As we have come to edepend on a handful of commercial varieties of fruits and vegtable, thousands of heirloom varieties have disappeared. It's hard to know exactly how many have been lost over the past century, but a study conducted in 1983 by the Rural Advancement Foundation gave a clue to the scope of the problem. It compared USDA listing of dseed varities sold by commercial US seed houses in 1903 with those in the US National Seed Storage Laboratory in 1983. The survey, which inlcude 66 crops, found that babotu 93 pecent of the varieties had gone extinct. More up-to-date studies are needed.
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