The Seed Farm at Princeton

“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”

― Wendell Berry, writer, environmental activist, and farmer.

Some years ago, Hopewell Township farmer and Princeton University faculty member Tessa Lowinske Desmond set out to write a book about seeds. While conducting research, she realized that although books can be useful, what the world really needs are more regionally adapted, resilient seeds. That realization led to a commitment to preserving culturally meaningful seeds with community partners, seeds that often go back generations and centuries.

The result is The Seed Farm at Princeton — a 3.5-acre farm nestled amid the woods at the Stony Ford Research Station, a 99-acre property given to, and managed by, Princeton’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. The unassuming farm, hidden off Pretty Brook Road on the edge of Lawrence and Hopewell townships, sits apart from the University’s many world-class research labs and state-of-the-art facilities. But for Desmond and her team, the contrast is an important aspect of the project.

The high tunnel at The Seed Farm at Princeton.

The farm, which has no road sign, is marked by a field expanse, a plastic-covered high tunnel currently filled with heirloom collard greens setting their seeds, a shed, and a simple main building that is shared across projects at the research station. Bucolic and serviceable, and, as Desmond described it, “unpretentious.”

It’s telling that an item on the farm’s wish list is a refrigerator — working or not — that they can use to incubate germinating seeds. “We don’t need a state-of-the-art appliance for that job, we just need an insulated box with shelves and a door,” says Desmond. “Farmers are efficient people, tinkers, and hackers who like to reuse. Out here, we’re farmers.”

What could be its most valuable asset is a committed group of students and community partners who regard the soil and the culture of growing with respect and admiration, or learn to do so. And this is crucial for taking good care of the Earth.

One of the aspects that appeals to seed keepers is mutualism — the idea that plants complement each other, the practice of “companion planting” where one planting benefits another.

“It’s a model that nature gave us. Mutualisms happen in nature,” says Desmond, offering the example of the Three Sisters in which corn, beans, and squash exist in a symbiotic relationship practiced by Native American planters. Plant the corn first so it grows tall; encourage the beans to use the corn as scaffolding; and the beans, in turn, will provide nitrogen to the soil. The large squash leaves will shade the ground to reduce weeds, adds Desmond, who recommends Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants as essential reading.

Mutualism, in addition to being a result of companion planting, is also a metaphor for social interactions, something that very much aligns with Desmond’s way of life. “We can have different models for give and take with each other,” she says.

Students in the Land and Story in Native America class processing Nanticoke Squash for seed harvest.

Tending Relationships

The Seed Farm’s website opens with the words, “Planting seeds, tending relationships,” and continues: “Though we come together from a wide range of disciplines and life experiences, we share a common focus: our work deals with questions of repair and mutualism including repairing relationships with land, soil, plants, the environment, and each other and thinking about the essential role that mutualisms play in processes of repair.”

Although Desmond has recollections of her grandparents’ Minnesota farm, she didn’t always devote her academic life to seeds. She was a member of her neighborhood’s community garden as a student at the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a Ph.D. in multi-ethnic American literature. Landing at Harvard, she created a course on food justice and the cultural impact of food while serving as a lecturer and the administrative director for the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights. In 2018 she came to Princeton, where she built upon that course to increasingly focus her research on food, farming, and social movements. Desmond is currently a research specialist in the School of Public and International Affairs where, in addition to directing The Seed Farm, she also helped to found and co-leads the Princeton Food Project and serves as co-principal investigator for the Heirloom Gardens Oral History Project.

When Desmond moved to the Princeton area, she started a homestead farm with her family and joined the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New Jersey (NOFA-NJ). Through NOFA-NJ, she met local farmers who were actively working to revitalize heirloom crops and develop open-pollinated local varieties that are adapted to grow well in this region, she says. The farming conferences she attended often ended with seed swaps, where attendees pulled seeds out of their pockets. “I was showing up empty-handed,” she recalls. Others seemed to notice too, and, eventually, elders in the community asked her if she would start growing seeds with them. Knowing that she had limited capacity at her homestead farm to partner with seed keeping communities, she asked colleagues if it would be possible to designate a place on campus to grow seeds with students and other faculty.

The response was overwhelmingly positive, she says, and support from campus was warm and enthusiastic. Within a few months, land was being cleared and student interns recruited. The farm aligns with the mission and values of the University.

A seed farm is different from a campus garden, as seed farms are more suited to the academic calendar. “Seed farming doesn’t require the attention that market crops require,” Desmond says. “In fact, you want the most resilient crops for seed instead of the ones that require perfectly weeded rows and ideal conditions.” To harvest seeds, the produce should be left in the field long after it would be if it were being harvested as food. At The Seed Farm, “when students return in the fall, the beans are on the vine, the squash is in the fields setting their seeds . . . seeds come at the end of a plant’s lifecycle.” Eggplants, for example, should be “brown, squishy, practically rotting before we harvest seeds. String beans — so tasty when they are young and green — are left to dry in pod,” she says, adding that they are harvested in October for seed instead of their July or August as they would be for food. “I can bring the dried beans to class with me in February,” she says. “Students can interact with the fruits of their labor.”

However, Desmond doesn’t know of another college with an established seed farm. That might change eventually, as she is interested in writing about how this farm can be a model for others. But for now, The Seed Farm at Princeton “is the only model like this in the country,” she says.

The Princeton model has community partners who bring seeds to cultivate. “We don’t decide what is rare or culturally important,” Desmond explains. “Our partners know that. Each organization identifies in spring what they would like us to grow, and determines the urgent research questions that are important to them regarding each crop.”

