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to eat what they saw as their country’s future. Indeed, by the end of the siege in the spring of 1944, nine of the institute’s self-appointed seed guardians had died of starvation.
    Vavilov’s ideas have been modified in the years since. Today’s scientists consider the regions he mapped to be centers of diversity rather than of origin, because it isn’t clear whether the earliest domestication occurred there first. Yet Vavilov’s vision of these regions as the repositories of the genetic diversity upon which the future of our food depends is proving more prescient than ever.
    Today there are some 1,400 seed banks around the world. The most ambitious is the new Svalbard Global Seed Vault, set inside the permafrost of a sandstone mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen just 700 miles from the North Pole. Started by Cary Fowler in conjunction with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, the so-called doomsday vault is a backup for all the world’s other seed banks. Copies of their collections are stored in a permanently chilled, earthquake-free zone 400 feet above sea level, ensuring that the seeds will remain high and dry even if the polar ice caps melt.
    Fowler’s Global Crop Diversity Trust recently announced what amounts to a recapitulation of Vavilov’s worldwide seed-gathering expeditions: a ten-year initiative to scour the Earth for the last remaining wild relatives of wheat, rice, barley, lentils, and chickpeas in order to “arm agriculture against climate change.” The hope is that this mad-dash scramble will allow scientists to pass along the vital traits of these rugged relatives, such as drought and flood tolerance, to our vulnerable crop varieties.
    Still, storing seeds in banks to bail us out of future calamities is only a halfway measure. Equally worthy of saving is the hard-earned wisdom of the world’s farmers, generations of whom crafted the seeds and breeds we now so covet. Perhaps the most precious and endangered resource is the knowledge stored in farmers’ minds.
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    FORTY-YEAR-OLD Jemal Mohammed owns a five-acre, hillside farm outside the tiny hamlet of Fontanina in the Welo region of Ethiopia’s northern highlands. It is in the heart of one of the centers of diversity that Nikolay Vavilov visited on his 1926 expedition.
    Stepping foot on Mohammed’s land is like tumbling back in time to an ancient way of farming. His circular, thatched-roof hut with walls of dried mud and straw is the same dwelling that has dotted Ethiopia’s countryside for centuries. A pair of oxen lies to the right of the hut in the shade of a jacaranda tree. Three or four chickens strut across a bare front yard. His fields, tilled with an ox-drawn plough and planted by hand, are a jumble of crops: tomatoes, onions, garlic, cilantro, gourds, sorghum, wheat, barley, chickpeas, and teff, a grain used to make injera, a flatbread.
    The image of the traditional, small farmer’s life is one of simplicity. And yet compared with the mechanized operations of modern agriculture, Mohammed’s work is a dynamic and highly nuanced juggling act in the face of constant threats like drought, untimely downpours, and disease. He plants legumes and grain together to make the most of limited space. Such intercropping is also a natural way of fertilizing: The legumes growing at the base of the taller sorghum add nitrogen to the soil.
    Welo was one of the regions hit hardest by the devastating 1984 famine in Ethiopia that killed hundreds of thousands. The experience is still seared in Mohammed’s memory. He shows me a collection of hollowed-out gourds filled to the brim with what look to be colored pebbles. “I keep these stocks as my security, my backup,” he says, looking down at the gourd casks filled with what I now realize are seeds. He has seeds for all of the crops growing in his fields. Mohammed’s wife has rubbed the seeds in