by Kana Miller, CFSA Local Food Distribution Coordinator | Wednesday, May 18, 2022 —
Kristyn Leach, farmer at Namu Farm (Winters, CA) and founder of Second Generation Seeds. Credit: Kristyn Leach.
Growing and eating specialty varieties of Asian vegetables connects me to my Japanese identity. On the small vegetable farm that my partner and I manage in Lewisville, NC, selecting Asian seeds is fun and deeply personal. As I flip through seed catalogs, I think about the foods I want to eat and the vegetables I’d like to share with my Japanese mother. I imagine the flavors and textures I want to invoke with my cooking.
Last summer, I tried growing three different Japanese varieties of winter squash. I carefully selected the squash seeds from Kitazawa Seed Company: Blue Kuri Kabocha, Uchiki Kuri, and Shishigatani. I learned a lot during this experiment. I remember the joy and heartache of starting seeds and rearing transplants. The joy that came from the first sight of cotyledons; the despair from scorching a couple of young plants in the hot summer sun after planting; and finally, the pride during harvest and zeal while carefully selecting recipes to test out the squash flavors.
(Left) A close-up of one of the winter squash growing at Kana’s farm in Lewisville, NC. (Right) Mature squash plants later in the season. Credit: Kana Miller.
My desire to learn more about preserving and growing specialty, heirloom Asian vegetables has grown with the increasing popularity of Asian vegetables and herbs in the sustainable agriculture and culinary scenes. In this context, it was with great enthusiasm that I sat down for a conversation with Kristyn Leach, farmer for Namu Farm and founder of Second Generation Seeds. We talked about Kristyn’s partnership with Kitazawa and the seed trialing process that eventually led to the development of Second Generation as its own company. Kristyn also shared the questions she often asks herself when running her farm and seed company, and we declared our love for soybeans!
CFSA: I’m so inspired by what you’re doing and excited to speak with you. Your approach to this work resonates with many things I’ve been thinking about over the past few years, as a biracial Japanese American, living on a small vegetable farm, and in my food systems work.
Kristyn Leach: I’m glad to hear that. That’s been the whole goal with moving forward with all these things for Second Generation. I think about the way it felt for me to see Kitazawa always selling Asian vegetables when I was younger. I think for us, it was trying to think about what would let somebody who discovered our project feel equally excited, if not more excited…If you can connect through all of these different nodes and give people access points to broader community building. That’s pretty much our main aspiration behind doing this.
CFSA: Would you mind sharing an introduction to Namu Farm and Second Generation Seeds for those who aren’t as familiar with you and your work?
Leach: I farm in the central valley of California, so just super hot Mediterranean climate. The farm is in Yolo County, and Yolo is the Patwin word for a place abounding with rushes …. I lease land from someone who, in his retirement, started an olive farm growing olives for olive oil. I originally started the farm because I had been managing other farms for a couple of years. Being able to carve out nice little bits of space to grow some different Korean crops, mostly Perilla and Chamoe, Korean melons.
I had moved from Washington state, and when I moved to California, I had never experienced anywhere that had the kind of food culture that the Bay Area has. Being curious and starting to grow a lot of Asian crops 13 years ago also coincided with a lot of young and inspiring Asian American cooks and chefs starting to ascend into running different kitchens and opening their own restaurants. It felt like a really nice synergy because my curiosity and interest were met by other people’s enthusiasm.
It gave me a little bit of the confidence I needed to keep gradually scaling it [the farm] up or even giving me a sense that I could reasonably do this. All the ways I saw different people and their journeys to being farmers—I didn’t relate to a lot of that. Recognizing that there was this demand and people … that were bringing their own stories, experiences, [and] histories to the food they were making was just incredibly inspiring.
I was really fascinated with the seed keepers who did come here, and on any little patch of land, what did they choose to grow? … Korean Perilla was one of those plants where for me, not growing up in Korean culture, … it was clear to me that it is distinctly Korean.
Kristyn stands in a field of Korean Perilla. Credit: Kristyn Leach.
I ended up becoming close with the owners of Kitazawa … I started doing their field trials—running trials for different crop varieties, giving them feedback, and helping to shape the types of criteria that a small(-scale) farmer would select for. It was eye-opening because, for my farm, we are trying to minimize tillage. So we have some really specific methods we utilize, but more importantly, I think we have specific principles we try to adhere to. We think about all the long geological processes that shape that soil and environmental factors. We looked a lot at the dynamics of that ecosystem, and it was just interesting to see what did well and what didn’t in doing these trials—especially for a lot of Korean varieties. I have some seeds that have been cultivated by peasants and farmers in Korea that are also practicing this style of natural farming. When I would trial some of those varieties against some of the commercially available ones, it just really stood out.
For me, trials were the cornerstone of refining and optimizing (my) farm. The better you get at asking questions that guide a trial, the better you get at determining what observations you’re looking for You can start chiseling away at all of these different types of inquiries. What emerges is meaningful information about the architecture of your farming practice …. Learning how to run trials … helped me better understand what was going to bolster resilience on my farm and set my farm up to be as successful as possible.
