our own tastes. Likely it is our love of uniformity. Modern agriculture loves uniformity-the cultivar or variety is the goal. Everything needs to be the same over and over again. Why do all corn fields look alike? That really isn’t how corn grows in the ‘wild’ or left to breed on its own. We made it that way. For the farmer and the consumer uniformity is desirable. Unfortunately it brings us our demise as well. These types of highly homogenized plants with their genetically identical populations makes a response to an environmental calamity difficult if not impossible. We have frozen them in time with little chance of the population as a whole to change. This is what the plant breeder has created.  Come to think of it, where are the new food plants and why don’t we see those replacing our corn and soybean fields as well as finding them available to the gardening public?  They are around in small amounts but it is more or less a highly specialized market. Is it possible we can have a diverse and delicious environment filled with healthy plants? That question was really the beginning of Oikos Tree Crops. My answer was to find and grow these new food plants yet at the same time not ‘breed’ them to any large degree. I wanted to use their wild counterparts to make their culture easier and more successful. The end goal was to make our ‘home’ food production more aligned with the laws of nature. If you are interested in creating, preserving and expanding the limits of new food plants then you have come to the right place. Botany falls away and so does the strict confines of where does a plant grow whether it is defined as local, global, native or exotic. Flavor and nutrition are the new goals. If you want a new crop, you need to start with new seed. This is the goal of Oikos Tree Crops. This was my means to share my personal journey with these plants.