We promote the use of these ancient crops and their wild relatives by gathering, safeguarding, and distributing their seeds, while sharing benefits with traditional communities. We also work to preserve knowledge about their uses. Both are essential in our efforts to restore the earth. The loss, in human terms, is equally severe.
Traditional farmers are a stabilizing force in many Native American communities.
They conserve historic seeds adapted to local conditions, keep traditional agricultural and culinary practices alive, donate crops for ceremonies and feast days, and feed extended families from their fields. We are as concerned about the loss of ecological relationships, the traditions of humans and plants evolving together, as we are about the extinction of a single species. When peoples sustained by agriculture lose their agricultural traditions, their survival as a culture may also be at risk. For many Native American tribes in the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico, these relationships are being severed and destroyed.