Safeguarding the Future of US Agriculture - Global Crop Diversity Trust

every year, rather than replant their own best seed. Within two decades, cornfarming in the U.S. transitioned from landraces to new hybrids, from on-farmconservation to a focus on production. As farmers cross that threshold,conservation of the diversity in agriculture depends on conscious decisions tocollect and conserve. Only by doing so will agriculture the world over avoid themass extinction of landraces—along with wild relatives of crops that are inevitablybeing lost to changes in the habitats in which they grow. Such losses in diversityhave real, although unpredictable, impacts on the future ability of agriculture tocope with whatever changes lie ahead.US agriculture needs to anticipate—and be prepared for—the unknown. This maycome in the form of a mutated fungus that takes hold across genetically similarfields of wheat or rice, or in the form of pathogens that arrive in the wind or slipthrough quarantine undetected. Whatever the form taken by such unanticipatedevents, crop diversity is bound to be an essential component of the response. Andwhile it is not possible to immediately find all the useful genes contained incollections of crop diversity, molecular tools that facilitate targeted geneticsearches are increasingly available. The question is not whether we will have thetechnology to find the genes that are needed, but whether the crop diversity itselfwill continue to be available for this and future generations.42 CONCLUSION