In my view it is extremely important to grow and preserve our Heirloom varieties of edibles, they have much greater lifeforce than the hybrids. Plus only they breed true so that you can save your own seed and depend upon the fact that what you think you planted is in fact, what you can expect to harvest.
..And there's another very pressing problem too, the attempts of megaseed, megafert corps trying to patent the entire genome of a species, say, Broccoli!
I spent *years* going to ag conferences talking about this issue to anyone who would listen!