A Bengaluru seed keeper and Meghalaya schools are holding on to rare vegetables

Two practical efforts in India are trying to keep unusual vegetables from slipping out of daily use. Mongabay published the account on October 29, 2026, drawing on reporting by Sharmila Vaidyanathan for Mongabay India. Markets have narrowed around hybrids. Indigenous crops such as the clove bean and the Yerengere white long eggplant have largely vanished from commercial shelves.

In Bengaluru, natural farmer Prabhakar Rao, founder of Hariyalee Seeds, conserves hundreds of heirloom varieties. He told the reporters that people are eating the same few vegetables and that the loss of variety is happening under the radar. A paper in PNAS in July compiled 1,482 vegetable species and said the true count of local and wild kinds is higher. About 24 percent of the wild relatives of 79 major vegetable species are at risk of extinction. Lead author Maarten van Zonneveld, who heads the gene bank at the International Potato Center in Lima, said many of those species are missing from national and international gene banks, and that the point of saving them is to keep using them.

In Meghalaya, the North East Society for Agroecology Support has put underused wild and regional vegetables into meals at 26 schools. Globally, the WorldVeg Genebank holds more than 65,000 samples, and the Crop Trust has named "opportunity crops" for a harder climate. Colin Khoury of the Crop Trust told Mongabay the task is to prioritize vegetables and to back the small growers and supply lines that can move food that does not look identical. The Bengaluru collection and the 26 school kitchens are the concrete pieces. The species counts describe the wider loss. They are not a harvest figure for this season.