Don't collect it." But you can't anticipate what value that might have. Because just by looking at the material in a farmer's field you might say, 'That one's no good. "That's why you have to collect everything. Today, the genes of humble PI178383 are a foundation of agriculture-bred into much of the bread we eat.
Harlan wrote in his journal "it was…hopelessly useless." Useless for food, but, as it turned out, inside these seeds is a superhero for fighting wheat disease. "An old farmer variety that had probably been grown for thousands of years." "This is PI178383," Bonman says, referring to a wild variety of wheat growing in Turkey. If there's an Indiana Jones of plant explorers, his name was Jack Harlan, who made one of his greatest finds in the 1940's.
Department of Agriculture has sent scientists, called "plant explorers," to the ends of the earth to collect seeds. Most countries collect seeds in banks for safe keeping. "We have in this room more than 50,000 different what we call accessions or collections of wheat from around the world," Bonman explains. government storehouse in Idaho, where Mike Bonman watches over America's collection of wheat seeds. To understand the danger of disappearing crops, 60 Minutes visited a U.S. The downside is the family variety goes extinct. But today, farmers are planting mass-produced industrial seeds. And here's why: seeds used to be passed down through families. Estimates are that every day one crop strain disappears. "We've lost about 6,800 of those, so the extinction rate for apples varieties in the United States is about 86 percent," he explains.Įxtinction exists in all crops. "And how many are there today?" Pelley asks. 7,100 different varieties of apples that are catalogued," Fowler explains. But in fact, in the 1800s in the United States people were growing 7,100 named varieties of apples. "Maybe 25, I would guess," Pelley remarks. There's Golden Delicious.' They're going to give you an answer like that," Fowler says. "If you ask somebody 'How many kinds of apples are there?' They're going to say 'Well, there's red, there's green. But science fiction aside, the main purpose is to protect against a doomsday that is unfolding right now because the plants we've been eating for 10,000 years are going extinct.
If an asteroid strikes the earth, seeds to restart agriculture would come from the vault. Officially, the seed bank is the "Svalbard Global Seed Vault." It's built to warehouse backup copies of all the world's crops - 1.5 billion seeds - including everything from California sunflowers to ancient Chinese rice. Inside the boxes that came off the plane are millions of silver envelopes, containing seeds of everything from chickpeas to wheat. We wanted absolutely the coldest spot we could find," Fowler explains. We wanted to take advantage of the naturally frozen temperatures down here. "This is the coldest place in the mountain. Now they were loaded for the last mile to Fowler's frozen Fort Knox. What's in the boxes took 10,000 years to develop and 70 years to collect. The treasures that the vault was built to house came by plane and approached an airstrip at the base of the mountain nearby. They freeze it colder than the permafrost, so that if the earth warms and the power goes out, the vault will stay frozen for another 25 years. "We're going freeze it even further," Fowler explains. Inside, pipes provide additional refrigeration, despite the fact the vault is only several hundred miles from the North Pole.
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