It is a pity that more than 95% of the old seeds have disappeared from farmland.

More than 10,000 years ago, humans realized that some of the seeds harvested could be retained so that they could be replanted the following year.

"Xinyu": people eat meat and drink blood, clothing and fur; as for Shennong, they think that insects and beasts are difficult to feed the people, but seek edible things, taste the fruits of all kinds of herbs, observe the taste of sour and bitter, and teach people to eat grains.

Until the twentieth century, crops were propagated in this way.

Under the catalysis of commercialization and science and technology, from cross breeding to "artificial mutagenesis", "ploidy breeding", "cell engineering", "chromosome engineering", and then to the "transgenic engineering" which is widely debated in society.

Chinese traditional folk breeding has become synonymous with backwardness. Chinese agriculture is seriously "short of core", and our "agricultural core" has been stuck.

China imports about 75000 tons of crop seeds every year, and the import volume is about 500 million US dollars. China is already a big importer of seeds. At present, there are about 6500 domestic seed enterprises, most of which have a turnover of less than 30 million yuan, and the domestic seed industry market is very serious.

Domestic seeds are sold by jin, while foreign seeds are sold by one.

China lags behind foreign countries for 20-30 years in the field of modern science and technology breeding, and it is difficult to overtake at corners at present. However, over-reliance on imported seeds is likely to contain the risk of "breaking seeds" in the future.

At the two sessions, the state stressed that seed safety should be firmly in its own hands.

The natural heritage has become the "patent" monopolized by the giants.

The genes of each traditional variety are unique, which is the result of the evolution of resistance to diseases and insect pests and the adaptation to specific growth conditions and climate.

But at present, the number of almost seed varieties from north to south is very limited.

Note: the wider the ribbon in the picture, the more kinds of fruits and vegetables. The ribbon on the horizontal line represents the categories of 1903, and the ribbon below the horizontal line represents the categories of 1983.

The main categories from left to right are:

Beet, cabbage, sweet corn, lettuce, cantaloupe, pea, radish, pumpkin, tomato, cucumber.

If you lived in 1903, you had more than 500 kinds of cabbages, more than 400 kinds of peas and tomatoes, and 285 kinds of cucumbers to choose from.

Eighty years later, in 1983, the number of fruits and vegetables dropped sharply, leaving only 28 kinds of cabbages, 25 kinds of peas, 79 kinds of tomatoes and 16 kinds of cucumbers.

In the commercial seed bank at the beginning of the 20th century, compared with the national seed storage laboratory in 1983, researchers found that 93% of the seeds had disappeared in the past 80 years.

The information above is that the US National Geographic Information Map shows that 93% of the varieties of fruits and vegetables in the United States are nearly extinct. To make matters worse, the data in this picture are more than 30 years ago, and the problem must be even more serious today (Chinese data have not been found).

Traditionally, farmers can keep seeds through self-breeding and self-propagation from one harvest season to the next. Without intervention, nature will provide you with what you need for your next harvest in an endless cycle.

Commercial cultivation is the erosion of crop genes, the decrease of crop genetic diversity, and the most direct result is the increase of epidemic and pest infection. To take the simplest example, the French "tomato virus" in 2020 accurately attacked disease-resistant varieties, while the previous non-resistant varieties were less sensitive to the virus.

Laws in the West prohibit the sowing of unregistered varieties of food plants (it must be the work of monopolies behind it). This is really quite hooligan. I need your approval to grow a la carte seed in my own yard, but that's the law.

Farmers have to go to seed monopoly companies to buy seeds.

Let's talk about Monsanto, because it is the biggest monopoly in the seed industry. Monsanto's development benefited from GM patents, and after 1996, the United States opened GM planting licenses. Monsanto seized the GM tuyere, successfully applied biotechnology business model in agriculture, and had a strong voice in the field of genetically modified seeds such as corn, soybean, cotton, rape and so on, which opened the global era of agricultural transgenic. In 1998, he became the leader of the world seed industry through a series of mergers and acquisitions.

