Grower Code: JL

Joseph Lofthouse subsistence farms in Paradise, Utah. He is a seedsman of the highest caliber. He is gracious enough to grow several varieties for the Snake River Seed Co-op, but more importantly, he’s keeping it interesting through his book. Landrace Gardening:Food Security through Biodiversity and Promiscuous Pollination. If you ever need the straight skinny on the most important thing we as seed savers can be doing for the future of agriculture, it’s good to spend a little time with someone like Joseph. While in so much of the seed world the focus is on “maintaining uniformity and varietal purity,” Joseph takes the opposite approach, allowing survival of the fittest selection within wildly crossing varieties to create robust and diverse landraces that provide greater resilience, variety, and delight than a standard, uniform variety. One of Joseph's most recent plant breeding projects is advocating for beautifully promiscuous and tasty tomatoes!