Our breeding work starts from a simple premise: the traits that let a crop hold yield under heat, drought, and thin soils are already present in nature. Recovering them is cheaper, faster, and more durable than trying to buy resilience every season with more water, more chemistry, and more cost.
Trait recovery
We identify and reintroduce traits — heat tolerance, drought tolerance, tolerance to alkaline and salt-affected soils, low-fertility performance — from species and landraces that evolved under the conditions modern commercial lines have lost touch with.
Targeted refinement
We refine those traits using modern marker-assisted selection and disciplined phenotyping, not at the expense of yield but in service of it.
Field-ready delivery
We only advance material that performs on a working field, not just in a research plot. Agronomy protocols are developed in parallel with the germplasm.
- 01STEP
Germplasm scouting
Public collections, North American native Lupinus diversity, international partners, and on-farm material with documented resilience under stress.
- 02STEP
Multi-environment trials
Stress-weighted trial networks across the working lands of the American West.
- 03STEP
Agronomy co-development
Planting, fertility, and harvest protocols hardened alongside the genetics.
- 04STEP
Market-matched release
Commercial release only when processor and buyer demand is already lined up against seed supply.
Built on cofounders' NSF-funded lupin research.
The genetic foundations we commercialize come from the cofounders' NSF-funded lupin research and direct field experience with the species we are bringing forward — linking Old World sweet backgrounds to adaptations recovered from New World relatives. The academic work is done. The fieldwork is done. What is left is disciplined execution at commercial scale.
“Domestication of Western Lupine”
- Award
- NSF Award #2414864
- Awardee
- Conducted under Manzanita Cooperative