Fred Pearce, “one of Britain’s finest science writers” according to Wikipedia, justified that assessment with what was really quite a good piece on Pavlovsk yesterday. Unlike others, he got everything pretty much right. Well, almost everything. Pavlovsk is not, of course, a seed bank, as the title of the piece suggests, but that mistake is probably down to a subeditor at The Guardian. Particularly impressive was how he tracked down an old report from a USDA germplasm scientist who visited the place in 1975. ((There is in fact also another USDA report online which mentions Pavlovsk.)) I’ll leave you with a nice quote:
Crop diversity has always been the Cinderella of conservation, even though the hundreds of thousands of crop varieties bred by farmers and scientists over several millennia represent a hugely important resource.