Click here to view the pdf file of our 2026 print seed catalog! You can also order a free print catalog here.
Following is the letter from the 2026 print catalog for easy reference. The first section features reports from the farms involved in Common Wealth Seed Growers. The second section is about the intersection of technology and farming.
COMMON WEALTH SEED GROWERS 2026 CATALOG LETTER
By Edmund Frost
Seed Farms Report
2025 was an especially good year for corn and squash, both in terms of seed production and selection work. I’m also happy that we’ve started new collaborations with several additional growers and farmer-breeders.
At Twin Oaks Seed Farm we added an additional small isolation plot for winter squash, and managed to do isolated seed growouts of four varieties: South Anna Butternut, Bakers Branch Butternut, Chinese Tropical Pumpkin, and Guatemalan Green Ayote. We did intensive selection work with each of these (see commonwealthseeds.com/blog for a video about vine tracing as a selection tool) as well as seed production. We’re glad to see solid progress in the varieties and to have good quantities of seed on hand.
We also moved forward with our moschata-species summer squash work, continuing dehybridization efforts with two Korean varieties (King Ka Ae and Jin Dong Ae), producing seed for the Brazilian variety Mini Paulista, and selecting from a new population that has both Korean and Brazilian parents. We used a combination of hand pollination and time isolation to save seed from these growouts.
We had a small but solid Tramunt supersweet corn seed production and grew successful crops of BTSYN 2 and BTSYN 7, two Hawaiian supersweet varieties. These come from James Brewbaker’s breeding program at the University of Hawaii, where he did over 60 years of corn breeding work. They are incredibly strong, disease resistant varieties – like field corn but with sweet corn ears. We’re happy to be able to make them available this winter and to be working with them.
The weather in Central Virginia was extremely rainy in May and June, with 20 inches falling over an eight-week period. This made early season weed control challenging. It dried out after that though, allowing the corn seed to dry down well. It was also a cooler summer than usual, with the last of the intense heat over by the fourth week of August.
Living Energy Farm produced seed for several varieties, including Seminole Pumpkin, Aji Dulce Spice Pepper, Mannon’s Majesty Tomato, and DMR 401 Cucumber. Alexis Zeigler continues his work refining the Easy Reaper Combine, harvesting wheat at both Living Energy Farm and Twin Oaks Seed Farm in 2025 (see livingenergyfarm.org/the-easy-reaper). We are offering wheat seed for the first time this year – Appalachian White Hard Winter Wheat, bred in North Carolina for eastern conditions.
Brenda Callen had another successful year of seed production at nearby All-Farm Organics, with great crops of Cuban Neck Pumpkin, Shandong Huang Gua Cucumber, and Yamato Cream Strain II Watermelon.
Jay Bost and Nora Rodli of Laughing Springs Farm took the year to largely focus on perennial plantings and construction (including a guest cabin and sauna!). Jay did keep up with some annual crops, especially corn, and is this year introducing “Cateto and Cousins Composite Orange Flint Corn,” a diversity mix of orange flint seedstocks from the Caribbean and up and down the Atlantic coast of North and South America. They plan a renewed focus on seed crops next year.
Megan Allen and Lalo Lazaro of Care of the Earth Community Farm have largely stepped back from Common Wealth Seed Growers to focus on other work. We will continue to offer several varieties that they bred and introduced.
Lyndsey Walker of Rock Cottage Farm struggled with heavy deer pressure this year. Moving forward she is especially interested in exploring wild medicinal and culinary herb seed crops.
We also started working with several additional growers and farmer-breeders this year.
Richard Goerwitz of East Wind Community in the Missouri Ozarks is offering “Ozark Gourdseed,” a corn that he bred over the last fourteen years for beautiful red and white ears on strong plants. Gourdseed corn is a traditional Southeast corn that is one of the parents of the ubiquitous dent field corns. Richard primarily uses it to make tortillas, but also grinds it for cornmeal, especially the red ears. Richard manages the food gardens at East Wind, a sister community to Twin Oaks.
Doug Jones of Common Ground Ecovillage in North Carolina has been doing on-farm vegetable breeding for many years, specializing in sweet and spice peppers. We have carried and done seed production for his variety Chocolate Cake since 2016. This year he is introducing a new variety and doing the seed production himself. Red Reliance is a large, rectangular, sweet bell pepper that is a production mainstay for Doug’s CSA operation, Full Table CSA. The plants are large and productive, and the peppers are sweet, bright red and keep well. Common Ground Ecovillage is a new community project with a strong Agrarian vision, supporting its farmers to dive deep into the goal of nourishing members and customers with nutrient-dense food grown in the Piedmont Bioregion.
