how are wild varities of crops important?give a few examples.?

Question

crops

Answer 1

Agriculture today is primarily monoculture. That is, we grow very few varieties of corn, soybeans, wheat, etc. Farmers grow what the market dictates. Apples are a good example. Hundreds of varieties exist, but only a few - selected for customer appeal and shipping/storage ability - are grown commercially: Macintosh, Red Delicious, Granny Smith and one or two more. The same is true for most commercial crops.

Now, what if a disease, say, a virus, were to affect one of these crops? Remember the Irish potato blight in the 19th century? When that happens, we need to have a wild gene pool available where we can find a blight-resistant strain. Fortunately, many varieties of potato still grow in South America. Since this is not true for all crops, recently somewhere in Europe (Scandinavia or the Netherlands, I forget exactly) a gene bank has been set up to grow and preserve antique or "heirloom" cultivars.

Home gardeners have access to heirloom seeds through certain seed companies and organizations like Seed Savers Exchange. These old-fashioned seeds were grown for qualities we favor and selected for, like flavor - as opposed to uniformity, shape, size, or firmness to withstand shipping.

GMO (genetically modified) crops are a recent nightmare unleashed in America...but that's an answer to a separate question.

Answer 2

Years ago I worked at an agricultural experiment
station in a division that specialized in tomatoes.
One of the diseases that affects tomatoes is
tobacco mosaic virus. A wild variety of tomato
from South America is resistant to this virus. One
of the aims of the work I was involved in was to
get this genetic resistance into the cultivated
tomato. It wasn't working because the wild and
the cultivated tomato wouldn't hybridize. Now, with
molecular techniques the gene from the wild
tomato could probably be inserted into the
cultivated tomato fairly easily. This is what some
people, as you other answerer, call the "nightmare"
of genetic engineering. There is no reason to
refer to it as a nightmare. It is scarcely different
from what people have been doing for thousands
of years by selective breeding of plants and
animals. The only possible drawback is the
possibility that the plasmids now used to carry the
foreign gene into a new organism may also carry
something that is not wanted. This is a technical
problem to which a solution can probably be found
without much trouble.