Agricultural diversity has now become a topic for continuous discussion due to a rapid decline in agricultural variety. For centuries, the availability of millions of wild crop cultures contributed to the development of domesticated crops that have now become a source of nutrition. However, out of millions of existing types of wild crop cultures, the vast majority have been abandoned and eradicated, as the agricultural companies placed major emphasis on the breeding of domesticated cultures that are easy to grow and yield a harvest. Currently, the sphere of agriculture is widely focused on supporting and promoting monocultures instead of investing in the increased variety of crop mixtures (Wuest et al., 2021).
Such a tendency presents a severe threat to the environment and biodiversity, as eradicating wild crop variety will lead to higher exposure to poor harvest and dependence on key crops (“Importance of biodiversity,” n.d.). For this reason, in order to combat this issue and promote biodiversity, a decision was made to create specialized seed banks that would preserve unique varieties of wild crop cultures.
Undeniably, the creation of seed banks is not a full-scale solution to the problem, as the number of previously destroyed crop cultures will take much effort and technological interventions to be restored and enhanced. Still, the existence of such a preservation strategy is a beneficial means to prevent the decay of biodiversity in agriculture. A prime example of explicit seed preservation is the Millennium Seed Bank in the UK that currently stores nearly two billion seeds gathered from all over the world (Harrisberg, 2019). This strategy has, by all means, proved itself effective, but more support and investment are required to continue and improve the preservation means and crop mixture technologies.
References
Harrisberg, K. (2019). UK seed vault banks on wild crops to feed a warming world. Reuters. Web.
Importance of biodiversity. (n.d.). Lumen. Web.
Wuest, S. E., Peter, R., & Niklaus, P. A. (2021). Ecological and evolutionary approaches to improving crop variety mixtures. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 5(8), 1068-1077. Web.