Carrie Piesen of Bay Branch Community in Mineral, Virginia, has grown for CWSG in the past as part of Living Energy Farm. This year she grew and did selection work with Virginia Red Moon and Stars Watermelon, which we are newly introducing this year. This started as a selection from Yellow Moon and Stars that we made at Twin Oaks Seed Farm a few years ago. Carrie plans to keep selecting and stewarding the variety moving forward.
Chris French of French Farms in Redland, Florida, south of Miami, produced seed of Thai Kang Kob pumpkin for us this year and advanced a winter squash breeding line. In past years he has done winter increases and line advancement for several CWSG breeding projects, including Bakers Branch Butternut and Vine Borer Resistant Kabocha, and given us feedback on various other varieties. South Florida is a pretty different growing zone from the rest of the farms involved in CWSG, with the main growing season taking place between October and May. This is a promising collaboration in that it allows for moving certain breeding and selection projects forward much more quickly, and for testing some of our varieties in more tropical conditions.
Overall, we produced seed for sale for over 45 varieties and seedstocks, including several new original introductions and many that are unavailable elsewhere.
Note that we are not including a separate research update section in this year’s catalog. Much of the research we did this past year is pretty well covered in the variety descriptions, especially given that we are offering several research samples and diversity mixes.
On Appropriate Technology
Last year’s catalog letter focused on land access and the challenges and successes we face as farmers sustaining livelihoods and movements in a difficult economic environment. This year’s letter focuses on technology, especially as it relates to agriculture and agrarian culture.
I will start with a discussion of artificial intelligence. An intense amount of focus has grown up around AI in the last year, and while I continue to believe that a lot of it is marketing, it has become hard to ignore. Do I want Adobe to give me an AI summary of the Twin Oaks Community governance documents? Do I want an AI-generated image to go with the sweet pepper variety description I wrote for the website? YouTube is flooded with unlabeled AI content, including machine-generated music videos and wildly false history narratives. Internet search engines are usually using AI features by default. Recently, someone showed up at our farm at midnight because AI told him to come.
My first question is – what problem is any of this solving? How are our lives, or the ecosystems we live in, or the health of the planet going to improve or be sustained because of this technology? So far most of the products of AI come across to me as unimpressive, unnecessary, unasked-for, and unpleasant. In the future their quality and usefulness may improve, but who are they really useful to? Even if we end up liking a particular application, we still have to look at the ecology, the power relationships, and the costs behind it.
The immediate effects of building and operating infrastructure for AI don’t look good: The massive energy needs of data centers promise to worsen climate change by increasing fossil fuel use at a time when we need to be seriously decreasing it. They drive up household energy prices and utility bills. They overuse water, drying up nearby wells and aquifers. They cause noise pollution, ruin agricultural and wild land, and increase land prices. [These concerns have united residents of many rural areas to oppose data centers, with some success – including here in Louisa County.]
Then there are the social and societal effects (which of course are also ecological in nature). We’re being asked to trust the tech industry in rolling all this out, so let’s look at their track record over the last 20 years: Concentration of power and money in the hands of a few multi-billionaires. Surveillance and lack of privacy that is difficult to opt out of. Content designed to distract, disorient and steal our attention. Echo chambers that increase political and cultural polarization. Developmental harm to children. A culture of removal from our immediate surroundings that damages our capacity for relationships with each other and with the ecosystems that sustain us.
AI promises more of all this, as well as marginalization and unemployment for many professions, warfare and policing where machines make the choices about who lives and who dies, even more pervasive surveillance by corporations and the state, widespread loss of place-based knowledge and skills, and a culture of the kind of abstracted mediocrity that AI content delivers.
Our society has a blind spot with regards to technology. We could choose to evaluate and assess new technologies before adopting them wholesale. Instead we are surrounded by language and messaging that says AI is just inevitable. And we find ourselves with a lack of discourse or even vocabulary to describe what making choices about this technology could look like.
Wes Jackson, in his book New Roots for Agriculture, published in 1980, writes about a future in which people have reorganized agriculture and settlement patterns to adapt to the land, to solve the slow but brutally additive problem of soil erosion, to empower local communities, and to enable subsequent generations to thrive far into the future.
