2025 Spring Homeland | High Desert Seed 

Laura Parker is going into her tenth growing season with High Desert Seed + Gardens. She has expanded her seed offerings from the 20 or 30 varieties she started with to around 300 varieties. She also sells produce grown on her farm near Paonia, Colorado at farmers’ markets, to regional restaurants and to local foods distributors. 

High Desert Seed operates differently than most seed companies. 

“We are farmers and seed growers first, and we are actively working to support a more diverse seed system,” Parker said. “We grow about 90 percent of the seed we sell ourselves.”  

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She has built a network of regional seed growers who produce the other 10 percent of the High Desert seed offering. The collection can be found in over 40 locations in four western states and online at highdesertseed.com 

“Part of my mission is to get people to grow seed,” Parker said. 

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According to Parker, most commercially available garden seed is internationally grown and by increasingly fewer companies. This monopolization of the seed industry puts food sources at risk, she believes.  

“A lot of seed is produced in Europe, particularly in the Netherlands, and in South America in the central valley of Chile. A lot of what is grown in the U.S. is produced in California and the Pacific Northwest,” she said. “Sometimes you have just one grower producing the entire seed supply for most every company.” 

In the 1990s, a wild gourd got crossed with Delicata squash in the fields of a big company producing the seed supply for “pretty much everyone across the U.S.” The result was inedible, giving people who ate it diarrhea. This is a practical example of the consequences of consolidation in the seed industry.  

“They had to go back to small growers like us to replenish the seed,” Parker said. “This story is very telling of what can happen when only one grower is producing seed for everyone.” 

Background 

Parker’s family moved to the High Desert from a farm in Appalachia and started a grass fed and finished cattle operation in Colorado.  

“We were early adopters of holistic management practices,” Parker said. “My family believes in diversity; we managed for a diversity of forbs and grasses. Now I grow for diversity in our food crops.”  

Gardening in a different climate proved challenging. 

Understanding some basic plant breeding terminology is helpful if you plan to save seeds.  
Open Pollinated: a plant variety that is not hybridized and will reproduce true to type from seed, provided it does not get cross pollinated by another plant.  
Self Pollinating: A plant with both male and female parts within the same flower, such as tomatoes or legumes.  
F-1 hybrid: a first generation cross of two genetic lines. 
Landrace: a traditional variety not genetically bred which has evolved different traits naturally and adapted over time to the local climate and soil conditions. 
Pollination: the transfer of pollen from anther to stigma, allowing fertilization and the production of seeds and offspring. 
Pollinators: the means by which pollen is moved, including wind, water, insects, birds, bats, and humans. 
Annual: Annual plants complete their life cycle in one year, from germination to seed production to death.  
Biennial: Biennial plants require two years for their life cycle. In the first growing season, they produce roots, stems, and leaves. In the second season, they produce seed. 
Perennial: Perennial plants live for many growing seasons, generally producing new growth each year. 

“My mom and dad were used to growing a garden in West Virginia,” she said. “As a young girl I watched my mother struggling to grow a garden in the High Desert. Some varieties would do better than others, but many of the things they were used to growing didn’t do well at 7000 feet.” 

Parker admits that she was a reluctant helper in the garden when she was growing up. 

“I was not always that excited when mom asked me to come weed with her,” she said.  

Parker recalls collecting Columbine seed pods with her grandmother, and at age six, planted sunflowers in a corner of the family garden. She saved the seeds and planted them again. 

“They would get all crossed up and wouldn’t be like the ones I planted the first year,” she said. “I was hooked, enthralled with the magic of plants and seeds.” 

While attending Colorado College, in Colorado Springs, Parker grew concerned as she learned that many of her fellow students and colleagues didn’t know where their food came from.  

“It puts us all at risk when people don’t know where food comes from,” she said. “A colleague of mine and I got together and started a program called Food Chained. We held local food events, took students to farms and brought in a whole bunch of different speakers including Allen Savory, Michael Pollan and Joel Salatin. We had over 30 food related events over the course of two years.” 

During this time, Parker also connected with local farmers and worked on an organic farm south of Pueblo. 

“They had a pretty big seed garlic operation and were getting into growing more seed varieties at the time. Dan, my boss, was gone for a month and a half, and basically gave me the seed saving book Seed to Seed and said, ‘Here, this will help you.’ I got thrown in at the deep end.” 

During that summer, Parker reached out to Vandana Shiva in India. Parker asked Shiva, a food sovereignty advocate, environmental activist, scholar and author to come speak to the student group. 

“It took a lot of effort to bring her to campus. When she came, she was super impressive and inspiring. She invited me to come to India to work on her farm after college.” 

Parker traveled to Navdanya, the education farm where Shiva teaches seed saving and organic farming techniques and spent several months working there. The experience opened her eyes in new ways to the need for diversity, independence and self-sustainability in agriculture in new ways. 

“I spent time working in her seed banks during the season after rice harvest,” she said. “The farm I was on maintained 600 varieties of rice: purple rice, red rice, darker orangey-tan rice, short grain, long grain, all the different things. Witnessing in person all the diversity that exists in a crop that we think of as solely white rice was eye opening. It was eye opening to witness just how much diversity exists or perhaps existed in our domesticated food crops.  ” 

Parker learned how quickly the crop diversity and  knowledge of seed saving disappeared, even in an ag-based country like India where a high percentage of the population is involved in agriculture. Estimates vary, but in the past, India was home to tens of thousands of different varieties of rice. 

