Project is first-of-its-kind in organic seed production
Assorted vegetable seed-(clockwise) gasden pea, pinto dry bean, winter squash, broccoli (center, sweet corn. (Credit: Lynn Ketchum)
Corvallis, OR (October 22, 2024) – Often, growers must use organically produced seeds to produce organically-certified produce. But despite a growing demand for organic seed, growers lack research-based information about best production practices.
A coalition that includes three Oregon State University Extension Service researchers was awarded a $3.4 million grant from the USDA to improve organic seed production, both in the Pacific Northwest and nationally.
The Organic Seed Alliance — based in Port Townsend, WA— is leading the four-year effort. OSU’s Kristie Buckland, Alice Formiga, and Cynthia Ocamb are key investigators on the project. The Willamette Valley and the Skagit Valley in Washington are two of the best locations for producing seeds in the United States.
“This project has a great capacity to be able to produce a tremendous amount of data and it has a very, very robust education plan, and that's pretty rare,” dsydBuckland, the Extension vegetable and specialty seed crop specialist at the North Willamette Research and Extension Center in Aurora.
In addition to the Organic Seed Alliance, Buckland, Formiga, and Ocamb will collaborate with about a dozen other researchers in Vermont, Colorado, New York, North Carolina, Washington, and Wisconsin. A project this scale is the first of its kind.
“The collaborative approach is really impressive,” says Buckland, who credits Jared Zystro, the research and education assistant director at the Organic Seed Alliance who wrote the grant.
“Jared has put together a team that is really integrated but also serves all the regions of the country,” says Buckland, an associate professor in the OSU College of Agricultural Sciences.
The needs of organic seeds
Organic food is on the rise. According to the USDA, between 2001 and 2021, Organic retail sales grew by 40%.
“There's a clear marketplace demand for people to be able to access high quality organic food. It's been increasing over the last decade,” says Buckland.
As the consumer demand has increased, Oregon growers have raised concerns with OSU and the state legislature about the need for better information derived from research on organic seed production.
“Growers need more research to be able to plant the best varieties and to be able to put the best management practices into use when growing in an organic system,” says Buckland.
And the research needs to be shared with the industry, Formiga said, an assistant professor of practice in the College of Agricultural Sciences and the executive director of eOrganic, an organization that shares accessible, science-backed information about organic growing.
“The producers who need the results of the research don't necessarily have easy access to the information” if it’s published solely in peer-reviewed journals and using scientific jargon, says Formiga.
The grant is focused on sharing research through education resources while the project is ongoing, says Formiga, who has a background in library and information science.
“One of the values of the library profession is to make information available,” she says. “That's where I feel like there really is an intersection.”
Solutions from the grant
Researchers will be gathering data in various ways, including from the growers. “A huge part of the project is ‘crowd-sourced data,’” says Buckland. “Grant collaborators will import data from current producers across the country on their production strategies and their yields.”
From there, researchers will be able to determine if what successful management strategies are already operational in the fields. There will also be field trials across the United States to compare how different management techniques affect yields.
For example, “We'll space plants differently within the rows and just see the impact on yield, disease management and insect pressure,” says Buckland.
OSU will also host irrigation trials at the North Willamette Research and Extension Center. “We will apply different rates of irrigation to see what the impact is on seed production,” says Buckland. This is important, she explained, because the changing climate means historic weather data — which has informed how farmers and researchers predict the best irrigation practices — may no longer be applicable.
Another part of the project is determining what practices are best for disinfesting seeds to reduce pathogen risks. “Going back 30 years, there hasn’t been any single technique that has worked uniformly as the best or preferred treatment,” says Ocamb.
“There's such a lack of information in the organic seed production world about seed-borne pathogens,” says Ocamb, an OSU professor of plant pathology in the College of Agricultural Sciences.
“Pathogens can potentially be transported to areas where they could now survive and present a long-term pathogen problem,” says Ocamb, whose research on the grant centers on finding management tools that can deactivate pathogens on the seed without damaging seeds.
The grant will allow Ocamb to do a comparison between different treatments to see which work best.
The grant — from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s Organic Research and Extension Initiative — will fund outreach efforts across the U.S. Researchers such as those at OSU will host in-person instructional workshops, events and field days as part of an effort to get their research out there. Formiga will be working on online outreach tools by hosting webinars and digital content for those who can’t travel to research sites.
“A seed cleaning video will be huge. People are going to watch that forever,” says Buckland.