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Maize evolution under domestication is a process that continues today. Case studies suggest that Mexican smallholder family farmers, known as campesinos, contribute importantly to this, but their significance has not been explicitly quantified and analysed as a whole. Here, we examine the evolutionary and food security implications of the scale and scope under which campesinos produce maize. We gathered official municipal-level data on maize production under rainfed conditions and identified campesino agriculture as occurring in municipalities with average yields of less than or equal to 3 t ha⁻¹. Environmental conditions vary widely in those municipalities and are associated with a great diversity of maize races, representing 85.3% of native maize samples collected in the country. We estimate that in those municipalities, around 1.38 × 10¹¹ genetically different individual plants are subjected to evolution …