The Siwan Seed and Seedling House is an initiative of HajMoulein Eco-community Farm aimed at creating a space to conserve endangered Siwan plant seedlings threatened by the spread of monocrop, market-oriented agriculture in Siwa. More fundamentally, it is a space for opening dialogue with Siwan farmers to revive and safeguard traditional Siwan regenerative agricultural practices.
Over the course of the project, we succeeded in collecting and replanting six endangered varieties of Siwan date palms. We also held several organized and informal meetings with dozens of Siwan farmers to engage in dialogue around traditional Siwan regenerative agricultural knowledge and the importance of conserving plant biodiversity in Siwa. In collaboration with a number of farmers, we developed a natural compound to combat the red palm weevil and tested it at HajMoulein Farm. So far, the compound appears to have been successful in confronting this invasive pest. However, we still need much more time, work, and sustained engagement to convince a larger number of farmers of the importance of returning to traditional practices of plant-based composting, botanical pest control, the cultivation of companion plants, and growing food for household needs rather than focusing exclusively on market-oriented agriculture with all its associated practices.
We established a nursery and, in collaboration with a number of Siwan farmers, collected several endangered seedlings. Together, we developed natural pest-control compounds and documented a number of recipes drawn from the agricultural knowledge of elders.
We enjoyed opening further dialogue with Siwan farmers, and I was personally moved by the smiles on their faces as they recalled the techniques they once used in traditional agricultural practices—techniques that most of them had abandoned due to the adoption of market-oriented, standardized farming systems reliant on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Farmers are enthusiastic about conserving biodiversity and reviving and preserving their traditional agricultural knowledge, but economic pressures and the state-supported ideology of market-oriented production place significant barriers in the way.
The project is directly connected to the local community. By conserving Siwan plant biodiversity and collecting and revitalizing traditional agricultural knowledge, it seeks to encourage learning from elders, intergenerational knowledge transmission, strengthen independence from the market and its mechanisms, and move away from the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides
This post is based on Youssef Ramez’s report for 2025 Germinators Projects.
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