About

The Seed to Kitchen Collaborative connects plant breeders focused on organic systems to farmers and chefs in the Upper Midwest, to create delicious, well-adapted vegetable varieties for local organic production. This collaboration presents a unique opportunity to focus on vegetable variety characteristics important to local food systems, such as flavor, fresh-market quality and productivity on smaller-scale diversified farms.

Wisconsin is lucky to have many active vegetable breeding programs at UW Madison, as well as a strong local foods movement supported by excellent farmers and chefs. We also have a strong organic vegetable community.

Flavor and direct-market quality traits are difficult to measure in plant breeding programs. In addition, flavor has often not been a priority because of the importance of traits such as shelf life and tolerance to shipping in long-distance food systems. By working directly with chefs and farmers to develop evaluation methods for flavor, we hope to improve our ability to select high quality vegetable varieties for farmers, gardeners and consumers.