Word: croppings
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...Svalbard is a repository for samples from national seed banks across the globe - almost every country in the world has one. Their purpose, of course, is to backup native plant varieties. If climate conditions change or a disease threatens crops currently in use, plant breeders can dip into seed banks to try to grow new crops. The seed diversity preserved in these banks can mean the difference between feast and famine. But the banks that contain our most diverse and important collections of seeds tend to be located in developing countries, where budgets are tight and conditions are less than...
...climate warms, it will take a toll on agriculture. A recent study in Science warned that by the end of the century, the average temperatures during growing seasons could be higher than the most extreme heat of today. To keep growing food, we'll need to make use of crop varieties that are better equipped to withstand heat and potentially droughts; breeders sifting through Svalbard's unparalleled collection of seeds today may discover tomorrow's crops. "This isn't just a time capsule," says Fowler. "This is a living institution, built to address individual catastrophes, not just global ones...
...series of investments necessary to ensure that a warmer, more populous world will still be able to feed itself. Funding for global agricultural research has dwindled in recent years, in the wake of the great success of the Green Revolution of the 1950s and '60s, which vastly increased global crop yields through intensive fertilizer use and irrigation. Bananas are one of the most important cash crops in the world, for example, yet Fowler notes that there are just six banana breeders on the planet...
...country derided as far too orderly to ever be interesting, a surprisingly large crop of writers has been drawn to Singapore. Joseph Conrad has given sinister life to its mangrove-wreathed port, W. Somerset Maugham has brought murder to its torpid rubber plantations and Paul Theroux has given us the pornographic delights of its Vietnam War-era brothels...
...Less studied, though, is the "genetic dillution effect," in which selective breeding to increase crop yield has led to declines in protein, amino acids, and as many as six minerals in one study of commercial broccoli grown in 1996 and '97 in South Carolina. Because nearly 90% of dry matter is carbohydrates, "when breeders select for high yield, they are, in effect, selecting mostly for high carbohydrate with no assurance that dozens of other nutrients and thousands of phytochemicals will all increase in proportion to yield...