Crop Wild Relative Week

Each year, September 22-29, the Crop Science Society of America celebrates Crop Wild Relative Week. Below you can find links to all our guest blogs, our web stories about crop wild relatives, a video, and other scientific information.

What are crop wild relatives?

You have crazy cousins, right? Okay, we know you love your cousins, and they help you out in various ways. The agricultural products you buy in the store benefit from having cousins, too. Crop scientists refer to these cousins of today’s domestic crops as “crop wild relatives.” It’s not because they act wild and crazy. It’s because they often grow in wild landscapes and have evolved in response to sometimes severe environments on their own. They have not had any changes to their genetics through human interaction.

Why do we celebrate crop wild relatives?

You might enjoy eating wild strawberries or blueberries you find while hiking, but you’ll have to admit their yields aren’t great enough to feed your family. That’s why breeders and agriculturists have been selecting higher-yielding crops for centuries to help feed the world. They’ve also looked for great traits, like disease resistance and tolerance to climate extremes.

The fruits, grains, and roots of crop wild relatives are not as large as domesticated crops. Some might be bitter or have poor texture. But these hardy plants have a natural and useful diversity of traits that helped them live in some harsh conditions. And these traits are useful to breeders in the fight to create a sustainable and secure food supply.

Over the years, scientists began to preserve the seeds and germplasm from crop wild relatives. A few of the wild species are near extinction, so collecting and preserving them is crucial. Some species are extinct in the wild and exist only in genebanks. There they are carefully studied, maintained, and shared among crop scientists around the world.

Crop wild relatives are crucial to the longevity of our food supply. We’d like to raise the visibility of these wild and weedy kin, and highlight this important area of crop science.

The resources, stories, and fun facts that can be found on our websites are for everyone. Please read our blogs and web stories, and watch the videos of crop scientists using wild relatives for their useful traits. If you’d like to dig deep into the peer-reviewed papers our scientists have published, we’ve collected them for you, too!

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