About
About Zomia Collective
We find landrace cannabis in the hills of mainland Southeast Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific, buy seed from the people who kept it and publish the record that comes with it.
What we do
A landrace is a population that has grown in one place long enough to belong to it, saved season after season by the same families and never crossed into the commercial stock. There are fewer of them every year.
So we go. We sit with the growers, buy seed at a price they set and write down what we can: the place, the elevation, the season, the harvest, the person who kept the line going. The seed comes back and goes in the shop. The record goes on landrace.wiki, an independent encyclopaedia where anyone can check what we sell against a public article rather than taking our word for it.
Where the name comes from
Zomia is what geographers call the massif running from the central highlands of Vietnam west across the Southeast Asian mainland and into the Himalaya. Hill country that the lowland states around it taxed, mapped and governed badly or not at all. Willem van Schendel coined the term in 2002 and James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed turned it into a history of the people who stayed out of reach.
The same hills hold some of the oldest continuously grown cannabis populations on earth. That is not a coincidence. A plant that is illegal everywhere survives longest where the state reaches least. We collect there, so we took the name.
How it started, and what went wrong
It began with wanting to grow real landraces and finding them close to impossible to buy. Éloïse had been travelling in Asia since 2012 and bringing seed back since 2013. The shop opened in 2021 on seed sourced through collaborators in Thailand. From 2022 we were collecting for it ourselves.
2023 took most of it apart. Our accounts were mass reported and deleted, PayPal cut us off and the card processors followed. Two informal partnerships fell apart in the same year, both of them handshake deals with nothing written down. Reach went to nearly zero and sales went with it. Demand never actually moved. People still order whenever we post. We had stopped being able to reach them, or to take their money when they found us anyway.
The years since have been slow and unglamorous: getting the collection documented properly, building a workflow that does not live in one person's head and putting the legal side on a footing that a bad month cannot knock over. We also tried and dropped a research station in Thailand along the way; the conservation page tells that story and what replaced it.
- 2012
First trips: India, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.
- 2013
West Bengal, Bihar and Himachal Pradesh.
- 2015
Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.
- 2016
Georgia: Kakheti and Tusheti. The move to Thailand.
- 2019
Éloïse and Piano start collecting seed together in Laos and northern Thailand.
- 2021
Zomia is founded, and the first official Zomia seeds are collected in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.
- 2022
Three expeditions: Thailand, Cambodia and Himachal Pradesh.
- 2023
Six expeditions across Thailand, Cambodia, India, Vietnam and Laos.
- 2024
Seven expeditions: Colombia, Thailand, Cambodia, India and Sri Lanka.
- 2025
Seven more: Thailand, Laos, India and Nepal.
- 2026
Three trips so far: Thailand, Cambodia and Sri Lanka.
How it is set up
Two legal pieces, each doing the thing it is suited to. A French association loi 1901 holds the membership, the documentation and the conservation work, which are all lawful in France and belong there. The seed shop sits in a Spanish company, because seed sales are settled law in Spain and a criminal matter on paper in France. Every functioning French seedbank is registered in Spain or the Netherlands for the same reason.
Both are in progress. The association is being registered and the Spanish company is not incorporated yet, so this page carries no registration numbers or registered address until they exist.
Who runs it
Two of us. Éloïse started the project and works on it full time, collecting, documenting and writing. Gaëtan handles fulfilment out of France and has funded a good deal of the fieldwork. Bella did much of the 2025 collecting and has since moved on, and her name is on a lot of that year's records.
Back the work
Seed sales do not pay for the collecting. Patronage does, and it has through every bad year the project has had.