He adds that many farmers in this utopia have chosen to return to using draft animals for tillage. Horses can reproduce themselves while tractors can’t, he explains, and they don’t rely on expensive external inputs. Meanwhile, many of the farmers are using small combines newly engineered to harvest and sort different kinds of seeds simultaneously from perennial polyculture plantings. These ideas have stuck with me since I read the book 17 years ago (though I continue to farm with tractors). I’ve taken them as inspiration for what it could look like if we strive to make more clear, responsible and coherent choices about technology.
Utopian visions aren’t the only place to look for examples of organic and sustainable farmers embracing more nuanced and comprehensive kinds of thinking and planning. In fact, in the face of the destructiveness of many modern technologies (and AI is just one example here), I would argue that the sustainable and organic agriculture movements are and have been at the forefront of challenging our society’s dominant technological discourse.
Organic farmers could be growing GMO corn, soy, cotton, canola, alfalfa, papaya, and summer squash, but we’re not. We’ve clearly and explicitly chosen not to because GMOs concentrate power into the hands of a few corporations, and because we don’t trust the safety of such a fundamental departure from how genetic evolution has always worked.
Organic farmers could be relying on all kinds of advanced chemical inputs for pest and disease control, but we don’t. We see that these inputs often disrupt farm ecology, harming beneficial insects as much as pests. We see that they hurt our rivers and wetlands, and we see that they’re dangerous for our health as well.
None of this is to say that we don’t have our own smart and functional methods and technologies, from crop rotations to season extension, to movable fencing, to agroecological design that encourages beneficials, to specific plant breeding techniques.
Appropriate Technology is a movement and an approach that came to prominence starting in the 1960s, with an initial focus on developing countries and the Global South. It recognized that efforts to deploy large scale industrial technology often weren’t benefiting the vast majority of people, but were instead leading to displacement, unemployment and a larger class divide. The idea is that small scale farm equipment and technology can empower people to stay on the land and make a living. Appropriate Technology elevates values of resilience, community, decentralization, and employment over profit and centralization. The movement came to have a presence in the U.S. as well, with organizations like Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas (ATTRA), and with ideas that have permeated (or at least co-evolved with) the broader sustainable agriculture movement.
In the current cultural and historical moment, what I would like to propose is a renewed and refreshed appropriate technology movement. A movement that not only questions and offers alternatives to centralized industrial and agricultural technology, but that challenges the current centralization of power by communication and information tech monopolies. Developing and using open source, decentralized, and privacy-conscious software is an important part of finding a better way forward. But so much of what needs to be addressed is cultural and even spiritual. With this in mind it is my belief that sustainable agriculture belongs at the center of such a movement.
AI is at the forefront of an effort to massively confuse and disorient people in the pursuit of centralized power and profit. Farming is the opposite. Farming, and I’ll include gardening here as well, offers direct connection with the sources of our sustenance: the land, the soil, the ecosystems, the animals, plants, microbes and insects that we all rely on. You wouldn’t know it from most content on the internet, but these are still at the center of what is physically going on for all people. Farmers understand this, and part of what we offer the rest of society is this knowledge and the ability to feel and articulate it. In contrast to the vision of the future that AI presents, there is the potential in agricultural life and work for the kind of connection, meaning, empowerment, and grounding that our society so strongly lacks and needs. While the tech industry offers the hope of a centralized AI superintelligence that will somehow solve all our problems, the sustainable agriculture movement offers thousands, millions of appropriate technology innovators: farmers and thinkers who are grounded in soil, plants, ecosystems, and agrarian culture.
Now to tie it back to seeds – I am a seed grower and this is a seed catalog.
Seeds are powerful. The seeds we have today are the means by which we will feed ourselves next year, and all the years after that. Physically, culturally, and spiritually they are the embodiment of power and potential. In a culture that is increasingly cut off from the sources of our sustenance, seeds offer a clear and tangible sense of connection. They are a link to the past, to our seed keeping and plant breeding ancestors who worked with the living world to sustain their communities. Good seed stewardship today is a responsibility we hold that links us to future generations. Seeds stand to be a central focus point for efforts to re-ground and re-connect our culture and create sustainable and healthy futures. In the sustainable and organic farming movements, and the appropriate technology movement, if we are to be successful, we have to have clarity and focus around seeds.
