Genebank details

The Margot Forde Germplasm Centre (MFGC) is the national forage genebank of New Zealand, and is currently headquartered in the north and south of the country at Palmerston North and Lincoln.

The MFGC was named after well-known collector and curator Margot Forde in 1992. It currently houses more than 160,000 temperate forage accessions belonging to around 2,500 species (a large portion of these are breeders’ lines).

Data on over 3,600 temperate forage accessions is currently available in Genesys. This represents two major forage species, Lolium perenne and Trifolium repens, as well as Trifolium occidentale, a proposed ancestor of Trifolium repens (Williams et al., 2012).

Accessions of these species have been collected by staff from the MFGC and related organisations during the past 80 years.