Welcome to the Organic Seed Partnership

The Organic Seed Partnership is a collaborative effort of universities, government agencies, non-profits, and vegetable growers working to make organic vegetable varieties more available to all. For the next four years we have funding as part of NOVIC to continue this mission.

This project is a collaborative effort of Oregon State University, University of Wisconsin, USDA- ARS, PGRU (Geneva, NY), Cornell University and Organic Seed Alliance (Washington) and will help continue and expand organic vegetable breeding and outreach.

• Creating a national network of organic vegetable breeders working with each other and regional growers to benefit the organic community with improved vegetable varieties that are adapted to organic systems combined with disease resistance, nutritional and flavor quality, and contemporary productivity traits crucial to modern markets.
• Focusing on five crops that span a growing season: pea, broccoli, sweet corn, carrots and winter squash.
• Variety trialing and evaluation of material at various stages of development will provide key information regarding adaptability and will be ideal for soliciting regional participant grower input and guidance for further improvement toward cultivar development.
• Participatory breeding and the deployment of soil health tests developed at Cornell that measure biological and physical properties, in addition to traditional chemical tests, will allow a more detailed understanding of plant performance at each site.
• Outreach activities will make the results of this work more accessible.
• Graduate student training and summer internships at each hub will be key aspects of the work.
• Workshops will be conducted and media will be developed to reinforce grower collaborations regarding the breeding, trialing and seed saving methods for each crop.

For 2010 the Northeast hubs will continue breeding efforts in squash and pea and trialing and outreach efforts in all six crops. We will be soliciting grower input at all stages of the project. We are looking for participating growers for our on-farm trials of pea, broccoli, sweet corn, carrots and winter squash and most likely late blight tomatoes. In each case we will have about 9 varieties in each trial. Please contact Michael Glos (mag22@cornell.edu) if you are interested in participating.

We have funding to support growers efforts for the on-farm singled replicated trials.