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DARTMOUTH — A wet spring and hot, humid summer make for a difficult tomato season on the South Coast. And as Benoit Azagoh-Kouadio walked his rows of tomatoes at Round the Bend Farm in June, he saw brown patches and rotting leaves at the base of several plants.
Disease has been hurting the Dartmouth farm’s organic tomato crop for years, as growing seasons have become warmer and wetter. However, Azagoh-Kouadio said, “a bad year for growing is a good year for seed selection.”
Round the Bend’s garden manager knelt to examine some tomato plants that were growing clusters of yellow flowers. Each grew at different heights, with varying leaf and flower shapes. Some showed signs of disease, while others did not.
Azagoh-Kouadio is taking part in a tomato variety trial run by the Freed Seed Federation — a Westport nonprofit that works to produce regionally-adapted seeds. The goal is to give farmers in the Northeast hardy plants that can survive the changing climate and other environmental pressures, and bolster local food security.
Farmers worldwide have grown, saved, and shared individual varieties of seed for thousands of years, adapting them to local climes. Yet large private companies have dominated plant breeding over the last 50 years. They have cut many traditional varieties of seed in favor of modern seeds, designed to be grown anywhere with fertilizer and pesticides.
Critics say growing these modern seeds is costly for both farmers and the environment. So the Freed Seed Federation and local farmers are taking seeds back into their own hands.
In the tomato trial, Round the Bend and six other Massachusetts farms are growing a range of open-pollinated and heirloom tomatoes. As the plants mature, the farmers will let the Freed Seed Federation know which ones consistently produce, have tasty fruit and show resistance to diseases.
“Through a process of elimination, we find varieties that work,” said Ben Wolbach, owner of Skinny Dip Farm in Westport and a tomato trial participant.
The Freed Seed Federation will save seeds from the best performers, and share them for future growing seasons. It plans to develop a few varieties of seed, grow them out, and put them up for sale to the region’s tomato farmers in a few years.
This quest for a better Massachusetts tomato is just one of the Freed Seed Federation’s many plant breeding projects. They’re also working on crops like beets, celery root, and chicories with local growers.
“We are getting farmers and gardeners excited about saving seeds, like we’ve always done,” said Freed Seed Federation Executive Director Bill Braun.
As modern agriculture runs into production barriers with climate change, regionally-adapted seed will be key to feeding future generations, Braun said.
“The bottom line is that diversity breeds resilience.”
A return to agriculture’s roots
The Freed Seed Federation’s work is part of an emerging movement, known as participatory plant breeding. It’s a return to the roots of farming, and a response to massive changes in the global agriculture industry.
In the mid-20th century, a productivity movement in agriculture — known as the Green Revolution — led foundations, seed companies and universities to develop modern varieties of seed. These seeds perform consistently across growing regions, with the use of fertilizer and pesticide.
As masses of Americans moved from rural communities to cities, remaining growers consolidated land and farmed modern crops to stay viable. This created struggles for smaller seed companies. Larger companies bought them up and cut their offerings.
Now, four multinational corporations control most of the global seed supply. They offer a few varieties of modern seeds to grow any given crop. The seeds must be purchased annually and are often protected by patents. They must be grown with fertilizer and pesticides to produce strong yields.
While this food production system has reduced global hunger, it has also been an “environmental disaster,” Freed Seed Federation Breeding Director Hannah Traggis said. A 2022 Scientific Reports study found nitrogen fertilizers contribute 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And more than 40% of insect species worldwide are declining, largely to pesticide use, some biologists estimate.
The economics of modern farming do not work well for small-scale farmers in regions with variable growing conditions. So most food production has shifted toward large, specialized farms in prime growing areas. That has led to concerns that a climate shock in one of these areas could result in mass food shortages, said Organic Seed Alliance Research and Education Co-Director Micaela Colley.
Massachusetts growers don’t have the buying power to control which genetics major seed companies select for, said Wolbach of Skinny Dip Farm. This means yields here can be limited. Many environmental pressures that farmers face in Massachusetts do not exist in major growing areas.
“So much work goes into growing these crops,” he said. “When they don’t do well, it hurts.”
Sustainable agriculturists say South Coast farmers can address these problems by reclaiming their heritage as breeders and saving seed.
To do so, farmers and gardeners grow open-pollinated seeds for a given crop to fruition. Then, they harvest fruit from the best-performing plants, extract the seeds, and save them for use next season.
