A documentary produced between 2018 and 2019 by Fábio Freitas, a researcher at Embrapa Genetic Resources and Biotechnology, has recently hit 2 million views on YouTube. The film entitled Casa do Kukurro [House of Kukurro] depicts a traditional method to plant cassava practiced by families of the Waurá ethnicity, who live in Alto Xingu, Mato Grosso, Brazil. According to Freitas, for those indigenous people, Kukurro is the spirit who owns the cassava, which is embodied in the shape of a caterpillar that feeds from the plant's leaves. For those people, the spirit looks after the croplands and gives the plants strength to grow more vigorously. The house of Kukurro is formed by building different mounds or ditches, where all the varieties managed by the farmer are gathered in a sort of “castle” to host the spirit of cassava. “Their belief is that the practice strengthens the energy of the plants they grow. In evolutionary terms, grouping different varieties helps their recombination, increasing the chances of the emergence of new varieties”, Freitas asserts and explains that the house of Kukurro works like a mini gene bank. “It is interesting because cassava has vegetative propagation, that is, it is a clone: a piece of a cassava plant (cutting) is placed on the earth and a new plant rises, except that it is genetically the same as the original one. But how can we explain such a large cassava diversity if it is vegetatively propagated?”, the researcher questions. For him, the house of Kukurro can be one of the explanations. “They gather all the kinds of cassava they have there. In addition, they recognize and use plants that grow from the seeds in their plots, an unusual occurrence, and thus any new type of cassava that may come to be is assessed; if that new variety is interesting, it is integrated into the collection”, he observes. Check the full documentary here.