The technology of open pollinated seeds, as opposed to hybrid seeds, is important to consider in this discourse. Hybrids lend themselves to centralization. The developer of a hybrid can (and usually does) keep the identity of the parent lines secret, ensuring ongoing control of the variety. The upside is that this brings in money to fund more research and development. One downside though is that centralized solutions aren’t likely to work optimally in each of many diverse climates and applications. Another is that when a farmer comes to rely on a hybrid they become more vulnerable to the decisions of a far-away company, including potential discontinuation of the variety. Taken as a whole, when we rely on hybrids and centralized seed development, we lose seed stewardship culture, and the resilience and empowerment that come with it.
Open pollinated seeds (OPs), on the other hand, carry that promise of resilience and empowerment. Anyone who has seeds of a variety has the potential to carry that variety forward. The same OP seedstock can become adapted to many different environments and microclimates. If many people are doing seed work in this way it also becomes feasible to rely on your neighbor and network for a resupply of seeds if you lose your stock or if you want to introduce new genetics. In contrast to hybrids however, OP seed models can lack a clear method for supporting the concentrated innovation and research that is also needed for good outcomes. For open pollinated seed systems to reach their potential – if we are to tap into the benefits I mentioned above, some concerted organizing and collective intention needs to be present.
Unfortunately, OP seed systems have also been heavily impacted by globalized corporate economic frameworks. In some parts of the world it is actually illegal to sell or share OP farmer varieties, and large seed corporations are trying to introduce these kind of laws wherever they can. This is not the case in the U.S., but corporate models are at play in other ways. Here the reality is that a large proportion of seeds, hybrid and OP alike, are produced overseas to utilize cheaper labor markets. This is something that needs to be understood and addressed in the sustainable and organic farming movements. I think that the needed next step is to make clarity and transparency about seed sources standard practice that everyone expects and asks for. This will enable people to seek out and to value quality seed work that is likely to be appropriate to their conditions. Understanding and assigning value to seed work is a prerequisite for creating ways to support it – whether through seed purchases, through public funding, through movement and cultural understandings, or by other means.
The flow of seed stewardship and seed sourcing, however, is complicated. There is not only the question of who grew the seeds you hold in your hand, but of who has been stewarding and selecting the strain in an ongoing way over multiple years (they might or might not be the same person or people). And who kept and developed the variety, or its parents, further back in time? To be able to understand and answer these questions, and to assign value in a constructive and accurate way, what we need is somewhat more complex than transparency – it might be better thought of as seed literacy or as building culture around seeds.*
The date of the utopian agrarian vision that Wes Jackson articulated in New Roots for Agriculture was 2030. Most of it has not come to pass, but there is one piece that is relatively on track. Part of Jackson’s vision was the development of productive perennial grain, legume, and oilseed crops in an effort to solve the problem of erosion caused by tillage. The Land Institute, founded by Wes and Dana Jackson in Salina, Kansas in 1976, has since made significant progress in the breeding and development of perennial wheatgrass (kernza), perennial wheat, perennial sorghum, and perennial sunflowers, among others. It is interesting and inspiring to me that seed development is the part of the vision that has been accessible to work on and where tangible results could be achieved. It is essential to have good work to do, and to achieve successes, even as we may encounter roadblocks in other areas. All this encourages a belief I have: seeds are something to rally around and to build from in the broader work that is ahead – the work of creating sustainable, connected, grounded, functional culture and ecology. And while we’re at it let’s reclaim the concept of technology for things that are appropriate to healthy human society and healthy ecosystems – for innovation that is empowering, ecological, meaningful, community-minded and well-considered. Yes, the tech innovators of the future are sustainable farmers.
*[With that in mind, here are a few recommendations for further exploration and inquiry about seeds: Turtle Tree Seeds, Adaptive Seeds, Truelove Seeds, Peace Seedlings, Sylvan Roots, Sistah Seeds, Experimental Farm Network, Working Food, Driftless Seeds, and Siskiyou Seeds are all seed companies that have been an inspiration to me for the quality of the work they do, and for their clarity on seed sourcing. There are many other great projects – this is just a starting place. The Bauta Initiative on Canadian Seed Security and Organic Seed Alliance both have good archives of informational and how-to materials. Seed Worker Organizing (seedworkers.org) is a project I’m part of that aims to organize mutual support among seed growers, and to advocate for better economic frameworks. Local Seeds Coalition (localseeds.org) is initiating a new seed source labeling campaign. The Seed Garden: The Art and Practice of Seed Saving is a good general introduction and reference book, and Carol Deppe’s books on plant breeding and gardening are interesting and inspiring.]