Comments on The "Doomsday" Seed Bank

Grow heirloom crops, and buy heirloom vegetables.

That's all well and good, but do they have poppy seeds? Cannabis seeds? Coca seeds? Bet they do they- wouldn't that be a scandal? Maybe you should use those well-honed journalistic skills and find out.

3...2...1...

let the inappropriate "seed" jokes begin...

i've done Native Seeds before and they have good books for your inner plant geek.

The USDA has a small-ish seed bank here in Washington, on the WSU campus in Pullman. They grow all kinds of crops and harvest the seed for cold storage.

http://www.ars.usda.gov/main/site_main.htm?modecode=53481500

The problem with preservation through planting is GMO seeds have a way of cross-pollinating with native seeds, rendering the offspring sterile.

The more you learn about the loss of crop species--and the loss of biological diversity, in general--across the globe, the more horrified you get. The likes of Archer Daniels Midland have helped create a fragile agricultural system across the world.

For anyone who's interested in such awesomely depressing matters, there's a book that came out last year I highly recommend: The Sixth Extinction.

a lot of god all these seed will do us when all the bees are dead and can't pollinate them!

Oh my God you ARE capable of making sense! Sweet! I wondered why you still worked there.

You call that work? Although, to be fair, you probably can't call it a paycheck either.

Just growing the seeds would do nothing against really catastrophic like a asteroid impact, nuclear war, massive climate change, etc.

Say what you will about the over engineering of food, but it has enabled most of us to not have to farm and instead spend are time developing lots of cool shit. If we ever did have to rebuild it would be nice to be able to not have to start completely from scratch.