Monsanto was acquired by Bayer for US $63 billion in 2018, which further consolidated the voice of the world seed industry and opened a new era of Bayer Monsanto seed monopoly.

According to statistics, 80% of the world's food market is controlled by five multinational companies, including Monsanto.

What kind of food each family can eat is already firmly under the control of these multinational seed companies. From the production, planting, processing, transportation, sales and other aspects of monopoly control, the formation of the upstream and downstream of the whole industry chain, has an absolute say in the agricultural product market.

China has also paid tuition fees for more than 20 years because the giants monopolize nature's "patents".

When Monsanto visited China in 2000, the Chinese staff gave each other a wild soybean out of courtesy and friendliness. At that time, the Chinese side did not expect the result of giving away the wild soybean.

Monsanto staff received such a gift, and then used such a seed to extract the "prolific gene" and "anti-virus" gene. Later, Monsanto applied for 64 international patents based on the results of soybean research.

As a result, Chinese farmers later found that growing Chinese soybeans would infringe on American patents. The enthusiasm of Chinese soybean farmers has been hit by more than half of the high compensation. China has also gone from a country with 90% of the world's known wild soybean resources to the world's largest importer of soybeans, now behind the United States, Brazil and Argentina.

Similar things have happened to Chinese kiwifruit, Beijing roast duck and orchids.

The seed industry is intensifying mergers and acquisitions around the world, with the intention of Yu Qiang, who is strong, to form a super monopoly.

Monsanto has R & D advantages and technical barriers in the seed industry, with 106 seed R & D centers and a research team of more than 20,000 people. However, the total number of R & D personnel of all listed seed companies in China is less than one-twentieth of that of others.

Since the general international rule is to strengthen monopoly through capital, technology, and patents, which is stuck in the "neck" of the seed industry of other countries, China has to catch up, otherwise it can only be choked.

In 2017, Sinopec spent 50.4 billion US dollars to acquire Syngenta, one of the four giants of agricultural seeds, with the help of its top leader. It won the top three positions in the world seed industry.

The state has put forward the idea of storing grain in the land and technology for seed safety.

Hide grain in technology, this is done by agricultural technology companies, technology companies do technology companies, hide grain in the ground is what we can do, that is, to protect old seeds and protect the gene pool of agricultural products.

The old seed that has been eliminated in the face of high efficiency

It is true that the old seeds are not high-yielding and the efficiency is low compared with foreign seeds.

But the advantages of the old varieties are also very obvious. for example, apart from the high yield of tomatoes, the taste of today's tomatoes is too different from that of the tomatoes we ate when we were young, and they are generally very untasty, and the advantage is that they can be stored for a long time. This is all the result of the introduction of foreign seeds. Many of the delicious tomato varieties that were native to China in the past have disappeared.

In addition to plant seeds, China also faces severe challenges in terms of animal seeds.

Wuding chicken is the most suitable for Yunnan steam pot chicken, Pudong chicken is the most suitable for making the most authentic Shanghai chicken bone sauce, Qingyuan Ma chicken is the most suitable for Guangdong white chopped chicken, and Luyuan chicken is suitable for making chicken breeds called flower chickens. Have been included in the "national livestock and poultry genetic resources protection list".

They were all defeated by white-feathered chickens with a breeding cycle of only 45 days.

Chenghua pig is the most suitable pig breed for back-pot meat, and Wujin pig is the most suitable pig breed for Yunnan cloud leg. Are listed as national treasured and protected varieties.

They are all black skin, and its disadvantage is that it grows slowly and the lean meat rate is low, so it is eliminated by foreign pigs.

White-skinned pigs are later imported from Europe and the United States, characterized by high lean meat rate, long production cycle, poor taste, far worse than China's native black-skinned pigs, and no original meat flavor.

At present, the three major pig breeding groups in the world monopolize 98% of China's pig breeding market. except for pig breeds, breeding cattle, chickens and ducks all rely on foreign imports, and the current situation is also very grim.

