I’ve mentioned before that seedbanks will have (and are already playing) a really important role in coming decades as we tackle climate change and food scarcity. Carolyn Fry’s Seeds; A Natural History (2016) tells some amazing stories about seedbanks, as well as the role of seeds in propagating human culture more generally. Fry explanation of the loss of genetic diversity that has been one side-effect of agriculture (especially agriculture on a massive scale) and how saving wild species will help us find ways of reintroducing the genetic diversity necessary to tackle the challenges of the coming century. Part of her explanation goes like this:
“A handful of wild wheat seeds is genetically diverse in much the same way as a crowd of people. Just like humans, plants in different wild populations can have markedly different characteristics despite being the same species. When farmers began to cultivate crops, the first seeds they sowed from wild plants would have contained only a small subsection of the genetic diversity present in their local wild wheat population. This, in effect, created a bottleneck in genes at the point at which agriculture first developed. Over subsequent millennia, farmers domesticated plants through a process of selection and breeding. They bred out natural traits, such as the shattering of seed heads and dormancy, which enabled plants to survive in the wild but were not useful for agriculture. On the other hand, they retained and selected for characteristics that were helpful, such as higher yields and pleasant taste. Any individual landrace is therefore the result of breeding work by thousands of farmers over many generations.
“Modern cultivars are the result of sophisticated programs of breeding and genetic improvement specifically designed to meet the needs of large-scale commercial agriculture. Monoculture farming, under which vast areas are planted with a few such cultivars, results in the highest yields but the lowest genetic diversity. The Green Revolution is an example of this [think the introduction of modern pesticides, inorganic fertilisers and new plant-breeding techniques in the twentieth century]. At the start of the twentieth century, India was home to over 30,000 varieties of rice; today, just ten varieties are grown in 75 percent of the country’s rice fields. Moreover, some crop varieties have been genetically modified to tolerate specific herbicides such as Mosanto’s Roundup product, a development that has enabled farmers to easily eradicate weeds but has led to them abandoning traditional landraces and varieties in favor of crops that offer better financial returns.” (p.22 Seeds)
Ref: Carolyn Fry (2016) Seeds; A Natural History. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago