As part of OSA’s work with the USDA Transition to Organic Partnership Program, we have been revisiting our library of educational content to identify small but powerful clips that can help support and inspire seed growers along their organic journey.
Below, explore short highlights from OSA-led webinars and conference presentations that address pressing seed production and plant breeding issues—from managing greenhouse disease risks and navigating variety releases to building practical pedigree breeding systems. The embedded YouTube videos start at beginning of quoted clip, but we encourage you to watch the full recordings if you’re interested. For those who prefer audio formats or have limited internet connectivity in the field, we’ve also created two complete presentation recordings from the 2025 Organic Seed Growers Conference that are deep-dives into participatory plant breeding and organic tomato variety development.
Breeding for the Future: Widespread Management Changes Influence Breeding Project Goals
“There are also opportunities when management changes occur. There’s a lot of interest right now in no-till in organic vegetable production, particularly responding to climate stress—heavy rains in the spring making it difficult to get in there and plant—and more farmers are interested in no-till systems.
Well, a lot of our varieties, even the ones that have been developed in organic systems, have not been developed for no-till systems. And so that is an opportunity for breeders that really want to look at an emerging management system that, in 10 years, will probably be much more important, with many more farmers adopting those techniques.
Thinking as a breeder, you really need to be looking 5 or 10 years out and saying, ‘Okay, what are the management changes that we’re seeing that I could start working on to target a new variety to that particular system?‘”
Plant Breeding Prerequisites: Creativity and Passion
“I do have formal training as a plant breeder from UW-Madison, but I don’t want anybody in this audience to think that that is the track you have to go down to be a plant breeder. The only real prerequisite for being a plant breeder is an interest in being creative with plants and letting that passion lead you to explore and experiment.
Thankfully, today there are a lot of different resources and communities of people that you can connect with and learn about thanks to places just like OSA that weren’t available when I was just getting interested in plant breeding.“
How Seedborne Diseases Spread From One Generation to the Next
“When I talk to people about seedborne diseases, the assumption is that that means every seed in that seed lot is contaminated. But usually, seedborne diseases are inefficient, so usually you’re talking 2% or less of the seed lot has the pathogen in the seed.
Well, that’s good news, but when we’re raising transplants in a greenhouse and they’re all—you see the photo there—they’re all close together, they’re all wet, they’re watered from overhead, the disease can spread very quickly. So, even if it’s only 2%, it can be much higher than that and spread in the greenhouse very quickly.“
Why the Kernza® Brand is Protected Through an Identity Preserved Program
“The Land Institute, which is a non-profit, is developing a perennial wheat variety called Kernza. This one they released publicly; they published it in the Journal of Plant Registration, and then they trademarked the name and licensed it with an identity-preserved program.
That really ensures that people know what to expect when they purchase Kernza. The identity-preserved program says that anybody who uses that name has to grow the variety under a certain set of conditions.
Tessa Peters, who I talked to from The Land Institute, said that ‘The Land Institute has a historical tie to the idea that we shouldn’t be the sole owners of these technologies—the goal is perennials on the landscape—but we owe it to our collaborators and all of our growers that the brand name means something.
So, for them, the trademark with an identity-preserved program was a way to add value to the variety without restricting others from iterating on it, too.“
Growing for Grain vs. Growing for Seed: Differences in Processing Techniques
“Kernza can be pretty fragile. When we work with grain producers, we tell them to thresh it really hard because we want as much clean, pre-threshed seed as possible. When we work with seed producers, we tell them the exact opposite: baby it, don’t thresh it very hard, and make sure that you’re taking really good care.
Because what can happen is that it’s a very long, thin seed; you can break the germ off, and then it won’t germinate well.“
Tracking Plant Breeding Pedigree with a Standardized Naming System
“When I start off in the year 2016, this is how I label things and track them rather than names. It helps with sorting the data on Excel spreadsheets and writing things down in the field, rather than if I named it and kept that name. It’s more writing; it sounds funny, but it’s more space on the tags and more things you have to do.
For example, this was the fourth hybrid in 2016, so I named it 16-H04. I grew that out, and I selected plant 18, so that is represented as 16-H04-18. Grow that one out next year, I select four, and it’s 16-H04-18-4.
What this allows me to do is track over time where something originated and what path it’s going. If I lose seed or have a problem with a generation, I can go back to that family, look at it, and keep it going.
That’s basically how I set up my tracking for a line, since I’m doing all pedigree-method. This is overly simplified, but I was just trying to give you an idea of how I go about using those numbers to do it.“
Segmented Seed Contract Payments Distribute Risk Between Buyers and Growers
“The contract also includes different payment options for growers, between growers and seed companies.
The first option is a balloon payment, which is kind of the more traditional payment option where the grower is paid for seed on delivery of the seed crop to the seed company.
But it also includes an option for segmented payment. That’s where the grower receives different parts of their payment at different points in the process. So maybe at the cultivation point there’s a segmented payment, at the harvesting point there might be a segmented payment, and then again at the delivery of the seed crop there might be another segmented payment.
