Stewarding and Improving Asian Specialty Crops with Second Generation Seeds

Assistant Professor Ga Young Chung, Department of Asian American Studies, College of Letters and Sciences, with collaborators Professor E. Charles Brummer, Department of Plant Sciences, College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences, Katharina Ullmann, Director, UC Davis Student Farm, Antonia Palkovic, Researcher, Department of Plant Sciences, and Laura Roser, Junior Specialist, Department of Plant Sciences.
Partner: Second Generation Seeds

Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities have long contributed to California agriculture and cuisine, but the legacy of sociopolitical challenges, including exclusionary land and citizenship laws, low working wages, and language barriers in accessing resources still impacts AAPI farmers today (Tsu 2013; Garcia 2012; Daniels 2011).

Many crops with cultural significance to the AAPI community have not been bred for production in the United States, resulting in a limited selection of varieties of culturally relevant seeds available to farmers, especially those that are adapted to sustainable agricultural systems. In this project, we plan to establish a participatory breeding and evaluation program in collaboration with community partners, AAPI farmers. This project ultimately aims to: 1) produce new knowledge that combines academic knowledge with the knowledge and rich cultural legacy embedded in this historically marginalized community, and 2) increase crop diversity so that AAPI farmers can easily adapt and increase farm profitability while building climate resilience and food sovereignty into farming systems.

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