyst for militarism:  How do ordinary and domestic objects, technologies, spaces, and infrastructures make violence feel at home in the world? We are concerned with the domestic life of militarization as oikos: the household, habitat, and milieu of violent material relationships that are both ongoing and latent. The domestic is not just a discrete, private space; it also extends into public spaces like neighborhoods, local businesses, waste disposal infrastructures, hospices, and crop fields. Developed within an editorial process rooted in a feminist ethos, the articles collected here provide critical and alternative methodologies and disciplinary forms for considering militarism's aesthetics, affects, and modes of appearance. This collection resists conventional spatialities, temporalities, and incarnations of war while calling attention to the obscuring of violence through practices of care and marketing operations.