At the same time, producers like Mr. Pérez are turning back toward traditional varieties.
Mrs. Singer sells only poppy, sesame and other traditional varieties -- and trouble.
Farmers worry that plants with tailor-made survival genes will over time displace tastier traditional varieties.
Farmers, enjoying vastly greater yields with the new hybrids, couldn't be expected to go back to planting the traditional varieties.
It's a movement committed to growing and saving heirloom seeds, traditional varieties that, in many cases, have only narrowly survived.
If it wasn't enough that traditional varieties are in danger of dying out as orchards make way for new developments, now there is a new problem.
His first catalogue was a twelve-page list of seventy-five traditional varieties that he had sown and collected on the family farm.
But recent research suggests that these new wheats have fewer minerals and vitamins than traditional varieties and more of the proteins that cause "leaky gut" type conditions.
While many traditional varieties such as the cox balance sweetness with acidity, newer cultivars such as the gala offer a purer sugar hit.
Financial, technology or media companies are more likely to buy modern versions, while construction firms and manufacturers tend to opt for cheaper, traditional varieties, he added.
To contaminate traditional varieties of crops is to contaminate the genetic reservoir of plants on which humanity has depended for most of its history.
