From the Field to the Future

Miles Hillmann is a lifelong entrepreneur with a career that bridges scientific curiosity and hands-on innovation. From his early work at the Kabanyolo Agricultural Research Station in Uganda during Idi Amin’s fall, to experiencing food shortage and famine in the Ethiopian Central Highlands. His work encompassed everything from agricultural development, to establishing food-for-work projects, providing grain in exchange for labour on flash flood irrigation systems. The importance of food security was indelibly imprinted on his mind.

He later pioneered real-time feed analysis in the UK and created one of the UK’s major environmental control companies exporting to Europe, Nigeria and the Middle East. Throughout, a passion for agricultural science — especially the potential of genetic advances — remained a quiet thread.

That thread was reawakened when his old friend Geoff Hawtin won the 2024 World Food Prize. Geoff’s lifelong mission to conserve genetic diversity through global gene banks inspired Miles to investigate the remarkable, largely hidden revolution now transforming plant genetics — and its potential to reshape food security in the developing world.

This book is not his story. It is the story of the scientists, curators, and plant breeders leading this movement — told in their voices, through his lens. This is the story of the Super-Seeders.