Seed sharing rescues a crop and leads to new pest-resistant technology. Haitian sorghum crop now viable due to molecular marker discovery supported by 50 years of research. A research team supported by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research on Sorghum and Millet (SMIL) helped rescue the cereal crop, sorghum, with fifty years of global research and new technology. The recent evolutionary rescue of a staple crop depended on over half a century of global germplasm exchange.