From collection to cultivation | Endangered maize | Seed and gene banks
From collection to cultivation
The genetic diversity of agricultural crop plants is essential to food security, present and future. But how this diversity makes its way into agricultural production—for example as more disease-resistant or nutritious crops—is not well documented. This poses problems for scientific and political decision making. It also provides the jumping off point for the project From Collection to Cultivation.
Over a five-year period, with funding from the Wellcome Trust, I’m leading a team of researchers in developing histories of the knowledge, labor, techniques, and tools used to transform plants gathered around the world into novel crop varieties destined for farms, markets, and, eventually, dinner plates. We are following plants as they circulated among agricultural explorers, plant pathologists, crop breeders, seed bank curators, commercial farmers, and even allotment gardeners to better understand the histories of everyday foods, from sweet potatoes to peanuts to chile peppers and beyond.
In tracking down these untold stories, we aim together to transform the history of how and by whom modern agricultural crops—and modern diets—have been made.
Endangered maize
Maize, or corn, is one of the world’s most important crop plants. Many people worry that farmers aren’t growing as many varieties as they did in the past—and that this shift presents a problem for the future. My research has explored the science of maize diversity as its developed since the 1890s, in Mexico, the United States, and beyond, exploring why and with what consequences the conservation of diverse varieties became a global enterprise. This history is the basis of my book Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction (University of California Press, 2022). It’s also the jumping off point for a few other reflections and activities, including my analysis of how maize scientists talk about race in corn, the politics behind histories of hybrid corn, and my own experiments in maize cultivation.
Seed and gene banks
A seed bank is a facility that stores the seeds of diverse plant species and varieties, making these available for research and cultivation. They often aim to preserve these samples as well, so that they can be used by scientists, farmers, and gardeners in the future. Since 2015, I’ve been studying the history of seed banks (also described as gene banks, a category that encompasses a wide range of facilities that preserve genetic material from plant and animals) and the social and political concerns that underpinned their rise to prominence. I’ve written about their roots in international development programs and their embrace by community organizations, research that has led me to reflect on the many hopes and ambitions that bring people together around the project of saving seed. More recently I’ve started to think about the intersections of data management and seed banking, including the centrality of databases to effective seed curation and the history of “back-up” as strategy for long-term conservation.
