To protect these bean varieties for the future, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (known as Embrapa) sent 514 samples to Svalbard. Svalbard's collection contains wheat seeds from individual villages throughout the world, which have baked their own unique breads through the centuries.īrazilians eat black beans (feijão preto) with almost every meal, and they're an important ingredient in feijoada, a bean-and-pork stew that's largely considered the South American country's national dish. Other "crown jewels of agriculture" are also new to the vault: The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (known by its Spanish-language acronym CIMMYT) mailed in 1,946 types of maize, or corn, and 5,964 samples of wheat. ( Read more about frozen Svalbard in National Geographic magazine.) The center shipped 195 samples of wild potato and 61 of wild sweet potato to Svalbard, in part to protect the species and to experiment with creating more nutritious, disease-resistant types of domestic potatoes. That possibility has spurred the International Potato Center (known by its Spanish acronym CIP) to action. Several of the nearly 200 species of wild potato growing from Patagonia all the way north to Colorado could go extinct by 2050, said Guarino, thanks to loss of habitat and climate change. "We have varieties that are productive even in dry conditions and in saline soils-so we need to do everything we can to ensure they always will be available to future generations." "Barley is very important not just for Japan but for the food security of the world," said Kazuhiro Sato, a professor at Okayama University's Institute of Plant Science and Resources, in a statement. (Related: " Space Beer Ready for Taste Testing.") In 2010, Japanese brewer Sapporo made a limited-edition "space beer" with barley grown from seeds that spent five months in Russia's Zvezda Service Module on the International Space Station. ( Read "Food Ark" in National Geographic magazine.) Barley is fermented to make beer, forms the base of miso soup, is roasted to make a cold tea called mugicha, and is distilled to make a Scotch-like whiskey. That's because the grain is a staple of traditional Japanese cuisine, or washoku. In the first ever seed deposit from Japan, the Barley Germplasm Center, located at Okayama University, sent in 575 types of barley, with plans to send another 5,000 in the future.īarley experts in the country became concerned about the stability of their gene banks following the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Here are a few highlights of the recent acquisition. ( Read more about seed banks around the world in National Geographic magazine.) "It's always a good insurance policy to keep a copy of the seed and send that copy up to Svalbard," he said. That's where the Global Seed Vault-also called the Doomsday Seed Vault-comes in. But these facilities can be vulnerable to disasters such as civil war, typhoons, and fires, said Guarino. Many research universities and institutes worldwide already maintain their own gene banks of food crops-essentially refrigerators of dried seeds. Given an uncertain future, with climate change and diseases that could wipe out a variety overnight, scientists say it's important to keep as many different crop varieties as we can. As we've come to rely on just a handful of the highest yielding varieties of fruits, vegetables, and grains, thousands of other varieties are disappearing at an alarming rate. The goal of the vault is to safely preserve as many different varieties of crop species as possible before they disappear. (Related: "Pictures: 'Doomsday' Seed Vault Safeguards Our Food Supply.") As a "safety deposit box" to protect the diversity of the world's food genes, the advanced facility houses 820,619 crop varieties in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, Norway (map), according to Luigi Guarino, senior scientist with the Global Crop Diversity Trust, one of the vault's partners. The seeds, sourced from more than a hundred countries, arrived this week to coincide with the vault's sixth birthday. Beer and whiskey lovers, raise a glass to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which has just taken in 20,000 new crop varieties-including 575 types of barley.
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