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The timeline can be navigated with the “Scroll Left” and “Scroll Right” buttons or by dragging the pointer to a date on the timeline waveform (located at the bottom of the screen on the desktop version and on the left of the screen on mobile). To filter by a particular topic and see a smaller section of the data, make a selection on the dropdown “Filters” menu or click “Search” to do a keyword search. Hover over the abbreviated filter tags in the blue boxes to see the complete name of the filter, or click a filter to display all the data with this tag. If you want to take a deeper dive into a specific topic by viewing a narrative essay page and a curated timeline, click on “Stories.”

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United States Department of Agriculture is founded for collection and distribution of seeds.

1862

The Story of The Patenting of Life
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The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is created to standardize the distribution of seeds. Prior to this, seeds were brought to the U.S. by immigrant farmers or stolen from tribal nations. The USDA is formed to meet trade agreements, send seeds to farmers for free, and encourage farmers to create hybrid strains. All of these activities are now centralized in a federal department for the first time.