A Maine man who left a significant mark on farms, gardens, plants, seeds and the people who grow them across the country died on June 1 at age 69. John Navazio of Belfast, a plant breeder, professor and author, is remembered by family and colleagues as an enthusiastic resource for organic growers.
He spent the past decade as the plant breeding manager for Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Winslow. He previously worked for the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor and universities and seed companies across the country.
“His whole training was to serve organic farmers,” said his wife, Terri Matson. “He loved farmers.”
His focus on diverse plant varieties, farmer participation in the plant breeding process and education set him apart. Johnny’s called him a bright spirit who provided a blueprint for “countless young farmers” interested in sustainable agriculture, seed saving and plant breeding.
Navazio co-founded the Organic Seed Alliance, a group researching, teaching and promoting seed saving, and wrote “The Organic Seed Grower: A Farmer’s Guide to Vegetable Seed Production.”
Popular plant varieties he developed include Dragon purple carrots, several Swiss chards, Dark Star zucchini, Touchstone Gold beets, Rossa di Milano onions, Hungarian Hot Wax peppers and the Long Pie Pumpkin.
That pumpkin, a well-known baking squash today, originates from one an old Mainer brought to him at the Common Ground Fair from the family garden in the 1980s.
“He just loved working with plants,” said Matson. “He would go to work, come home and go into the garden.”
Navazio grew up in an apartment in Virginia, wanting to be a farmer. On his way to a summer job on a U.S. Forest Service fire crew in college, he saw the name of an organic farm in a grocery store. Navazio went outside to the pay phone, called the farm to ask for a job, and got one, leaving the forest service behind and beginning his agriculture career.
In the 1980s, he started a permaculture course and agriculture program as an adjunct professor at the College of the Atlantic. It was the first of its kind, according to Matson.
“Let’s be honest, lecturing was one of John’s favorite pastimes, and he did it so well,” his obituary noted. “His anecdotes, aphorisms, and theories were colorful, often comical and always entertaining.”
He and Matson met at his birthday party in 1986, which she attended with friends who had just arrived from British Columbia to start a macrobiotic intentional living community in Bar Harbor. The group brought him fresh walnuts as a present. They’d heard he believed all grocery store walnuts were rancid, and so they scoured stores to find some.
“There are a gazillion of those stories,” Matson said. “He was such a character, and that’s why he was so liked by people. He had a big heart.”
A tight-knit community of people in Maine tried to live off the land and shared their knowledge with each other back then, Matson said. Some of them worked at Johnny’s, where Navazio was employed seasonally in the 1980s.
The couple left Maine for Navazio to get his doctorate in plant breeding and plant genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He worked for seed companies and universities while they raised their two daughters Amelia and Zea, now grown.
One of his missions was developing diverse seeds suited to environmental stresses and farm-specific conditions so that growers could profit more.
He was an early adopter of “horizontal resistance” in plant breeding and the first to use it for vegetables. The process develops plants through a “survival of the fittest” model to make them better adapted to different conditions.
Navazio also supported open pollination, meaning plants were pollinated naturally and became more genetically diverse. He practiced “participatory breeding,” which brought farmers into the process.
“He loved making vegetables beautiful, nutritious, and something people could enjoy cooking and eating and ultimately be healthier,” Matson said.
Navazio was always testing the limits of taste, nutrition, and hardiness, Matson said. The family often taste-tested vegetable varieties at home in the kitchen.
In his last 10 years, he saw his work at Johnny’s as the culmination of his life’s research.
“They just provided the best environment for him to hone what it was that he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it,” Matson said.
Johnny’s plans to release several vegetable varieties Navazio developed before his death, according to the company.
The horizontal resistance style of breeding he used to develop them, focused on developing hardy plants, is “very much going to be a big player in the seed industry in the future,” Matson said.
A funeral service was held June 7 at the Baldwin Hill Conservation Cemetery in Fayette.
