FARMINGTON — The founder of FEDCO Seeds will be the first speaker in a series of workshops this winter on the importance of saving heirloom seeds and preserving genetic diversity of plants that have evolved over generations to be hardy, delicious and disease-resistant.

The series is sponsored by the Farmington Seed Savers Group.

C.R. Lawn, who founded FEDCO in Waterville in1978, will talk about, “Where do Seeds Come From?” at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 16, at the Farmington Grange Hall on Bridge Street in West Farmington. There is a $5 fee to help cover the cost of renting the hall and refreshments.

Lawn, who is on the board of the Maine Organic Farmers & Gardeners Association and is an advisor to the Seedsavers Exchange, the nation’s largest seed bank, will discuss the business of acquiring seeds for farmers and gardeners, the politics of international seed businesses, and the increasing role of genetic engineering, according to a release.

He will bring his perspective as both a grower and a seeds man to the concerns about food security, genetic diversity and seed patenting.

At 6:30 p.m. on Jan. 20, Amy LeBlanc, an certified organic gardener from Wilton who grows and sells more than 200 varieties of heirloom and hybrid tomatoes and peppers through her Tomato Lovers Paradise catalog, will describe seed-saving techniques, from the simple to the tricky.

On Feb. 17, Will Bonsall of Industry, the founder of the Scatterseed Project and advisor and major curator for the Seedsavers Exchange, will focus on more advanced aspects of seed saving, such as maintaining the purity of cross-pollinating species and dealing with biennial crops that have to be wintered over.

Bonsall’s Scatterseed Project, a regional seed exchange for this area, maintains more than 3,000 plant varieties including 1,100 varieties of peas and 650 varieties of potatoes.

The Seed Savers Group was organized this year as a way to get more people to grow endangered plants and to teach them the right way to save seeds. The goal is to share information and seeds with others, according to spokeswoman Rosalie Deri of Farmington.

“There seems to a lot of interest in saving seed among gardeners and small farmers, and we felt this was a good time to have the program. It is usually a quiet time of year for growers and people are starting to plan their seed orders,” she said.

Deri said the group hopes to launch an educational project this year where participants would grow a particular heirloom variety of winter squash and save the seeds after harvest. The suggested reading would be “Seed to Seed, Seed Saving Techniques for the Vegetable Gardener,” by Susan Ashworth, the hand-pollinator’s bible.

Hand pollination is time-consuming but not difficult and is the only way people can maintain the purity of a variety of corn, according to Ashworth’s book.

“Food security in the future cannot depend on patented seed,” LeBlanc said in an interview. “Traditional varieties that have been grown in a particular region have genetic material that gives them the ability to better adapt to climate change. And those old varieties taste good.”

“It is very satisfying to save your own seeds. It gives you ownership of the food process,” she said.

In her book, Ashworth warns of the urgency of rescuing the world’s heritage of seed. Old varieties are lost each year, she said, as multinational agribusinesses buy out family-owned seed companies and replace regionally-adapted collections with more profitable hybrids and patented varieties.

These are more expensive to produce, cost more for the farmer and gardener, and are less disease and pest-resistant that native strains, she writes.

“Far from being obsolete or inferior, these may well be the best home garden varieties ever developed. It is entirely possible that half of the non-hybrid varieties still available from seed companies could be lost during the next decade,” according to Ashworth.