Seen from the air, the USDA National Clonal Germplasm Repository for Tree Fruit, Nut Crops and Grapes is a tidy, unremarkable, roughly 70-acre patchwork of varying shades of green and brown. From the ground, it’s a lush, hot, endless expanse of tangled vineyards and sun-blasted groves, alive with chirping birds and buzzing. It contains two each of hundreds of species that are or have been relevant to California’s agriculture — as well as those crops’ wild ancestors — and has been called a bank, a backup, a living history, an ark. As climate change increasingly wipes out the fruits and nuts we eat today, this place, says Dylan Burge, a botany curator at the California Academy of Sciences, is where we’ll turn for help.
Almonds, apricots, cherries, figs, grapes, kiwi, olives, peaches, pistachios, plums, pomegranates, walnuts: The repository’s list adds up to 253 taxa and so much mouth-watering diversity that a 30-foot stroll will net you five kinds of plums. But as anyone who’s grown mealy peaches from a promising pit may suspect, this incredible richness can’t be protected by saving seeds. The only way to replicate these crops is to do an end-run around cross-pollination by clonally propagating them: by planting a live, healthy cutting. For cultivated fruits and nuts not backed up by living collections, gone from our farms means gone from the world.
California’s $17.2 billion fruit and nut industry may look too big to fail, but climate change-driven increases in temperature, drought, flooding, and disease aren’t just coming for this mostly Mediterranean climate; they’re already here. The near future is predictably grim: A 2009 UC Davis study concluded, “Areas…for growing walnuts, pistachios, peaches, apricots, plums and cherries are likely to almost completely disappear by the end of the 21st century. For…apples, cherries and pears, very few locations with safe chilling levels were found to exist today, and…virtually none will exist by mid-century.” That’s a big threat to food security (California fruit and nuts account for
more than half of the nation’s tonnage), and the main reason this repository is worth caring about.
http://modernfarmer.com/2014/09/beautiful-best-chance-save-tree-fruits-nuts-grapes/