I called John Preece at UC Davis about a month ago and he told me that UC Davis will no longer send fig cuttings or any plant materials to individuals not associated with a research university/institution. This is obviously incredibly disconnected with the fact that hundreds of non university affiliated individuals receive cuttings from UC Davis every year. Why would he say something like this and has anyone else heard anything like this? Maybe he was having a bad day?

Jeffrey,

We no longer have the resources to send cuttings out to everybody who orders them. Congress mandates that we serve the scientific and research communities and we, for many years were able to serve everybody. We became too popular and were so overwhelmed last year that we were still sending out cuttings in July that were harvested the previous December, so they were most likely dead. I cannot try to do more than what I have labor to cover and that is what happened last year. It is important to put these staff resources into care and management of the precious collection and that has suffered as we tried to handle an incredibly quickly growing number of orders. They quadrupled in the last 5 years.

You will have to go to nurseries to get this material now because we do not have the staff to fill so very may orders.

People who require genetic diversity as a portion of their research to improve our crops to keep us all healthy is the reason that the collection exists, so we try to serve them.

We are very sorry to not be able to fill your order. We wish that we could, but we just don’t have enough staff for all of these orders from the general public.

John

John E. Preece, Ph.D.
Supervisory Research Leader/Horticulturist
National Clonal Germplasm Repository, Davis, CA and
National Arid Land Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Parlier, CA
USDA-ARS

Davis office:

Physical Location:
3201 Straloch Road
Davis, CA 95616

Mailing address:
National Clonal Germplasm Repository
One Shields Avenue
University of California
Davis, CA 95616-8607
Office: 530-752-7009
Cell: 321-412-3717
Fax: 530-752-5974
John.Preece@ars.usda.gov
http://www.ars-grin.gov/dav

The letter seems pretty straightforward and understandable to me.  I have never gotten cuttings from them but I think others have posted on UC Davis restricting cutting distribution within the past year or two.  It is unfortunate though.  

UCdavis is having some financial difficulties.
The pepper spraying of protesters did not help.
The new dean is spending millions on P.R.
The money had to come from somewhere, some programs were bound to be cut.

The budget has a lot to do with it. Many things have been cut and fig cuttings are part of it, unfortunately.

Seems like a fair response from them. Fortunately lots of sellers out there with many varieties...

It's a fair response and there are plenty of people on this forum that can provide more diversity than UC Davis.

I received cuttings from them 3-4 years ago. Many varieties I have given away. I say let them focus on doing what they are mandated to do and let us hobbyists serve each other

There's nothing too special about the offerings at UC Davis.

There's Jon in January/February

Harvey sells a ton of different varieties.

Look out in November and several folks here offer up cuttings.

Leave the hard working folks at UC Davis focus on supplying cuttings to people that legitimately need them. Figs are so easy to root and share with one another I'm not sure why they are bothering with it at all?

First of all, John Preece is with USDA which leases some property from UC Davis to maintain the repository.  At fruit tastings I've attended several times John has made the point that they are federal USDA employees and not part of UC Davis.  This has nothing to do with any budget matters of UC Davis (though I don't believe there's a problem there either).

I think John first mentioned the change in policy at a fruit tasting last May or June which I did not attend.  It's simply due to the fact that requests kept getting higher and higher and that it was taking more and more staff time to fulfill all of the requests.  Their primary mission is to acquire and preserve material and secondly to be a source of material for research.  Many people made use of their service simply because it was free.  Personally, I've donated material to USDA at Davis and I know Jon and Bass have also.  Late last year I ordered some fig varieties for distribution through CRFG chapters and that's the sort of route that the Davis office wants to focus.

I heard several years ago how the USDA's budget had been relatively flat yet they had acquired more and more varieties and I had volunteered to help however they could use me.  They did have me help on an experimental pomegranate grafting project once, though I don't know that really saved them any money.

In a fig industry meeting John made a comment to me that I had probably already gleaned what I wanted from Wolfskill.  In reality, maybe 8-10 of the 300+ varieties I have came from there.  Like others have said, there are many other sources for fig cuttings.