USDA Announces $180 Million Seed Sovereignty Initiative to Strengthen U.S. Agricultural Security

Today, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins announced a $180 million investment to launch the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Seed Sovereignty Initiative, a major effort to both strengthen U.S. agricultural security by protecting the plant genetic resources that underpin American agriculture and enable breakthroughs in U.S. agricultural innovation.

This initiative will provide much-needed investments in USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS), which houses more than 600,000 accessions representing over 16,000 species. Using this funding, USDA will sequence collections of major crops to unlock the tremendous potential of the plant genetic resources the United States holds and identify critical gaps.

Click here to view the original article from the United States Department of Agriculture.