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Trump signs order seeking to end federal funding for NPR and PBS; NY immigrant wrongfully sent to El Salvador 'supermax' prison; PA 'Day of Action' planned for higher minimum wage, immigrants' rights; New bill in Congress seeks to overturn CA animal welfare law.

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National Security Advisor Mike Waltz is leaving that job to become UN ambassador, bipartisan Arizona poll finds Latino voters dissatisfied by Trump's first 100 days, and Florida mass deportations frighten community members.

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Rural students who face hurdles going to college are getting noticed, Native Alaskans may want to live off the land but obstacles like climate change loom large, and the Cherokee language is being preserved by kids in North Carolina.

Crops at risk in VA, U.S. as Trump fires seed bunker employees

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Thursday, April 24, 2025   

Working without fanfare, federal scientists at 22 U.S. sites maintain the nation's agricultural plant species collected since 1898. But the Trump administration's DOGE agency has fired them. The move creates uncertainty for hundreds of crop species that undergird the country's food system.

The U.S. National Plant Germplasm System safeguards the genetic diversity of agriculturally important plants. Professor Iago Hale at the University of New Hampshire says the potential loss of these "seed bunkers" should alarm every American.

"If you subsist totally on chicken nuggets and KFC, that's fine; understand that that comes back to plants grown in the field. The breading on your fried chicken, the French fries that you're eating - these are all products of crops, and this is how it works," Hale said.

In 1920, wilt and blight threatened the Virginia spinach industry. Genes resistant to those diseases were collected in a Manchurian spinach found 20 years earlier by a researcher. Today, those genes are found in almost every multi-disease resistant spinach.

A court order has temporarily reinstated some of the 300 scientists who worked for the Germplasm System, but it's unclear when their work will resume - putting 600,000 genetic lines of some 200 crop species in jeopardy.

Hale says the system is central to the nation's preparedness, because the food system is only as safe as our ability to respond to the next plant disease. Unless dormant seeds are continually cared for and periodically replanted, Hale noted the lines will die, along with their evolutionary history. He added that potatoes, the nation's fourth-largest crop, require even more care than wheat or corn.

"They're not maintained as seed, they're maintained as potatoes - it's a clonally propagated crop, and there is no long-term storage for those things," he explained. "So, the nation's entire potato collection has to be grown out every year - has to be regenerated every year, without fail, or it will die. And the potato season has been disrupted."

Hale said apples also must be maintained as living plants in the open field and scientists follow strict requirements to sustain genetic purity. He notes that in the 1980s, scientists at a gene bank in New York helped identify genetic traits that made apples resistant to several destructive diseases, including deadly fire blight.


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