The old seed is the cornerstone of world food security.

To protect the old seed is to protect the gene pool of the earth, which is an inexhaustible treasure for us.

The old varieties may not taste better than the new varieties, but they must be the genetic source of the good new varieties.

In 1954, cyst nematode disease dealt a devastating blow to the American soybean industry. Scientists rummaged through more than 3000 germplasm resources and finally found Beijing Xiaoheidou, a unique local variety collected by American missionaries from China at the beginning of the 20th century. it is the use of its unique disease resistance genes, the final cultivation of new soybean varieties to revive the industry. At that time, this germplasm resource from China had been preserved in the United States for 47 years.

Yuan Longping's hybrid rice saved 400 million Chinese from starving to death, thanks to the help of old varieties: a naturally existing male sterile rice made hybrid rice possible.

As a result, China has preserved the right to speak of rice seeds and is not controlled by others.

In 2013, a super typhoon hit the central Philippines, destroying coconut forests that farmers depend on and flooding large areas of rice fields. After the water receded, people were surprised to find that although the local varieties were out of harvest, there was still a small green rice field-the green super rice that was being tested stood tenaciously. This variety is from the project "cultivating Green Super Rice for Resource-poor areas in Africa and Asia" hosted by China.

This super rice also benefits from the rich variety of old rice varieties in China, so that scientists are able to gather high-quality rice genes and breed good seeds.

Shandong Agricultural University bred Shandong Zimai No. 1 by using farm varieties, which significantly increased the yield of wheat in Shandong. In Yuanyang County, Yunnan Province, experts isolated many strains from the roots and rhizosphere soil of local rice farm varieties "Moon Valley" and "Hongjiao Laojing", indicating that rice farmers in Yuanyang County have rich rhizosphere bacteria system, which can promote plant emergence and plant growth.

Think about the plot in the sci-fi movie Interstellar: drought and Fusarium wilt have wiped out crops such as wheat and okra, and corn, as a "doomsday crop", is dying, leaving mankind desperate. In fact, this plot is not whimsical.

Since the 21st century, there has been frequent news that crops have been affected by extreme weather.

For example, in 2009, Yunnan Province experienced a rare extreme climate-drought in winter and spring. In that year, Yunnan had abnormally little precipitation, high temperature and large evaporation, which led to continuous drought in many areas and affected 19.43 million mu of crops in the province, more than half of the sown area. Not only the agriculture in Yunnan was affected by the extreme weather, but also a severe drought occurred in the northern winter wheat region that year. At its worst, the area of crops affected by drought reached 161 million mu.

In the future, the earth's climate will be very unstable. Drought, high temperature, diseases and insect pests are putting more and more pressure on global grain production. Where will the earth's environment go in the future?

Modern agricultural breeding pursues high yield and disease resistance, which inevitably leads to the loss of some other high-quality genes, such as drought resistance. Seeds that lose their ability to resist drought become very vulnerable to natural disasters. Moreover, many new varieties have weak adaptability to the harsh environment, and often do not adapt to planting in barren and alpine areas.

While the old seed is different, the old seed is a variety formed by long-term natural or man-made selection under local natural or cultivated conditions. It is more adaptable to local soil and climatic conditions and has the ability to cope with climate change.

Will there come a day when human beings begin to look for traits that are resistant to drought and disease, only to suddenly find that plants with these genes have disappeared from the earth?

What should I do at this time?

To protect the old seeds is to preserve the genes for future breeding.

The old seed is the last hope to keep people alive.

In recent years, China has begun to attach importance to the collection and preservation of seed resources, especially old seed resources.

The Institute of crop Science of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences is conducting a 10-year national collection project to collect, preserve and store wild and local varieties in the national crop germplasm bank.

By the end of 2018, China had built 1 long-term bank of germplasm resources, 1 stock bank, 10 mid-term banks, 43 germplasm nurseries, 199 original habitat protection sites, 2114 long-term preserved species, and the total number of germplasm resources preserved exceeded 500000, ranking second in the world.