African-Crops Polyculture

African-Crops display by Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance at the Variety Showcase hosted by the Culinary Breeding Network in Oct 2023.  Photo by Tessa Lowinske Desmond.

African-Crops Polyculture Study

African-Crops Polyculture Study 

Faculty Lead: Tessa Lowinske Desmond

Collaborating Partners: Experimental Farm Network, Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, The Utopian Seed Project

This project will study the plant mutualisms at work in polyculture plantings of African-origin crops including okra, sorghum, melons, African peas, and various herbs.  A selection of these crops will be planted in varying configurations across four quadrants and data will be collected about soil health, plant health, and productivity.  

Read More
Service Focus

Members of the Service Focus Food Justice Cohort (2023-2024) at the Fall Convening of the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance in Nov 2023.  Photo by Tessa Lowinske Desmond.

Service Focus Program, Food Justice Cohort

Faculty Leads: Tessa Lowinske Desmond and Matt Lynn

Collaborating Partners: Pace Center for Civic Engagement

The Seed Farm is staffed by students all year.  During the summer, interns from various programs across campus come together to plant and tend the crops.  During the school year, The Seed Farm serves as a home base for the Food Justice Cohort of the Service Focus Program hosted by the Pace Center for Civic Engagement.  Along the way, students in select classes and programs also volunteer for short durations.  

A description of the purpose and activities of the Service Focus Cohort is below:

The Service Focus cohort based at The Seed Farm will spend the year with seeds and the people who care for them.  At the farm we will grow rare, culturally meaningful seeds with community partners to support projects in food and seed sovereignty.  In order to do that work with integrity, we will also discuss issues related to agriculture and seed saving, especially as they relate to culturally-meaningful foodways, history, and storytelling as well as climate change and food sovereignty.  Relatedly, we will develop understandings of Lenape history and Lenapehoking as a place, legacies of historical trauma including enslavement and forced removal, and the interconnected and sometimes conflicting histories of race and indigeneity that reverberate throughout much of the work of The Seed Farm’s community partnerships.

During the fall semester, cohort activities will be structured around regular Saturday morning workdays at the farm (which is located 10 minutes from campus), a series of fall field trips which students can choose from, and a monthly breakfast gathering.  Over winter break, we will conceptualize cohort-based projects.  The spring will be spent working in teams on those projects.  Students should expect to get their hands dirty and meet fabulous people.  Note that working at the farm includes exposure to the hazards of the outdoors including ticks, bugs, poison ivy, dirt, and sweat.

Service Focus is a collaboration of the Office of the Dean of the College, the Program for Community Engaged Scholarship (ProCES), the Office of the Vice President for Campus Life and the Pace Center for Civic Engagement.

Read More
Internship Program

Seed Farm Interns during the Inaugural Year (2022). Photo by Barron Bixler

Summer Internship Program on Racial, Indigenous, and Environmental Justice through Seeds

Faculty Lead: Tessa Lowinske Desmond

Collaborating Partners: RISE Fellowship (Recognizing Inequities, Standing for Equality), Native Roots Farm Foundation, Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, The Utopian Seed Project

The Seed Farm is staffed by students all year.  During the summer, interns from various programs across campus come together to plant and tend the crops.  During the school year, The Seed Farm serves as a home base for the Food Justice Cohort of the Service Focus Program hosted by the Pace Center for Civic Engagement.  Along the way, students in select classes and programs also volunteer for short durations.

Interns working at The Seed Farm are expected to develop understandings of historical contexts for the seeds that we work with, which include rare, culturally-meaningful varieties from African, Native American, and other global diasporas.  Through readings, films, discussions, and teachings from our community partners, interns at The Seed Farm learn about the histories, growing practices, and meaning of seeds in their cultural contexts.  

Interns at The Seed Farm have been supported by many campus partners including the Derian Internship Program supported by the Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship, the RISE Fellowship hosted by the Pace Center, and through High Meadows Environmental Institute internships hosted by the Conway and Rubenstein labs.  In summer 2024, The Seed Farm will be offering a co-curricular program on Racial, Indigenous, and Environmental Justice through Seeds supported by the RISE Fellowship Program.  The program will include interns based at The Seed Farm as well as interns based on-site with our collaborators.  Students working at Native Roots Farm Foundation, The Seed Farm, The Utopian Seed Project, and the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance will participate in weekly cohort meetings to learn, share, and reflect on their experiences together through the lens of racial, indigenous, and environmental justice. 

