County could help preserve all livestock breeds on Earth.

Maybe you’re the kind of discerning consumer who’s turned up your nose at Thanksgiving turkey; your foodie streak leaves you uninspired by insipid white meat, or your environmental leaning cautions you against eating mass-produced poultry. Instead, perhaps you’ve tried a heritage turkey from a farmers market, getting more flavor and more eco cred.

The United Nations is right there with you. Industrialized agriculture has led to a shrinking diversity of crops—and also of livestock varieties, like those heritage birds.

“Genetic diversity is under threat,” Jacques Diouf, then the director-general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization wrote in a 2007 report from Rome, announcing an initiative to preserve that biodiversity. “Often, the unbridled industrialization of agriculture discards heritage plants and animals, ecological resources, and with them centuries of old knowledge.”

Those centuries of knowledge might be bound for Monterey County with an educational center and cryogenic DNA bank on the former Fort Ord.

In the decade since the UN report, a nonprofit in Lexington, Kentucky, has begun the process of assembling what will be like the animal equivalent of a seed bank: A cryogenic bank of livestock cells will preserve the genetics, while a separate educational project will demonstrate the ecological value of diverse species on the landscape (using live animals, not their DNA).

That organization, the World Heritage Animal Genomic Repository and Veterinary Institute is hoping to set up shop in Fresno and Monterey counties.

Institute President Lucinda Christian will visit potential sites on the former Fort Ord March 1-3, scoping out the feasibility of locating a biosecure facility here. She’ll meet with county Economic Development Director Dave Spaur and Christina McGinnis, who runs the environmental programs division of the Agricultural Commissioner’s office.

They’ll take Christian to tour a 68-acre parcel north of Laguna Seca on Barloy Canyon Road. (It’s a property still owned by the U.S. Army, scheduled to be transferred to the county in 2017; the county could consider leasing it to the institute.)

Christian declined an interview at this early stage of the vetting process, but writes by email about her interest in this area: “Our organization is a biodiversity conservation organization and the Monterey area is historically an agricultural area with demonstrated commitment to conservation.”

The UN’s 2007 report tallied 7,616 livestock breeds on the globe. In the six years prior to that report, 62 breeds went extinct – nearly one a month.

The idea of a genetic livestock vault is different than the type of research institutions (mostly marine science-focused) Spaur has envisioned in the past for developing the former Fort Ord, but he still thinks the idea has potential: “We think it could fit,” he says.