Johnny’s Selected Seeds

= "a leader in the agricultural small-scale tool field" + an employee-owned company.

Description

Cara Parks:

"Some businesses are already catering to this small but significant niche market. (About one percent of farmland in the United States is made up of farms under 10 acres.) Johnny’s Selected Seeds, which operates near Coleman’s farm in Maine, is a leader in the small-scale tool field. Adam Lemieux, Johnny’s tools and supplies manager, has watched interest in this field expand. “In the last 10 years there’s been a lot of push toward scale-appropriate tools for small commercial growers,” he says. To respond to this newfound interest, Johnny’s aims to design new tools that can revolutionize the way some small farms operate, even if it means, as he says, “reinventing the wheel.”

Recently, the company began selling a small greens harvester, “a tough nut to crack,” according to Lemieux. With early versions of the tool, small salad greens became wedged together as they were cut and didn’t drop into a harvesting basket. Coleman and Lemieux tinkered with the idea off and on for years, until a teenage farmer from Tennessee spoke with Coleman and decided to take a crack at the problem.

Jonathan Dysinger’s design uses two stainless-steel bandsaw blades that were designed to cut through frozen boneless meat. It turns out this form of blade has scallops just deep enough to tackle the average salad-green stem. He also added a brush that pushes the greens through the blades and into the waiting basket. Dysinger’s Quick Cut Greens Harvester is a huge time-saver for small farmers." (http://the-magazine.org/22/hoe-down)