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A profile of Roger Chetelat, the director of the C.M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center at the University of California, Davis. Chetelat maintains one of the largest collections of tomato seeds in the world. Many of those seeds come from wild tomato species that Chetelat and his associates collect on field research trips to the dry coastal areas of Chile, Peru, and Ecuador. Wild tomatoes are tough, versatile organisms that have evolved resistance to virtually all common tomato diseases and pests and stubbornly tolerate extreme environmental conditions. Some boast extraordinarily high levels of sugars, beta carotene, vitamin C, lycopene, and antioxidants. Chetelat has dedicated his career to finding and preserving these genetic riches. Modern cultivated tomatoes are a frail, inbred lot. They all trace their origins to a single, wild tomato plant that underwent a random mutation sometime in prehistory. Because of this genetic fluke, that plant's fruits were plump, juicy, and many, many times larger than the output of its progenitors. Offspring from that tomato were taken away from the Andes and domesticated in what is present-day Mexico, becoming severed from their wild ancestors and the vast pool of genetic diversity that tomatoes had evolved over the millennia. Botanists call this a “bottleneck.” It leaves subsequent generations susceptible to disease and unable to adjust to rapid climate changes. The stored wild seeds at the Rick Center enable plant breeders to re-incorporate desirable wild traits into new tomato varieties, literally reconnecting them to their ancestral roots, ensuring that this vast reservoir of genetic diversity will be available when it is needed.

Red snappers in the Gulf of Mexico once hovered on the brink of extinction, their population having dropped to 2 percent of what had historically swum in the Gulf. But thanks to a recently introduced plan that turns the conventional wisdom of fisheries management on its head, the picture has begun to change. Called Individual Fishing Quotas (IFQs), the new regulations, which give a guaranteed allotment of fish to each participant instead of applying industry-wide quotas, went into effect for Gulf of Mexico Red Snapper (Lutjanus campechanus) in early 2007. The results were immediate and so profound that the Gulf Fishery Management Council voted earlier this year to increase the annual limit on red snapper to nearly 7 million pounds from 5 million.

Milk has always been susceptible to price fluctuations. Farmers are used to putting away money during good times to see themselves through lean times. Recently, however, the cycles have become more violent, with lows falling lower and highs rising not quite so high and the intervals between peaks and valleys shrinking. In 1970, when milk was bringing farmers the same amount that it is today, there were nearly 650,000 dairy farms in the United States. Now there are fewer than one tenth as many, only about 54,000. The largest 1 percent of dairy farms (a figure than includes only enormous factory farms with over 2,000 cows) produced nearly one quarter of the milk we consume. Recently, dairy farmers banded together to propose a radical solution to the dairy crisis. In order to survive, they concluded, American dairy farmers would have to join together to control the supply of milk, an approach along lines similar to the one taken in Canada.