Project Overview
Information Products
Commodities
- Vegetables: brussel sprouts, cabbages, cauliflower, cucurbits, garlic, cover crops, celeriac, sprouting broccoli and chicories
Practices
- Crop Production: cover crops, crop improvement and selection, crop rotation, varieties and cultivars
- Education and Training: demonstration, workshop
- Production Systems: organic agriculture
Proposal abstract:
Our goal is to help farmers select cultivars for summer and winter vegetables, and cover crops
for irrigated Organic fresh vegetable cropping systems. We will engage farmers, seed companies,
chefs, wholesale distributors and breeders in the cultivar evaluation and breeding process.
We will develop a holistic Organic vegetable and cover crop trial program. We will do this by
growing multiple cultivars and breeding lines at OSU’s North Willamette Research & Extension
Center (NWREC). We will evaluate the quality and adaptability of summer and winter
vegetables and cover crops in the Willamette Valley. Cooperating farmers, seed companies,
chefs, wholesale buyers and other agricultural professionals will help to identify priority
vegetable and cover crop cultivars and evaluation criteria.
We will host summer and winter vegetable and cover crop field days. These events will provide
educational hubs for sharing trial results and other relevant sustainable agriculture information.
We will post findings from our cultivar evaluations online.
Since 2014, we have hosted summer vegetable variety field days every year at NWREC, and one
winter vegetable variety field day in 2016. These trials have relied on seed company donations.
This proposal would help us refine these trials, and extend them to include winter vegetables and
cover crops. They would also allow us to develop evaluation criteria for all of these crops, and
publish one year of data. This would also allow us to provide seed and on-farm evaluation
protocols for farmers interested in trying vegetable and cover crop varieties on their farm.
This would enable us to evaluate genetic performance in whole-farm Organic fresh vegetable
cropping systems in the Willamette Valley. By coordinating on-farm variety trials, and including
farmers, chefs and wholesale distributors in project priorities and evaluation criteria, we can also
support participatory plant breeding in Oregon.
Project objectives from proposal:
Prioritize winter vegetables, and cover crops with farmers and seed
company staff, prioritize traits to evaluate in trials (i.e. taste, yield, N
content, pest tolerance, etc.), draft crop evaluation criteria
August, 2018
Coordinate seed donations to collaborating farmers interested in testing
winter vegetable and cover crop cultivars on their farms.
March, 2019
Prioritize summer vegetables and cover crops, and draft crop evaluation
criteria.
Feb, 2019
Coordinate seed donations to collaborating farmers interested in testing
summer vegetable and cover crop cultivars on their farms.
March, 2019
Grow trials Year-round
Prioritize summer vegetable and cover crops with farmers and seed
company staff, prioritize traits to evaluate in trials (i.e. taste, yield, N
content, pest tolerance, etc.), draft crop evaluation criteria
Winter, 2018
Support on-farm winter evaluations and coach farmers for the field day Spring, 2019
Host winter vegetable and cover crop field day Spring, 2019
Evaluate cover crop and winter vegetable trials Spring, 2019
Support on-farm summer evaluations and coach farmers for the field day Sep, 2019
Host summer vegetable and cover crop field day Sep, 2019
Evaluate cover crop and summer vegetable trials Sep, 2019
Format and publish variety trial reports online