Bringing landraces back home, 50 years later

Back in 1966-67, researcher Ángel Kato from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) collected 93 maize landraces samples from 66 families in Mexico’s state of Morelos. These seeds were safeguarded in CIMMYT’s Germplasm Bank, which today stores 28,000 samples of maize and its wild relatives from 88 countries. 50 years later, the descendants of those donor farmers were able to get back their ancestral maize seeds and, with them, a piece of their family history.