Hey all thanks for starting this thread about our work at Fruition Seeds. We just realized the thread was happening and wanted to chime in.
Everyone made a number of valid points that we will try and begin to address. I (Matthew) will try and be brief and if the conversation continues will be happy to continue to chime in or answer other questions as they arise. (Again, this is from me, Matthew- as one of the two co-founders of Fruition Seeds).
2. Kickstarter bio and further details...On the left side of the kickstarter link
there is a section in blue titled "bio." In this section there is a bit more about us.
Also, our website is now live
www.fruitionseeds.com with a whole lot more about us, our farm, our seeds, our growers, our vision.
But if you don't get time to check those pages out- here is our short bio in terms of seed production and farming. I started farming in 1994. Went through all the rounds of apprenticing, farm hand, farm manager, farm owner in Iowa, California, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Colorado. I was also simultaneously very involved with farm based education and started a number of farms and ag ed. programs for schools in North Carolina, Iowa and Massachusetts. On the administrative/leadership/business end was the executive director of the FARM Institute from 2005-2010 with a year round staff of 8 and a seasonal staff of 25. I completed my MBA from Babson focused on creativity and entrepreneurship. I ended up at the Cornell Small Farms program for 2 years as an extension associate, but not relevant to my work with Fruition.
Petra has been farming for almost a decade in the northwest and back here in the Finger Lakes where she grew up. She been solely focused on seeds for the last five. She has worked for small seed companies on the west coast and spent a season with Bejo here in Geneva. She is the seedswoman of the team! This past summer and fall she spent most waking moments visiting and working with seeds companies on the west coast and the northeast gleaning all bits of details before we launched Fruition Seeds.
Although we are the energy and vision behind Fruition Seeds (FS), FS is not just us. We have an incredible network of advisers, collaborators, and conspirators of market farmers, seedsmen and women, university pathologists/breeders/soil ecologists, seed company owners, small business owners. We have our hands full right now launching FS, keeping up with the farm(s) and field work, and living each moment. We are both keen on asking lots of questions are making mistakes. Learning!
2. Perfect segue into someones comment about collaboration/cooperatives! Collaboration and shared resources in the world we choose to live in and the work we foster. If you haven't read "Owning our Future" by Marjorie Kelly- now is the time. A huge inspiration for us and clarifying understanding of how sharing knowledge and resources is the antithesis of control. Our work at FS embodies this not only in how we work with collaborators, but in how we want to serve our customers and the type of conversation about the seed industry and seed in general that we believe is ready to happen. To us the seed is not something that should be owned nor should the information and knowledge about seed be limited to a few. We were talking with an owner/founder of a seed company in the last year who said "the details of where seeds come from and how the difference between breeding, seed stock, grow outs...etc related to the quality and conditions of seed was too difficult for his customers to understand and it would just confuse them." I was really disjointed to hear this because that kind of thinking is exactly how we concentrate control, by restricting knowledge. We are doing everything we can to take the responsibility of knowledge and make it palpable and engaging for a lay audience so they can be involved and not sit back waiting for someone to make decisions for them. To us the best way we can embody this is through transparency. Transparency of where our seeds come from, how we grow them, how we run our business, the places we have made good decisions that worked out sometimes well and other times poorly, where we made hard decisions that we are yet to know the consequences of, where we see opportunity to improve our work, our community, our relationships.
3. And now on to the plastics conversation. We could not agree more with all of you about the challenges, difficulty and ramifications of working with plastics in agriculture. We were shocked this winter when we finally decided to go this direction. Here is a little into our thinking:
A. Most of what you may have seen in the pictures on our kickstarter are on a field in Naples where we use landscape fabric. Our friends in Canada who are seed growers have been using it for over 2 decades and still using the same piece. As far as externalities of using non-rewables I might suppose landscape fabric uses less energy than mechanical cultivation.
B. We had to make a choice with the scale we are on (almost 3 acres with just 2 of us and a few friends and paid hands here and there). The choice was this: "weeding or breeding? What will make a more significant contribution to our seed culture, heritage, and future in the Northeast? Weeding or breeding?" All kidding aside of how you interpret this (it does make us smile), we felt that the place we could make a contribution was on using the resources we had within the ecological limits and understanding we have, to focus our work on selections and breeding at a scale where rouging actually made a significant difference.
C. The issues of selecting over time for genetics that are not as vigorous against weeds is very valid. We plan to develop enough rotations and as we scale up and add equipment to our operation that each generation will not be grown on the landscape fabric. But this is a down the road solution, not a present fact.
D. The fabric is not only a weed suppressant, but also semi-permeable and is amazing at regulating moisture that will reduce our irrigation use significantly.
E. It is hard for any of us to know the future of organic ag. I surely don't know. Trends are short lived in generations. Will we trend back towards smaller and smaller with more labor per acre? Will reduced inputs, more accurate, simplified tools continue to evolve? What is the best ratio of labor vs. mechanization for an ideal organic system to feed our neighbors? For us, the vision is right to livelihood, right to clean water and air, right to our own genetics. We strive for these things in our work and have to make choices each day that we can rest with each sunset. Plastics or landscape fabric in our system did not come east and it may not stay, but for now it was one of the best decisions we have made and are blessed to do our work without mechanical cultivation for the majority of the season.
F. I will spare you on the economics (unless asked for in future post) of the labor and mechanization vs. landscape fabric when growing seeds in our region.
G. We are (reasonably) sane as a very, very direct result.
I think an started to address some of the comments and questions. Grateful to be a part of this vibrant, thoughtful community.
I welcome any others, just give me a week or so to respond...
peace,
Matthew
