Philip Rutter

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  • Founder of Badersett Research, a hazelnut and chestnut breeding operation. His work revolves around breeding disease and cold resistant perennial plants - chestnuts and hazelnuts - as a replacement for corn and soybean annual agriculture (average USA erosion is 5 tons of topsoil loss per acre). His plants come true from seed. According to Philip, this is unique in that ALL perennial plant breeding today is based hybrids which do not come true from seed (all clonal propagation) - meaning that ALL such new crops are destined for catastriphic crop failure (as is happening) because only seed-grown plants provide genetic diversity that can cope with changing conditions and adapt to diseases over time. From my understanding, this is a Nobel Peace Prize - but since his time scale is 500 years, nobody is listening. He promotes the topic of crowdsourced breeding, where like in history, entire communities bring back plant stewardship back into their culture. Disclosure: OSE is interested in trial runs of his hazels and other chestnuts to determine feasibility of perennial polycultures as staple crops at our site.