This is the Tom Hartman program.

Crop diversity is at risk and there are some just extraordinary people out there working

to, in a way, save the world.

This is an absolutely remarkable story.

Barry Bongland is with us, technical specialist with the Global Crop Diversity Trust, based

out of Bonn, Germany, CropTrust.org is the website.

And Barry, welcome to the program.

Good morning, Tom Hartman.

Thanks so much for joining us.

I've read this story about how these wild seed collectors are going around the world so

far you've collected 370 different varieties of seeds in order to deal with the lack of

genetic diversity in our seed crops that makes them vulnerable to climate change.

Can you explain that?

Yes, we collected 371 species and soft species of wild relatives.

So this is a global effort to rescue endangered Crop wild relatives by collecting them from

the wild, conserving them and preparing them for use in pre-breeding.

And this particular part of the project is lasted for six years.

But it is important to note that this is part of a bigger 10-year project that was funded

by the Norwegian government and it is aimed at adapting agriculture to climate change.

We call it, in short, the Crop wild relatives project.

Some of the stories that I saw collectors in Nepal traveling on elephants to wore off

tigers and rhinos and they found a species of wild rice that's resistant to bacterial

...