224 US seed varieties just finished their Plant Variety Protection term: free list, plus what it doe

Breeders here sometimes ask whether a modern variety is "allowed" as a parent or to share around. I went through USDA's Plant Variety Protection status report (updated Sep 3, 2026) and pulled out every certificate whose 20-year term (25 for trees/vines) ended between Oct 2025 and Oct 2026. There are 224.

What's in it: 52 common wheats, 36 lettuces, 25 soybeans, 22 cottons, 21 field corns, 8 triticales, 7 common beans, 6 oats, plus forage and turf grasses (tall fescue 'Blackwatch', USDA's wheatgrass 'Beefmaker'). Lettuces like 'Malawi' and 'Rubicon' could be interesting for anyone breeding lettuce.

What expiry does NOT change:
- Saving seed to replant on your own farm was always allowed under PVP (7 U.S.C. § 2543). Selling it for planting wasn't; that's the part expiry frees up.
- Brand names stay trademarked. Only the variety name is freed.
- Some of these (especially soybean, corn, cotton) may still be under utility patents or bag-tag licenses.
- USDA itself says it "cannot guarantee the accuracy" of its status data. My dates are calculated from the issue date plus the term.
- Not legal advice. Check with USDA's PVP Office before selling seed.

Disclosure: I built the free searchable list at https://public-variety-watch.netlify.app. I'm gauging whether a paid monthly "newly expired" alert is worth building. I'm happy to answer questions here, and I'd welcome corrections.

This is very cool information to be presenting. It's hard for me to imagine how you monetize it. Who do you envision paying for it? It seems more likely to be a valuable draw of traffic to a site with several additional elements of interest for breeders, but I'm not sure I know enough about the market to even judge.

This is a nice compilation and I did recognize some of the varieties. Glenn wheat and Esker oats, for instance. I am just starting to learn about different grain varieties, protected and open source (beyond variety protection). I see this database as a possible valuable tool for growers and adding more past years before October 2025 would remind us of some older varieties. So much time, money and effort goes into the development of a new variety and the 20-year protection is certainly warranted. What is becoming quite important is finding a variety that does well on your farm and in your climate. May be quite an old variety that is still available but lost in the shuffle of modern promotion and the latest and greatest craze.

Roughrider hard red winter wheat is an example of variety staying power, made available by NDSU in 1976.  https://washingtoncrop.com/documents/Archives-Wheat/RoughRider.pdf
As I understand it, Roughrider was a gamechanger in getting hard red winter wheat to survive the winters farther north in the US. This variety is still being grown locally because the milling quality is favored by bakers. My organic certifier, MOSA, has said about organic seed. If you have a variety that does well on your farm, we consider it organic. This is now part of my quest, to find varieties I can grow and save seed for future use. May be used for cover crop seed or grain production. It's really handy to have seed on hand when the conditions present themselves to take advantage of a window.

Here is something else to consider. A variety released 20 years ago may not have been suitable for a particular climate. Average length of the growing season has been increasing here, some of these older varieties may now be a perfect fit.