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SEED GROWER PROFILE – FRANK MORTON: AN AGENT OF CHANGE
Frank Morton is a plant breeder and founder of Wild Garden Seed in Oregon. He and his family supply many of the unique varieties in the High Mowing catalog.
On a spring day in the early 1980’s, a curious young salad grower found himself looking at one red lettuce seedling in a sea of flats filled with tender green oakleaf. A novice seed saver at the time, Frank Morton left this plant for seed, hoping to reproduce this unique cross of red romaine and green oakleaf. As he recounts this first experience with breeding, he recalls that what came up when these seeds were planted the following season was “just as varied as the rainbow.” The outcome was seemingly a random combination of all traits of the parent varieties, twenty-three kinds of lettuce in all. Frank Morton was taken by the evidence of what had previously been missing in his work, and that first experiment launched a lifetime of creativity in classical breeding.
Wild Garden Seed Bears Fruit
Frank and Karen Morton are the dynamic duo behind wild garden seed, one of the finest producers of regionally-adapted, open-pollinated organic seeds. Situated along the winding Mary’s River outside of Philomath, Oregon, Wild Garden Seed has partnered with gathering together farm, a neighboring vegetable operation that has joined in providing space and people power for Frank’s growing seed production. In total, this collaborative effort tends over 50 acres of fresh market vegetables and seed crops. During the heart of the growing season, 65 employees (aka the Agents of Change) still enjoy a work-day tradition of group meals crafted with their own produce. Frank and Karen, along with their sons Taj and Kit, coordinate all aspects of seed production, harvest, cleaning, and marketing.
Since his auspicious first encounter with seed breeding, Frank has gone on to breed hundreds of named varieties, available directly from Wild Garden Seeds and through a limited number of lucky seed companies like High Mowing Organic Seeds. For over two decades, Frank and Karen balanced time between their salad business and seed breeding and production. Lettuce breeding became a way to make new products available for their commercial salad sales. As Frank puts it, “right away the goal was to create something beautiful that tasted good.” His breeding generated such interest in these unique varieties that Karen and Frank published their first seed catalog on a typewriter in 1994. By 2001, this hardworking family was ready to focus full time on seed breeding and production.
A Continuing Evolution
In over thirty years of seed production, Frank’s breeding goals have developed a comprehensive depth rarely seen in even the highest ranking academic circles. Frank and Karen’s home has been described to me as having “a breeding project every square foot.” With his experience as a grower, Frank spent his early years focusing on the qualities of lettuce, studying the tastes, shapes, thickness, heft, and colors that worked for his market. He quickly realized the value of season extension in his northern climate and began selecting varieties that performed well in the early and late parts of the growing season. Slowly Frank started to think about disease, launching extensive disease trials in order to select for resistance traits in his production. All of this is part of Frank’s devotion to his mission of fostering regional adaptation in seed breeding.
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| About/History 2014 – Letter From The Wild Garden – Frank and Karen Morton |
| This has been quite the year around here, aside from the record winter freeze and record summer heat. We purchased a new home farm for Wild Garden Seed “world headquarters” this summer, directly adjacent to GTF, finally getting business out of our kitchen and living room after 20 years, and creating new open space for the next generation of Wild Garden Seed people to grow into. 2015 will see us opening new ground at Aurora Farm, and creating the infrastructure for the next phase of Wild Garden Seed’s evolution. Karen and I began WGS in 1994 at the same kitchen table where her laptop is sitting now. The seed business was an adjunct to our Wild Garden Salad business until September of 2001, when we left salad selling behind and rededicated all of our energies to making a livelihood as seed growers, breeders, and sellers. There were some very tough years there. In 2002 we began a joint venture with our friends John Eveland and Sally Brewer, owners of Gathering Together Farm, to grow and sell organic seed under the Wild Garden name. Gathering Together Farm provided the infrastructure, means of production, and home office services, Shoulder to Shoulder Farm provided the seed management, processing, research, and marketing. We shared many complimentary farm functions over the years– the insectary benefits of diverse flowers in a long period of blooming, the harvest synergies of biennial crop production together, peaks and ebbs in farming cash flow, and seasonally opportune infrastructure sharing. All of these made the farm function better and helped lift Wild Garden Seed into a self-sustaining, farm-based seed enterprise with an international reach. We sold seed to 41 countries in 2014, our 20th anniversary. Now, all of us in this business together need to get our business straight. We are thinking of succession, how and to whom these farms and their businesses will be passed along. This is a looming topic for those of my time, and only a few of us have it well planned. Certainly, simpler is better. With that in mind, Wild Garden Seed has been recently re-organized as a part of Shoulder to Shoulder Farm (owned by Karen and myself), organically certified by Oregon Tilth under the S2S Farm name, with its home office at our new location on Aurora Lane just outside Philomath, OR, and right across the road from GTF. In the future, we will continue growing crops at GTF and Hank Keogh’s Avoca Farm, as well as the original Wild Garden at Shoulder to Shoulder, and at our new place, Aurora. This will provide new role opportunities and skill development for our maturing staff, and may afford some peace of mind for all of us wondering how the arc of our farming careers will progress and, eventually, conclude. |
Podcast:
Frank Morton of Wild Garden Seeds on the Patience of Seeds, and the Art and Craft of Plant Breeding
Videos
Other
The Open Source Seed Initiative
Today, only a handful of companies account for most of the world’s commercial breeding and seed sales. Increasingly, patenting and restrictive contracts are used to enhance the power and control of these companies over the seeds and the farmers that feed the world.
Patented and protected seeds cannot be saved, replanted, or shared by farmers and gardeners. And because there is no research exemption for patented material, plant breeders at universities and small seed companies cannot use patented seed to create the new crop varieties that should be the foundation of a just and sustainable agriculture.
Inspired by the free and open source software movement that has provided alternatives to proprietary software, OSSI was created to free the seed – to make sure that the genes in at least some seed can never be locked away from use by intellectual property rights.
https://osseeds.org/