These seeds come from crop varieties that have been stewarded through generations. Many are in the public domain. Unlike many modern seeds, they consistently produce plants similar to their parents, and can be adapted to local climates year after year.
Saved seeds from one’s own farm “have more of a sense of vitality to them” than many modern commercial seeds, Azagoh-Kouadio said.
Planting seeds that can thrive on the South Coast is a challenge because of Buzzards Bay’s unique climate. For example, while much of Massachusetts got clobbered by rain two summers ago, the South Coast experienced significant drought, Azagoh-Kouadio said.
Skinny Dip Farm grows several kinds of fruits and vegetables and varieties of these crops on its 5-acre organic operation to stabilize its returns amid variable growing seasons. Not everything does well every year.
That’s why Wolbach reserves bed space on his farm every year to participate in variety trials with the Freed Seed Federation, planting “for the long game.”
“Good genetics make me a better farmer,” he said.
“I’m not babying something that can’t deal with the stresses of too wet, now too dry, too hot, now too cold. I’m willing to participate in that gamble to get towards those varieties that [make me think], ‘I want to plant this one every year.’”
A seed change
Saving seed can feel like a burden for some farmers. And there are holes in the seed market that individuals cannot solve.
That’s why Braun started the Freed Seed Federation with his wife Dee Levanti and Traggis in 2017: to create new varieties of seed for the Northeast, on farms in the Northeast.
“We need diversity in seeds as much as we do ideas,” Braun said.
The work includes preserving culturally significant crops, breeding new crops, and adapting crops from around the world to the Northeast. Projects are funded by foundations, grants, and individual donors.
Its tomato trial, in progress since 2020, is drawing the most attention. It is funded by a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant.
Tomatoes are one of the most profitable crops for small-scale growers, Traggis said. They are also difficult to grow outside locally, given the risk of disease.
Septoria leaf spot and early blight — two diseases that spend the winter in South Coast soils — regularly hurt growers’ crops, alongside late blight. Yet breeding tomatoes with resistance to all three diseases is difficult, growers say.
So local farmers are resorting to fungicides and plasticulture to grow tomatoes. These approaches are expensive, and can harm local soil and waters.
Septoria leaf spot reliably cuts Round the Bend’s tomato harvest by a month or more, Azagoh-Kouadio said. While spraying copper fungicide on the plants to treat the infections is an option for organic growers, it can have damaging long-term effects on the soil, and Round the Bend has not been doing it.
Wolbach’s tomatoes consistently get infected with septoria and early blight at the start of the summer. He grows some tomatoes in a greenhouse. While growing more tomatoes indoors is a consideration with disease pressures, that process comes with its own problems – like gray mold.
In response, the Freed Seed Federation developed a breeding project for disease-resistant field tomatoes in Massachusetts, starting with seeds from seed companies, local peers and online networks.
“What we wanted was a pink slicer, or something that looked like purple Cherokee,” Traggis said.
Already, the nonprofit’s efforts are bearing fruit. The Freed Seed Federation and its collaborators have homed in on three viable varieties of tomato for Massachusetts and the Northeast. They’re now growing out one variety that performed well: a semi-dwarf plant that out-produces tomato plants five times its height.
It will be the nonprofit’s first release to the commercial market, launching in two or three years, said Traggis, the breeding director.
The end goal of the Freed Seed Federation is not to profit, Braun said. The organization is breeding in the public domain, meaning farmers will not have to buy seed annually, nor pay to save seed from its offerings.
He said being on the market will show people they can develop alternative seed systems.
“I think once these start getting into commercial release, then a lot of our peers will start saying, ‘OK, hey, we can participate in this too,’” Braun said.
Email environmental reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@newbedfordlight.org.
This collaborative effort highlights the impacts of our changing climate on agriculture and the local farmers efforts to creatively seek a solution to a changing climates impact on local crops including tomatoes. The sharing of ideas and experimenting with new resilient seeds at different farm locations speaks to a grasp of the issues, the ability to communicate, to seek funding, and find solutions from a new generation of farmers, who use innovative low impact technologies and who maintain and enhance the soils organically. This is a beacon of hope for the future of farming on the South Coast.
Keep up the good work. I have a small garden literally “on the beach”. Through the years many varieties have been tried producing poor results. A chance meeting with a stranger led to a conversation about tomatoes and he gave me some seeds that he got from a long time farmer. He had no idea of their origin. I have saved these seeds with reasonable success for about twenty years now. I have given seeds and plants to other gardeners who had poor results with them. This variety seems to have adapted to life “at the beach”.