Crop Species Took Huge Dive in Last Century

I ran across the graphic below on my sister’s tumblr blog this weekend and, though I already knew crop species loss was pretty dramatic, I found it to be quite shocking (click on the image to enlarge it).

If you can’t read the graphic, the key points are:

A CENTURY AGO
In 1903 commercial seed houses offered hundreds of varieties, as shown in this sampling of ten crops.

80 YEARS LATER

By 1983 few of those varieties were found in the National Seed Storage Laboratory.

Read more on our sister site, Eat Drink Better: Crop Species Loss Over Last 100 Years (Tremendous)

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