Interesting article in the New York Times. I only quote part of it here -tried to cleanse it of political viewpoint:
"In a climate-controlled bunker in an unremarkable building in rural Aberdeen, Idaho, there are shelves upon shelves of meticulously labeled boxes of seed. This vault is home to many of the United States’ more than 62,000 genetically unique lines of wheat, collected over the past 127 years from around the world.
Though dormant, these seeds are alive. But unless they are continually cared for and periodically replanted, the lines will die, along with the millenniums of evolutionary history that they embody.
Since its establishment in 1898, the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Plant Germplasm System and the scientists who support it have systematically gathered and maintained the agricultural plant species that undergird our food system in vast collections such as the one in Aberdeen. The collections represent a towering achievement of foresight that food security depends on the availability of diverse plant genetic resources."
“Across its 22 stations nationwide, approximately 300 N.P.G.S. scientists maintain more than 600,000 genetic lines of more than 200 crop species. The collections of some crops, like wheat, are in the form of seeds. But others, like apples (2,664 lines), must be maintained as living plants in the open field. The scientists who care for them must follow strict requirements for sustaining genetic purity so they can provide healthy viable seeds or plants to the tens of thousands of researchers and others who request them each year.”
"For example, when a newly evolved form of stem rust — a devastating fungal disease infecting wheat — emerged in East African fields in 1999, an international group of plant breeders turned to the N.P.G.S. collection for help. There, among the tens of thousands of patiently maintained lines, they discovered previously unknown genetic sources of resistance to the disease. Those genes now protect wheat varieties around the world, silencing for the moment the alarm of a feared global pandemic. (Just like human diseases, plant diseases do not respect borders.)
Such stories are common. In the 1980s, scientists at a gene bank in Geneva, N.Y., helped identify genetic traits that made apples resistant to several destructive diseases, including deadly fire blight. Those traits have since been deployed in the rootstocks of over 100 million apple trees worldwide, not only generating more than $91 million annually in tree sales, but also directly supporting the nearly $23 billion American apple industry."
[Excepted from https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/opinion/doge-elon-musk-usda-crops.html]