Read More
The Story Garden

Mandy Qua ’23 (foreground) plants seeds in the Story Garden with Akhila Bandlora ’24 (background) and Brian Kook ’25 (right). Photo by Jared Flesher.

The Story Garden

Faculty Lead: Tessa Lowinske Desmond

Collaborating Partners: Experimental Farm Network, Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm, Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance

The Story Garden is the seed of The Seed Farm.        

We like to say that we “Plant seeds and tend relationships.”  In the quarter-acre plot that we call the Story Garden, we plant small accessions of seeds that have been shared with us by community partners, grow them using the information and methods shared with us, offer to leverage the resources of the university to investigate any questions related to the seeds of interest to our community partners, and then return the seed harvest back to the community partners to use in service of their missions related to food sovereignty and food justice.  In the garden, student farmers tend the seeds but they are also attentive to their relationships to the plants, to the land, to each other, and to our community partners.  In the Story Garden, our community partners define what varieties count as rare and culturally-meaningful; our community partners define the research agendas; and our community partners reap the harvest in full to support work of food sovereignty and food justice.

Some varieties that we have grown in the Story Garden include: Accawmacke Broccoli, Achocha, Appalachian Grex Bean Mix, Bittermelon, Della Sorghum, Kenearly Tomato, Lenni Lenape Blue Pulling Corn, Long Island Cheese Pumpkin, Madagascar Mung Bean, Maycock Squash, Nanticoke Squash, Okra Oil Seed Breeding Population, Perennial Sorghum, Perennial Wheat, ‘Sacre Bleu’ Bean, Syrian Eggplant, Tulsi Basil from Iraq, Tulsi Basil from Maldives, Ukranian Sunflowers, Ultracross Collards, Ultracross Okra, Yakteen Gourd, Zipser Turkenspitz Peppers

Read More
Ultracross Collards

Selection of collards presented at a tasting in North Carolina.  Photo by Tessa Lowinske Desmond.

Ultracross Collards Community Seed Selection Project

Faculty Lead: Tessa Lowinske Desmond

Collaborating Partners: Heirloom Collard Project, Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, The Utopian Seed Project

Ultracross Collards were born in 2020 when a network of public plant breeders and small seed companies grew a composite collection of some 21 varieties of collard greens next to each other in an effort to cross them.  Part of an effort by the Heirloom Collards Project to work towards the “recognition and respect of collards as a key component of American food culture,” the ulracross collards collection uses heirlooms of the past to breed heirlooms of the future.  In the process of growing the ultracross collard collection, gardeners are invited to take notice of the rich diversity in the crop with leaves ranging in color from green to blue and even into purples and pinks, textures including frilly and smooth, glazed and matte, and growing habits from heading to open.   

The Seed Farm joined in the Ultracross Collards Community Seed Selection Project in 2022 as a network partner committed to growing the ultracross collards population for five years and making local selections based on environmental factors, pest resilience, taste, and appearance.  After five years of selection, participating farms will be asked to share back their locally-selected  and adapted variety with the Heirloom Collards Project to be grown altogether to showcase new and evolving collards varieties.

In addition to growing the collards, this is one of the few crops at the farm that we also get to eat.  In the fall of 2022, Campus Dining hosted a collards cooking class in Butler College where students and faculty learned to cook collards from The Seed Farm.  The collards that we cooked were served in the dining hall that evening.  

Read More
Collards Cooking Class in Butler College

Chef Christeen Griffiths, Campus Dining. Photo by Barron Bixler from his ongoing documentary project about The Seed Farm at Princeton

Collards Cooking Class in Butler College

Alison Hersch, Class of 2023   •  October 14, 2022

The Princeton Food Project (PFP) collaborated with the Effron Center for the Study of America and the Department of Sociology to host the class in conjunction with the visit of a guest speaker, Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr., associate professor of sociology and the Vann Professor of Racial Justice at Davidson College. The day before, Ewoodzie gave a talk on his new book, Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and Food in the American South, about his year-long experience following socioeconomically diverse Black Jacksonians in Mississippi. His lecture confronted how and why soul food is changing from the staple it once was.

Collards Cooking Class
Griffiths led a cooking class on cooking a pot of collard greens. The collard greens were grown at The Seed Farm at Princeton and are part of the ultracross variety developed and stewarded by the Heirloom Collard Project. Photo by Barron Bixler

At lunchtime on October 12, 2022, Butler College dining room filled with the aroma of simmering, seasoned heirloom collard greens. Overseeing the stoves were fifteen members of the Princeton community, including faculty, staff, undergraduates, and graduate students — all in Campus Dining caps and aprons — with varying culinary expertise.

