Joseph Lofthouse
Organization: Landrace Seedsman
Location: Paradise, Utah USA
Biography
Joseph Lofthouse grew up on a family farm. Growing conditions are high-altitude brilliantly-sunlit desert mountain valley in Northern Utah with irrigation, clayish-silty soil, super low humidity, short-season, and intense radiant cooling at night. He left the farm to spend two decades working as a research chemist and computer programmer. He returned home to become a sustenance market farmer and landrace seed-developer. Joseph is enamored with landrace growing and is converting every species that he grows into locally-adapted landraces. Promiscuous pollination and ongoing segregation are encouraged in all varieties. Joseph’s style of landrace gardening can best be summed up as throwing a lot of varieties into a field, allowing them to promiscuously cross pollinate, and then through a combination of survival-of-the-fittest and farmer-directed selection saving seeds year after year to arrive at a locally-adapted genetically-diverse population that thrives because it is closely tied to the land, the weather, the pests, and the farmer’s and community’s habits and tastes. Joseph writes the Landrace Gardening Blog for Mother Earth News. http://motherearthnews.com/search.aspx?tags=Lofthouse
