Working With What Is: Site Specific Plant Selection, Landrace Breeding, and Creating a Resilient Future

The Path of Least Resistance

Some time ago, I was dispensing some free advice regarding a proposed meadow conversion with a prospective client. The terrain in question was a former hay field with hospitable soil in a rural corner of eastern Pennsylvania.

She was nervous and unsure about her vision for the site, and in an effort to lighten the load, I offered, “There are many ways to create a meadow depending on your available resources, but at the very least, rest assured there are already meadow plants out there, just waiting.”

She didn’t verbally respond right away, but the narrowing of her gaze, and the incredulous half smile beginning to take shape on her face, bore a clear message; she would like her money back.

I’ve noticed this aversion to the path of least resistance before. There is a persistent notion that in order for our efforts on the land to be worthwhile, they must be a big lift. The notion, so weighted with assumed responsibility as it is, is worth putting down. On the other side of the table is a conversation with the wild world, just waiting.

On that farm in a rural corner of eastern Pennsylvania, in the years, decades, or even centuries since a tapestry of meadow plants, wildflowers, and perennial grasses have grown, their seeds lay dormant. They’ve remained hidden from the sun beneath a layer of sod as the annual grasses and grains waxed between cresting and felling season after season. Throughout that time, other meadow plant seeds from adjacent field edges flew in on the wind, sewed to a rough blade of grass, and fell to the ground, moving with gravity deeper into the earth. These are the ancestral seed lineages of here; they are the tenacious and persistent outliers flying in on the winds. Put more succinctly: they are what grows well here. Wherever here happens to be.

Site Specific Selection

Our inspiration to grow elderberry as our primary crop at Fields Without Fences was informed very basically from the observable reality that it was already growing on site. Our initial farm site was incredibly challenging to cultivate - historically farmed, degraded, and maintaining zero inches of topsoil. We considered the elderberry persisting in hedges across the farm a direct communication with the land, and went on to plant many different wild and named varieties on test plots throughout the farm.

Our favorite plants are the ones that grow with abandon. The persistent specimens that thrive on neglect, and remain tenacious in the face of pest and plague. The ones we’re surprised to learn are still there - this is where we gravitate. Once you begin a course on the path of least resistance, it has a certain magnetism.

The improved varieties cross pollinate with the wild ones and we collect their berries for seed. These seeds contain a bespoke genetic code of enhanced features uniquely suited to the conditions of our site. I plant these seeds as I see fit, the birds do as well, and what emerges is a thrilling conversation and captivating to and fro with the land.

Landrace Breeding

Landrace breeding refers to the practice of working with local, naturally adapted plant or animal varieties that have evolved over time in specific environments. These landrace varieties are typically the result of generations of natural selection, shaped by factors like climate, soil, pests, and traditional farming practices. The key idea behind landrace breeding is that these varieties are well-suited to the local conditions, making them resilient and hardy.

This process is familiar work. Humans have been saving seed and making selections based on preferred characteristics (commonly, fruit size, heartiness, palatability, pest and disease resistance), and sowing successive generations in an intergenerational process of landrace breeding throughout time. On the North American continent alone, it’s understood that Indigenous cultures once cultivated domesticated species of goosefoot, little barley, sumpweed, maygrass, and erect knotweed for thousands of years.* All of these domesticated crops have since rewilded, losing some of their previous qualities - yet their wildness is precisely what enables them to adapt and persist in their changing locales.

This is one of the essential qualities of a truly regenerative agriculture. Productive ecosystems that can regenerate themselves in an organic and perpetual manner with little input. Plant breeding in industrial agriculture has developed crops that rely on many inputs in the form of irrigation, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers - that may become less viable in a world with finite resources. Landrace crops, on the other hand, are often naturally pest-resistant and drought-tolerant due to their co-evolution with local ecosystems. And the process of saving, trading, and selling seeds necessarily retains local knowledge transference and genetic diversity.

Author, Lindsay Napolitano on the farm

Future Resilience

The climate is changing. Each season takes on an increasingly novel expression. The droughts are longer, the springs are colder, the years are hotter. We can make estimations, but as the world unfolds a complete knowing of the future escapes us until the moment it becomes the present.

Named varieties become named varieties because they have virtues that overlap with the demands of agriculture, such as high yields, uniform ripening, and large fruit. They are precious specimens that are often propagated through cuttings, which means every plant is genetically identical. On the other hand, wild species, or improved landrace species can retain a more complex genetic profile, in addition to other virtues of their own like a robust flavor spectrum, or a higher nutrient density. On the farm, it takes all kinds. And in an uncertain world, diversity fills in the gaps.

On the farm we leave space open for exchange. The work I do with the emergent ecology in the form of plant selection and propagation feels conversational, as if there were a real to and fro commencing between myself, and everything else in the world. Who or what is it that I’m speaking with? All myriad of influences leading to the arrival of a particular plant, in a particular place - and the enormity of it is magnificent.

What is, isn’t less so, just because it is.

Reference:

https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-39.4.549

By Lindsay Napolitano, 2025