The collards were grown at Princeton’s Seed Farm as part of a national effort through The Heirloom Collards Project to highlight collards’ rich history, diversity, and beauty. Several class participants were student volunteers at the Seed Farm who helped plant, grow, and harvest the collards, while for others the class was their first time working with collards. Chef Christeen Griffiths led the class in slicing, cleaning, boiling, and seasoning the collards; chef Jared Gierisch and the entire Butler College dining staff assisted in making the event a success.

Chef Griffiths demonstrates technique
Griffiths discusses technique with senior Liam Seely. Photo by Barron Bixler

This enriching experience ended in a fabulous Southern-style lunch prepared by Griffiths and the Campus Dining team. Attendees left with new skills and full stomachs, satisfied from conversation, camaraderie, and cuisine. That evening, the collards cooked in the lunchtime class were served for dinner at Butler College — seeds saved by the Heirloom Collards Project, collards grown at the Princeton Seed Farm, cooked on campus, and eaten by Princetonians.

PFP extends a special thanks to the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, and Dining Services’ Nadeem Siddiqui, Bernadette Penick, and Donna Pilenza. Event organizer and PFP steering committee member Tessa Lowinske Desmond, associate research scholar in the Effron Center for the Study of America, looks forward to future collaborations.

Read More
NJ Secretary of Agriculture Visits Princeton’s Seed Farm

Chief Vincent Mann and Nathan Kleinman inspect the seeds of a Ukrainian sunflower. Photo by Barron Bixler

NJ Secretary of Agriculture Visits Princeton’s Seed Farm

Tessa Lowinske Desmond  •  September 16, 2022

The New Jersey Secretary of Agriculture, Doug Fisher, visited The Seed Farm at Princeton’s Stony Ford Research Station on Wednesday, Sept. 7. Sunflowers were what precipitated the secretary’s visit. Ukrainian sunflowers to be exact. One of the farm partners at The Seed Farm, the Experimental Farm Network led by Nate Kleinman, has long been committed to growing seeds from areas of the world experiencing conflict and wars. When Russia invaded Ukraine this past February, Kleinman did what he often does and culled the USDA GRIN database — the national seed bank — for seeds of Ukrainian origin. Kleinman was worried that farmers in Ukraine could lose a significant amount of their agricultural biodiversity in the face of war, and hopes that his seed experiments might create a bulwark and also inspire other seed farmers to do the same.

Nagisa Manabe, Nathan Kleinman, Secretary Douglas Fisher, Associate Research Scholar Tessa Lowinske Desmond, Michaeline Picaro, Chief Vincent Mann, Tomia MacQueen. Photo by Barron Bixler

Secretary Fisher got wind of Kleinman’s work and asked to see it firsthand. Kleinman works with a number of other farmers, many of whom are also involved in The Seed Farm at Princeton project, including Chief Vincent Mann and Michealine Picaro of the Ramapough Lenape Turtle Clan, Tomia MacQueen of Wildflower Farm, and Nagisa Manabe of River Stoan Farm. This group of farmers, along with Princeton students and faculty, gathered at The Seed Farm for Kleinman’s tour. He showcased melons from Iran, eggplant from Syria, hibiscus from North Korea, gourds from Palestine, and, of course, the Ukrainian sunflowers, among other seed crops. Together the group harvested giant sunflowers heavy with seeds, some of them weighing as much as five pounds. Chief Mann shared with the secretary his dreams for having a certified label for Native American-farmed produce in the state. MacQueen and Manabe talked about challenges facing organic farmers, urban farmers, and farmers of color.

Kleinman harvests a Ukrainian sunflower. Photo by Barron Bixler

The Seed Farm project aims to bring together seed keepers and farmers to think about questions of repair and mutualism, embodied for us in the three-sisters planting practices of Native Americans in which corn, bean, and squash work together to create an environment of mutualism and reciprocity. This fall members will harvest the first fruits of the project, which began with planting this spring. In the coming weeks, The Seed Farm will launch a website and share opportunities to participate in an open house, workdays, and a harvest festival. In the meantime, follow The Seed Farm on Instagram and check out information about the organizations with whom the farm works via their websites and social media platforms:

Experimental Farm Network

Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm

Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance

Read More