WHEAT from Wales, barley from Belgium and chick peas from China are packed away in a climate-controlled room at Horsham.

They are among seeds from wild and domesticated plants around the globe housed at the seedbank nursery, run by the Department of Primary Industries.

The seedbank, known as the Australian Temperate Field Crops Collection, holds 34,000 different varieties, for future breeding.

Curator Bob Redden said the seeds could hold the key to feeding a growing global population into the future.

Bob said the seeds came from the Middle East, China, the Indian sub-continent and Europe.

He said while most were stored at 2C for up to 25 years, others were kept at -18C, to enable much longer survival, in a situation similar to the Arctic vault.

The seedbank, one of five collections in Australia, has one of the biggest national collections of brassica and legumes in the world.

Bob said genetic diversity was an important part of meeting the challenges of climate change.

"Improving the productivity of crop varieties relies on breeding programs having access to a varied gene pool," he said.

"The genetic diversity of these crops makes them a gold mine for plant breeding."

Bob said breeding plants to suit Australia's environment would ensure the nation had a reliable food source.

"In these gene pools there is enormous potential to deal with climatic stresses," he said.

Bob said since the 1960s, when modern crop varieties were introduced worldwide, the focus had been on breeding new varieties with market qualities, including cooking characteristics and increased yield.

Bob said the DPI was collecting, storing and analysing traditional varieties because of their diversity and their long evolution in many thousands of different ecological conditions dating from ancient crop distributions.

"In one crop, there may be thousands of different plant types which have adapted to these different local environments," he said.

"These varieties are rapidly being displaced by the more-profitable modern varieties."

He said all Australian field crops were imported species but crops in foreign, remote areas had seed lineages of up to 10,000 years.

"In the remote villages of China, the Middle East, South America and Europe, crops such as these still exist," Bob said.

"While yield may not always be high, the crops have been cultivated as a reliable food source, withstanding extreme temperatures, soil types and low rainfall."