Backyard Gardeners: Protecting Sacred Seeds?

Backyard Gardeners: Protecting Sacred Seeds?

As farms have become more commercialized in recent decades and have moved toward growing one to two high-yield crops, the number of varieties globally is quickly diminishing, erasing plant genes at the very moment in history when they may be most needed.

That has left Europe’s backyard gardeners and small farmers, as the de facto guardians of disappearing fruits, grains and vegetables. And time is working against them. These backyard gardeneres are mostly very old. When they die, their plants are dying with them. Holdovers from Europe’s more agrarian past, their children and grandchildren have little or no interest in maintaining crops.

Central Italy has 500 landraces, mostly maintained by aged farmers and gardeners and that is a big problem since there is a chance these crops will be lost within a generation – it’s eroding that quickly,” said Valeria Negri, a plant scientist at the University of Perugia who takes in orphaned seeds and raises them behind her home, the way a pet lover might take in stray dogs.

About 10 years ago, Negri and her students went door to door in nearby Tuscany asking households what crops each grew. When they returned several years later to request sample seeds, one third of the plants were no longer cultivated.

Three quarters of biodiversity in crops has been lost in the last century, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. In South Korea, only one quarter of 14 native species cultivated in home gardens in 1985 were still present in 1993. Only 20 percent of the maize types in Mexico that existed in the 1930s, exist today. In the United States, 95 percent of cabbages and 94 percent of peas no longer exist.

Click here for the rest of this article.