News

When the Growing Gets Tough, the Tough Get Pre-breeding

Much like dogs have wolves, our familiar crops have undomesticated relatives growing in the wild, which often have useful traits not found in their cousins grown on farms. As...

A global consortium on tea genetic resources will benefit tea-growing countries around the world, according to Professor Liang Chen, curator of the world’s largest collection of tea diversity and co-author of the Crop Trust’s Glob...

From sunflowers to blueberries, cranberries and blackberries to pecans and squash, the United States is home to a variety of widely eaten crops and their wild relatives. Unfortunately, many of these wild cousins of familiar crops...

Climate change is reducing potato yields in some important production areas due to more drought, heat, and diseases like late blight and bacterial wilt.

Our partners from the International Potato Center (CIP) are working with the...

“I’ve never seen barley looking this great before!” El Kbir Safraoui couldn’t hold back his excitement about the crop growing in his fields. And he had seen a lot of barley in his lifetime of farming in central Morocco.

Safraoui...

Hunting for Drought Tolerance in Papua New Guinea

Bananas were first domesticated in Southeast Asia, sometime between 5,000 and 8,000 BCE. They have since spread widely around the world. India alone consumes a quarter of the...

Abdellah Bounagua clutched the stone tightly in his weathered hands. With it, he could cast one vote. The durum wheat farmer from Marchouch in northern Morocco wanted to make sure he voted wisely.

He ran his hands through the...

We recently visited our Crop Wild Relatives partners at the Mekong Delta Development Research Institute, Can Tho University, in Vietnam. Professor Huynh Quang Tin is leading a participatory plant breeding (PPB) initiative where 13...

Nearly 5,000 seed samples of crop wild relatives saved in challenging, six-year effort to secure the future of food.

Bonn, Germany and Washington, DC (3 DECEMBER 2019)—As the world grapples with the challenge of sustainably...

Marie Haga | Marie's Corner

It’s been a particularly “wild” time for many Crop Trust staff recently, with teams heading to far-flung corners of the world - and often far off the beaten path - as part of the Crop Wild Relatives...

Marie Haga | Marie's Corner

When you hear the word ‘quality’ what comes to mind? This was the question posed by Janny van Beem, the Crop Trust’s Quality Management Specialist, at our most recent Genebank Operations and Advanced...