Traditional seed-saving produced over 200,000 wheat varieties over nine millennia.

Evidence

Since at least 8000 B.C. Iraqi farmers have successfully grown wheat without this package in what is known today as the Fertile Crescent. Over the centuries, farmers cultivated the range of varieties essential to crop sustainability by saving seeds from thriving wheat plants one year and planting and cross-pollinating them with seeds of different strengths the following year. By using such practices, the crop continually improves and diversifies, partly through selection by experienced farmers, partly through plant evolution, partly through open pollination conducted by winds, insects, and animals. As late as 2002, writes ecologist Jeremy Smith, the Federal Accounting Office “estimated that 97 percent of Iraqi farmers” engaged in these practices, with the consequence “that there are now over 200,000 known varieties of wheat in the world.” — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 279

Categorization

• CANDY: Astonishing figure — 200,000 wheat varieties from undirected seed-saving — a great light conversation fact.
• XREF: Connects to Vandana Shiva’s work on seed saving and monoculture threats, a key companion to Brown’s argument.