Bagging okra flowers to manage cross-pollination for an okra oil seed study.

Community Partners

Nathan Kleinman, the co-director and co-founder of Experimental Farm Network Cooperative in Elmer, which works to emphasize collaboration among farmers and plant breeding as a whole, and Bonnetta Adeeb, the founder of Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance which supports Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) gardeners in distributing heirloom seeds are two longstanding community partners.

For Kleinman, working with The Seed Farm was a “no-brainer,” he says. He had worked with Desmond before the farm existed, with Nanticoke winter squash seeds, which Kleinman got from an exchange in Iowa.

The Seed Farm at Princeton, he says, was the “perfect situation” because it is isolated from other farms, which he says is a major consideration. With Maycock summer squash (of the Nanticoke people), for example, a half mile from other plantings in the same family, like zucchini and orange pumpkin, is the distance necessary to try to maintain the character of the squash. The plants are pollinated by bees, which can move pollen a half mile. “If there is orange pumpkin next door, one could end up with crossed plants in the next generation, and there is no way to unwind that,” he says.

The now-called Maycock and Nanticoke Squash Revitalization Project was an example of collaboration between the Experimental Farm Network, Native Roots (which rematriates the squash to Nanticoke communities in New Jersey and Delaware), The Seed Farm, and Ujamaa (Adeeb’s seed cooperative and farming alliance).

“There’s nothing I know of that’s quite like The Seed Farm, Kleinman says. “Seeds are not on a lot of people’s radar. “

Adeeb’s involvement with the farm has been equally rewarding. Her seed journey began with the Garden Commission Cooperative in Philadelphia, where she met Kleinman, she recalls. During the pandemic, she set up an online store for heirloom seeds and received many donations offering free seeds to anyone in the country who could be reached by post office, realizing that many at that time did not have access to nutritious food. The challenge, she says, was that people were requesting meaningful seeds, often from the locales of their ancestors, and seed companies didn’t carry seeds like Scotch bonnet or okra. Seven growers became 20 growers, and became Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, now Ujamaa seeds.

Seeds are a teaching tool, notes Adeeb. “Young people want to touch the soil,” she says. “They want the oral history, to talk to the elders, offer support.” And there is the social aspect of community sharing.

She is now exploring polyculture at The Seed Farm, seeing what African seeds can be set up like Three Sisters, designing trials to find the best combinations and nutritional value.

Additionally, an okra breeding project with the Utopian Seed Project and Princeton University’s Conway Lab is developing a high-oil seed variety which has entailed growing hundreds — and sometimes thousands —of okra plants, harvesting the seeds and analyzing them using NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) technology available in chemistry labs.

In our projects with both okra and collards, says Desmond, “We’re making something new. We’re using heirlooms of the past to create the heirlooms of the future.”

Akhila Bandlora (PU ’24) planting a squash seedling.

The Future of The Seed Farm

It is these collaborations that Desmond envisions when she thinks of the future of the farm and expanding it — not necessarily in major infrastructure or artifice, but the partnerships that are at the heart of the project. She wants more students to have the opportunity to engage with the farm, plants, and community partners. And yes, perhaps expand the team’s staff so they can include more people, but the emphasis will continue to be on showing that a simple, organic project is meaningful.

The team has started to explore how they might include projects on heirloom and traditional perennial crops including fruits, nuts, and berries, and crops that are foraged as seasonal ephemerals in the woods.

One physical improvement on a wish list would be to rebuild an old farmhouse on the property, which burned in a fire last year. “We need a place to gather, host seminars and workshops, cook, and share meals. All of us who use Stony Ford Research Station are hoping to rebuild the farmhouse.”

“We just want to keep doing what we’re doing but bring in more people and expand to more crops,” she says, noting that the farm is still currently supported by seed funding from the University which will run out soon.

A ceremony on the farm has students in a circle holding seeds, a time to be more reflective, and show reverence for the seeds.

Lenni-Lenape blue pulling corn at the Munsee Language and History Symposium.

They might think about the Lenni-Lenape blue pulling corn that survived traveling from its original soil, was traded and shared, relocated, and made its way back to the Lenapehoking ancestral homeland. The history of a seed might be shared in the circle, and its importance. The circle conversation touches on gratitude, responsibility, and hope.

“When we knew we were going to keep this seed here from year to year, we knew we needed to find a way to set it apart and to be intentional with it, to make it special,” says Desmond, referring to the blue pulling corn. “In May, our seniors lead us in planting the corn. We plant it in a spiral shape on mounds with beans and squash. In the fall, we receive this beautiful blue corn dappled with white kernels.”

The Seed Farm’s purpose goes beyond cultivating seeds. It is a breeding ground for the way people can act. “I have brilliant colleagues and students on campus,” says Desmond. “The more we get out of our buildings, the more we put our hands in the soil, we can see that nature can be a real ally.

“If everyone loved one plant, think about helping to preserve that plant. Gardeners can save seeds. The old varieties change a little every year.

“You don’t need to be high tech. In many different Native American views there is an original agreement, the plants agree to give up wildness, and people agree to care for them. It’s the domestication of plants. I am trying to remind people of that commitment.

“What is very surprising is how responsive plants are to that care. They shift and realign their sensibilities for us. They are so adaptable.”

“I want our future thought leaders to know plants and soil, and have the wisdom that comes from that too,” she says.