“Getting to work with this grandma farmer that I stayed with in Korea, [when] sorting beans, “oh, this one’s for tofu, this one’s for soy sauce, this one’s for meju.” There are all of these different varieties [of soybeans] and this specialized knowledge lends itself to this way of using them.”
We did a trial of Korean melons for several years, and most of the available varieties are hybrid cultivars. I had a couple of landraces that were held by peasant organizers in Korea. Something surprising to me was the way the harvest distribution was. A lot of times, all we look to capture when you look at a seed description is something like yield, but we don’t parse out how that yield is distributed. For a small(-scale) farmer, that makes a huge difference. For so many cultivars, they’re bred and center larger scale, predominantly mechanized harvesting and transplanting. Part of that is to have a super synchronous fruit set. I didn’t need something like that to happen. I didn’t want 1,400 pounds of Korean melons all at once. I started thinking about how that yield and harvest distribution dictates how you’re breaking up the labor for each crop and the resources and inputs that go into it. Why is that desirable, and who is that desirable for? What is this designed for and whose point of view is reflected?
Those became really meaningful questions, not just about how small-scale, organic, or agroecological farmers were represented, but also from a cultural perspective too. There’s [the question of] whose perspective is shaping agronomic traits of value, behaviors, and characteristics, but also whose palette is being catered to, and who’s deciding what is a utility that is valued. It [these questions] sort of unraveled all of these things of realizing how narrowly curated what we have access to is.
When I was doing a lot of trials, realizing the Asian vegetables that are finding a wider audience in places like the U.S., and starting to see this proliferation of Asian vegetables at farmers markets, I realized a lot of that was still shaped by palatability to the West. To look at Asian mustard greens [in seed catalogs], the number one application was for baby leaf. Mild was the keyword that was listed first as a desirable trait. So you have a lot of selection criteria then being shaped by [people] wanting to toss it in a salad or braising mix when mustards in so many other parts of the world are subject to really complex and interesting fermentation processes. The sense of who gets to determine what [traits] are useful … is a form of power.
Coming back to your question, Second Generation was trying to hold all of these things when we access and broker Asian varieties to the U.S. Who is still calling the shots, so to speak? So when we started Second Generation, it was because I had been doing these trials and … [realizing] there’s probably room for us to focus on small farms and heirlooms and build systems that improve heirloom seed stock for this ever-changing climate.
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CFSA: On the Second Generation Seeds website, you have a resource called “Grower’s Guides.” One of these guides is on soybeans, and it covers the plant’s cultural and historical context, a botanical overview, and an in-depth growing guide. I love soybeans but feel like it is incredibly villainized in the U.S. I’d love it if you could talk a little about soybeans and why you decided to feature it in a Grower’s Guide.
Leach: I love soybeans, and I always say, ‘hate the game and not the player’ because it is not right they get the reputation that they do. There’s so much weird void of logic in the ways that the term “plant-based” has become something that’s on everybody’s tongue. We would never look at the ingenuity of how many applications soy has fed. It is hard to villainize it because, for me, it feels like the backbone of Korean food culture. Getting to work with this grandma farmer that I stayed with in Korea, [when] sorting beans, “oh, this one’s for tofu, this one’s for soy sauce, this one’s for meju.” There are all of these different varieties [of soybeans] and this specialized knowledge lends itself to this way of using them.
The U.S. soybean was one of the first crops that ever went into the young USDA’s breeding programs. Over the span of 30 years, [there were] multiple expeditions going to Korea, Japan, and China, collecting 6,000 distinct kinds of cultivars. Then you look at where we’re sitting today, and the entire North American gene pool of soy is derived from only 19 of those varieties. So, from 6,000 to 19 …, that’s an enormous winnowing of genetic material, unique traits, and novel alleles.
“We cannot say that we have any shot at preserving or building upon the biodiversity we need for life on the planet to continue to survive without having more diversity in those perspectives.”
That is what puts us on this precipice of vulnerability to a mass catastrophic event. There’s mounting pressure that is specific to how climate change impacts agriculture in all different parts of the world. When you have something that has such a narrow base of genetics, that susceptibility to different pests is going to be so problematic, and you’re not going to be able to adequately and elegantly keep pace with the challenges …. We cannot say that we have any shot at preserving or building upon the biodiversity we need for life on the planet to continue to survive without having more diversity in those perspectives.
CFSA: How can farmers in the Carolinas and Southeast get involved in your work?
Leach: Whether that’s a collaboration across different farms or collaborations with different community stakeholders, we’re trying to find ways to create hubs where those collaborations can happen. Through those collaborations, we’re trying to find other economic levers that help small farmers introduce seed programs on their farms, where a lot of that research and development isn’t being compensated for. We want to have more of a Southeast hub, but we only know a couple of farms there. When doing trials, it’s good to have all of the varieties we’re developing become acclimated to different environments.
To learn more about Second Generation’s Grower’s Guides and to join their Seed Stewards program, check out https://www.secondgenerationseeds.com/.
You can follow Kristyn Leach on Instagram at @namufarm and Second Generation Seeds at @secondgenerationseeds.
If you’re interested in growing specialty Asian varieties in the Carolinas, email Kana Miller at [email protected]