Manzanita Cooperative Information

Manzanita is developing new crops to diversify our food supply by applying modern scientific breeding and crop development techniques to the untapped resource of drought tolerant western native plants. We are using gene-informed rapid breeding to develop new commercial crops from the under-utilized native foods of California and the west. Half the crops grown commercially across the world are native to the Americas, but the more drought tolerant native crops of the west are dramatically under-represented. That’s a missed opportunity in a world that is getting hotter and drier.