The point of this option is to look at how we can spread financial risk out more fairly between a seed grower and a seed company, and how to make seed contracts fair for seed growers.”
Threat of Natural Disasters Underscores the Urgent Need to Steward Biodiversity
“This is when it got really real for us. Back in 2020, there was a giant fire a few miles away from our farm, and we ended up having to evacuate every seed off of our farm across the valley and cross our fingers that our entire situation didn’t burn to the ground.
Fortunately, the fire stayed away, and we kept going back wearing gas masks to harvest the seed during that time of year when you have to keep harvesting seed in the smoke. But it really brought it home that we have no idea what’s going to happen. We think that climate’s changing in a particular way; it might be better, it might be worse, it’s probably going to be really hard to adapt to either way.
So, it’s one of those things that this really made us believe that we need to start working on biodiversity for the future as much as possible now.“
Collaborative Plant Breeding Offers Opportunities for People of All Experience Levels to Participate in Shaping Their Food System
“We joined the NOVIC program in the second cycle, and I was like, ‘Finally, I get to use this graduate degree, right? I’m not just an overeducated farmer; I can do something with this.’
So, we started running variety trials. We would get the different varieties—sometimes they would provide us with the plants, and sometimes we would grow them out and we would put them out into the field.
For my first round, I remember it was sweet peppers; Italian sweet peppers were the rage at that time, this was probably 2018. I was like, ‘By golly, I’m going to do a randomized complete block design. I’m going to take yield data per-plant and ripening dates. Then I’m going to take it to my son’s middle school classroom, and we’re going to do a full-on blind taste test and collect data.’
And for real, I did that, and I’ve never done it again. Because it’s a lot of work, right? But I wanted the data, and to this day we still grow the number-one red Italian sweet pepper that we generated data from in that trial.
The thing is, you don’t have to do that as a farmer engaged in participatory plant breeding.”
Adapting Seed Varieties to Organic Conditions Can Take Years, Depending on Crop Biology and Environmental Stressors
“So, in terms of having certified organic seed, that’s right. And if you’re talking about whether a seed variety is adapted for organic practice and production, it’ll take longer. It’ll take longer, and it’ll honestly depend on the kind of pressures you’re putting on the seed as it’s growing out.
I’ve got terrible soil, so those varieties are under real severe pressure, which means it’s going to winnow out the losers fast. And it also depends on how quickly, how much those genes mix. Something like wheat, which is self-pollinated, you don’t get a lot of genetic drift from one plant to the other in one generation, which is why the researcher I spoke to said that it’s going to take maybe 10–15 years before you’ve really got a blend of those genetics.”
Audio Recordings from the 2025 Organic Seed Growers Conference
Lessons from Tomato Selection and Breeding
Speakers: Ambar Carvallo Lopez, Marissa Nix, Keith Mueller and Erica Kempter
Organic farmers often depend on conventional seeds due to the scarcity of organic varieties that meet their needs for disease resistance, high yields, and superior fruit quality. This session will explore two participatory tomato breeding projects that involve farmers, chefs, and seed companies. One project was initiated with farmers to identify desirable traits, while the other was driven by a small seed company aiming to develop new varieties that farmers would value. Both projects employed an iterative process of on-station and on-farm participatory selection, which has culminated in the development of four outstanding tomato varieties that are now nearing commercialization. Presenters will discuss their participatory breeding methods, highlighting the integral role of farmer, chef, and seed company collaboration, and discuss the challenges encountered, including managing diverse stakeholder expectations and ensuring genetic diversity. Learn how this model can not only advance the availability of high-quality organic tomato seed, but also set a precedent for inclusive and responsive agricultural research, fostering resilience and sustainability in organic farming communities.
Participatory Plant Breeding: Insights & Experiences
Speakers: Brise Tencer, Beth Hoinacki, and Pryor Garnett
Participatory plant breeding, where farmers and breeders collaborate to develop the best crop varieties, is thriving in the northwest. Programs focused on organic vegetables, small grains and other specialty crops are well-established and successfully working toward crop improvement, but what is it like to be a farmer who works within a participatory program? This panel features organic farmers, including Beth Hoinacki of Goodfoot Farm and Pryor Garnett of Garnetts Red Prairie Farm, collaborating with breeders on participatory plant breeding projects. They will share their experiences, challenges, and benefits of working with researchers to improve crop varieties. Attendees will gain insights into how collaborative breeding impacts on-farm productivity and supports organic seed systems. This session is geared towards farmers, organic seed industry professionals, researchers, and undergraduate and graduate students.
Note: Audio files may be downloaded for offline listening by clicking the three dots next to the speaker icon.
This event is supported through the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Transition to Organic Partnership Program (TOPP). TOPP is a program of the USDA Organic Transition Initiative and is administered by the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) National Organic Program (NOP).
