As many of our long-time customers know, we at High Mowing Organic Seeds believe that truly good food must start with good seed. For some, however, it is difficult to see the connection between where seeds come from and where foods come from. Recent research helps us draw a clear ancestral link between our modern food consumption practices and the seeds from which our food has developed over hundreds of thousands of years. In his New York Times piece How the First Farmers Changed History, Carl Zimmer explains:
The agricultural revolution changed our species and our planet. As bands of hunter-gatherers began domesticating plants and animals, they quit the nomadic life, building villages and towns that endured for thousands of years. A stable food supply enabled their populations to explode, and small egalitarian groups turned into kingdoms sprawling across hundreds of miles.
“Domesticating plants” – that’s us! At High Mowing, we are continuing a tradition initiated by our ancestors in the Fertile Crescent. Without seed selection and, eventually, breeding, all of us would still be wandering the wilds of the world, chasing down our next meal or gathering fruits and vegetables catch-as-catch-can. Lucky for us, our culture’s seed selection and breeding techniques have evolved with each passing year. Today High Mowing is able to offer our customers highly selected crop varieties, distinct in flavor, nutrient density and disease resistance. It is our hope that future generations will benefit from our seed development practices, just as we continue to benefit from the seed saving of our Middle Eastern predecessors. How We Do It The selection of seed starts with the grower. Growers know what they want from a plant, and High Mowing recognizes that important distinction: we don’t decide which seed to offer – you, the grower, do. That’s why we set up a rigorous evaluation system for our product development, starting with assessing the needs of the grower. We also select varieties for flavor, plant vigor, appearance, yield, and storability, among other traits. Each of these categories is taken into account before trialing crop varieties, and then traits are diligently recorded by our Trials team. Trials recommendations are then run by our Product Development personnel, an inter-departmental group made up of sales and marketing representatives, trials growers, breeding, and operations team members who decipher how and why each variety fits into our offerings before giving the stamp of approval for inclusion in our catalog. To provide the actual seed you receive in the mail, we fulfill our seed production needs in one of three ways: we produce it on our own farm; we contract another grower to produce it; or we buy it from other seed companies. Our farmers as well as many of the producers we work with have their own quality standards for producing seed. Selection and quality control testing is an on-going process that sometimes begins before a plant’s seed is even formed. All three of these production avenues result in the seed arriving in our warehouse in Wolcott, VT and subsequently being thoroughly tested by our Quality Control team. Each of these steps means that our seed is selected for quality in at least three – and sometimes more – instances before it is packaged and shipped. A huge advancement on the practices of our ancestors, the first seed savers! Why We Do It Aside from selecting for the highest possible quality in our seed, we also choose to provide only 100% organic, non-GMO seed in all of our categories. We do this for several reasons. Organic for organic. Unlike conventional seed varieties which are produced in conventional systems, our organic seed is developed in organic settings. This means that our seed has developed characteristics that tend to thrive in organic growing conditions. Our in-house breeders as well as our breeding partners select for heritable traits that do well in organic settings in order to improve performance on your farm or in your garden. Flavor. When we select varieties to include in our catalog, flavor is routinely the number-one high priority trait for which we test. Customers who buy our seed are selling to a market that cares about food quality and above all, taste. We recognize how important flavor is to our customers, and strive to achieve the best taste results in all that we offer. Ecological integrity. A critical reason we choose to produce seed organically is the environmental impacts inherent in seed development. Because they are not grown to be consumed, seeds are usually heavily sprayed in conventional models to avoid disease and pest damage to the plants at all costs. At High Mowing, we believe that the best way to produce high quality seed that performs well is to grow the seed production crops in the best possible conditions. To us, this means stewarding the land to provide regenerative, robust, healthy soils that allow us to operate with minimal environmentally destructive impacts. Resources To read Carl Zimmer’s NYT feature on our seed-selecting ancestors, click HERE.