“To understand how the varieties of rice in India have diminished and much of the diversity has been lost was shocking,” she said. “In a generation or two, the knowledge of seed saving gets lost and has to be relearned. People are losing the knowledge and the culture that goes with it.” 

After Parker returned from India, she knew she needed to be doing the same work in the U.S.  

“I had a kernel of an idea that I was going to start a seed business,” she said. “I ended up working for the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association as their executive director for a bit, did some local food forums connecting buyers with local producers in the Four Corners region, Pueblo, and the Colorado Springs area as well, and was hired as a consultant to connect bigger buyers with local growers.”  

She worked on another farm in Colorado before moving back home to help her parents. 

“Eventually, Dad was like, ‘When are you going to come and start farming at our place?'”  

Parker joked about becoming the family “turncoat” when she became a seed farmer, but the holistic practices and passion for diversity instilled in her childhood still drive her management practices. 

“The same thing underpins what I do: really caring about [genetic] diversity and having [varietal] diversity in our food system, especially growing in a marginal climate,” she said.  

The High Desert climate comes with wide extremes of temperature and weather patterns, low humidity and low rainfall. Crops, both grains and garden vegetables, need to be resilient. Resiliency comes from genetic diversity. 

“I’m pushing that edge a lot,” Parker said. “I try to find varieties from other high desert climates, varieties that do well here, and continue to select for that. We want to see vigor and adaptation to the unique conditions that we have here.” 

Seed Saving  

Parker teaches seed saving classes and encourages her students to define their goals before they start saving seed. 

“If your goal as a small farmer is to save money on a salad mix, you might not care about growing some different mustards together and getting them all crossed up,” she said. “If your goal is to preserve a family heirloom, you might want to pay more attention to population size and isolation.” 

Online sources can be a good starting place for a beginning seed saver. 

“You can easily access basic guides to seed saving on the Organic Seed Alliance website,” Parker said. “I also just try to be attuned and study plants. Knowing what are self-pollinating varieties and what plants are going to be outcrossed by pollinators and wind is a good place to start.” 

Self-pollinated crops are an easy way to start saving seeds. These include tomatoes, peas and beans. 

Squash, cucumbers and melons are easy to select for flavor and save the seeds from, but some varieties will cross-pollinate if they are not isolated or hand pollinated. 

“With squash, you need to be attuned to the different families,” Parker said. 

If you are able to isolate or hand pollinate winter squash varieties, it is easy to select for flavor and storage capacity. 

“That is something we definitely do when growing our stock seed,” Parker said. “We hold it through the entire winter and only pull from the ones not showing any rot.” 

Squash are then cooked and tasted and seed is grown out from the squashes with the best flavor. 

“We really want to be selecting squash for taste and storability.” 

Often when companies are growing seed at a larger scale, they’re not doing that selection part of the process, Parker said. 

When growing spring radish to seed, she lifts the roots, looking at color, shape and size, and only the well-formed roots get planted back out and allowed to go to seed. 

“Radishes are a crop that is really important to select carefully,” Parker said. “They can shift really quickly.” 

Corn is one of the crops easily cross-pollinated by wind and insects, but it is possible to isolate corn using time instead of distance. 

“It can be really tricky if you have huge corn growers near you, but if you can plant three weeks after your neighbors plant, you can miss the window when their corn is pollinating. I’ve been able to do that; we’re located in the end of a valley and there’s only one guy in the area growing a little bit of grain corn for his cattle.” 

Biennial crops such as onions, carrots, beets or parsnips are more difficult to save seed from than annual crops, particularly in colder climate regions where they cannot be left in the ground over winter. 

“We grow them just like we would for a garden crop, harvest them, and store all of the selected roots for the winter. Come spring, we plant them back out in the field; we always hope we did it in time to get a little bit of moisture for them. It’s always tricky timing with biennials.” 

Starting a breeding project might become an offshoot of a seed saving venture.  

“You never know,” Parker said. “I think it’s about experimentation and not being afraid to make mistakes. People can take a crop anywhere and select for their own conditions.” 

Parker is experimenting with cowpeas, sesame, tomatoes, dryland rice, quinoa, and developing a half-long parsnip. 

“We have really heavy clay soils here, so growing super-duper long parsnips is quite challenging. When we pull the roots out we select for shape. If weather allows and you have enough snow cover, sometimes you can overwinter biennials under heavy mulch, but not every season. It’s usually not worth the risk so we dig the roots, store them and plant them back out again.” 

Parker’s farm is irrigated, but she puts some crops through intentional drought trials to enhance drought tolerance in them. 

“We’re not dry farming, we call it low irrigation,” she said. “We only water every 15-30 days, and if we get any kind of moisture it restarts the clock. Anything we say is drought tolerant in the catalog is under this regimen when we’re growing it.” 

Tough climates make a good case for varieties that have more genetic resilience in them. 

“Maybe focusing on specific traits makes sense when we have a very calm and consistent climate, but we’re not seeing that,” she said. “We might wish for a more moderate growing season but it seems like we go from extreme to extreme.  

Seed saving is a dying art, and essential to our food sources. 

“Seed saving is a fundamental skill, and having more people save seed is the ultimate goal,” Parker said. “It breeds diversity in selection, and also that deep connection with plants and with your region and what’s going on there.” 

Resources: 
Seed Savers Exchange: https://seedsavers.org/ 
Open Source Seed Initiative: https://osseeds.org/ 
Organic Seed Alliance: https://seedalliance.org/ 
Seed lending library: Many public libraries provide a home for seed collections available to local gardeners. Check with a library near you!