Plant hereditary assets are plant hereditary materials of genuine or potential value. They portray the fluctuation inside plants that originates from human and regular choice over centuries. Their characteristic worth basically concerns rural yields. As indicated by the 1983 reconsidered International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), plant hereditary assets are characterized as the whole generative and vegetative conceptive material of species with conservative as well as social worth, particularly for the horticulture of the present and the future, with extraordinary accentuation on nourishing plants.

In the State of the World's Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (1998) the FAO characterized Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (PGRFA) as the decent variety of hereditary material contained in conventional assortments and present day cultivars just as harvest wild family members and other wild plant species that can be utilized now or later on for food and farming