A seed vault has been built in southern New South Wales to protect and store thousands of varieties of rice for up to 100 years.
The George Hulbert Seed Vault in the Department of Primary Industries’ warehouses at the Wagga Wagga Agricultural Institute is a temperature and humidity-controlled room designed to chill and dry the seeds.
Thousands of rare and unique species of rice will be stored in the state-of-the-art seed vault. (ABC Riverina: Conor Burke)
Plant pathologist Ben Ovenden said some species held in the vault were rare.
“We hold rice varieties in there that are unique and we know are held nowhere else in the world,” Dr Ovenden said.
Among the thousands of seeds secured in the vault are historic sushi rices from Japan, rice from the mountain regions of South Korea, and varieties that are no longer grown in Australia.
Dr Ben Ovenden said rice is intrinsically linked with culture and is the world’s “most important food source”. (ABC Riverina: Jess Scully)
The collection has been getting international attention, and Dr Ovenden said his team was recently contacted by rice growers in Hungary.
“[They] were looking for varieties lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union,” he said.
“We were able to assure them that yes, we did have their national heritage.”
Many of the varieties in the collection predate the Green Revolution, a moment in agriculture that saw plant breeding technology increase yields from crops.
Red rice growing the in the glasshouse. (ABC Riverina: Jess Scully)
Dr Ovenden said access to the intact DNA held in the vault could help solve modern agricultural issues.
“They might be genes that help rice adapt to climate change,” he said.
“There might be disease-resistant genes that we didn’t know we had and we didn’t know we needed.”
Dr Ovenden said an adjacent glasshouse was also set up so seeds could also be borrowed, grown, and replenished.
“You don’t want to have a library where the books sit on the shelf,” he said.
Investment for the future
Katherine Thomson, a scientist at the Australian PlantBank in the Australian Botanic Gardens, said storing seeds was an investment.
“Our valuable things are our seeds. We deposit them in our seed bank and then we withdraw them when we need to for the future,” Ms Thomson said.
Dr Hannah McPherson works with plant species in the Australian Botanic Gardens Herbarium in Sydney’s Mt Annan. (Supplied: Australian Botanic Gardens)
Hannah McPherson, who is the collections manager at the National Herbarium of NSW, said the preservation of flora was just as important as protecting fauna.
“We can really kind of get excited about saving a rare species of animal, but we forget that a rare species of plant can be just as exciting,” Dr McPherson said.
Tradesman Michael Westerdale can’t wait to try a rare rice variety grown from the seed vault’s collection. (ABC Riverina: Jess Scully)
For those building the Wagga Wagga vault its importance became clear as the project progressed.
Tradesman Michael Westerdale said building the facility was a far cry from his usual work constructing cool rooms.
“This is rice heritage, this is sleepless nights worrying to make sure it all works,” he said.
“It’s history. What more could you want to be a part of?”
