USA
November 10, 2019
Global Results
As winter approaches, we wanted to look back at our 2019 SeedLinked Beta testing and share some fun facts: 14,303 reviews have been sent so far this year across 221 varieties and 15 vegetable crops; 785 people signed up on the platform and 362 of those participants submitted most of the reviews across the US and Canada. Reviews were made across 10 different performance traits and 9 flavor characteristics, and 25 trial managers across Universities, nonprofits, seed banks, seed companies and breeders who managed 57 different trials!
Thank you! The collective intelligence you generated has strong discriminative ability and will help breeders, seed organizations, and growers like you make better decisions in the future.
A new My Trial page
If you reviewed this year and completed your trial, you can already see the live results. Go to “My Trials” and click on “Results” in your list of completed trial.
Our next step at SeedLinked is to direct trial results into an interactive search engine so we can respond to questions like “what red bell pepper does best in my region”, and allow growers to filter by traits such as flavor or disease resistance. You can already see a prototype in your profile in the “Search” tab, though we are working on a much better, more user friendly and interactive version. We’ve always been dedicated to building a collaborative and cooperative platform, so we invite you to help shape it - if you’re interested in being a part of that process to give feedback on some potential designs, please get in touch with us at feedback@seedlinked.com.
Feedback shapes the platform: New review pages
Over the past month we have been in touch with many of you about your user experience using the SeedLinked platform in 2019. We understand that many of you still like to collect data in the field on paper and enter data through our web-based interface, and realize that having a friendly interface is very important to making your experiences on SeedLinked a positive one. A culmination of that feedback process is that we have a new web based My Trials page to submit your reviews. The site will keep evolving and improving, so please keep sending us your feedback on how to make the web-based platform more user friendly. Most importantly, thank you for using the SeedLinked platform and for taking the time to provide feedback!
Outside of the platform
When we’re not on our computers building the platform, we’re also busy in the field evaluating trials, presenting our vision and work to partners and conferences, and looking for funding to support the journey of SeedLinked. We have been investigating new crops including small grains, trees, cover crops and hemp, as well as new geographies like Africa. Over the summer we attended great events that are shaping the future of food and seed such as Foodbytes! Chicago, Stone Barns Young Farmers Conference 2019, BC Seed gathering in Vancouver, and World Veg Center, and over the winter we have several more lined up; we will be also at the OSA conference in Corvallis, OR, the MOSES Organic Farming Conference in La Crosse, WI, and at the Variety Show Case in Portland. We hope to see some of you there - reach out at info@seedlinked if you’d like to meet up at any of those events!
Funding the work of SeedLinked is essential to make this platform keep moving forward. We are so thankful to have received grants in the past from the state of WI and USDA, and are looking for further funding for 2020. As the power of our platform is based on collaboration, our funding is as well, and we need your help to secure it. Please reach out to us to work together on funding partnerships via grant, subscriptions for trial management software, or investments. SeedLinked is transitioning to a B-Corp to embed our ethic and mission in the Bylaw of the platform, because people and the environment are as important as our financial stability.
About SeedLinked
SeedLinked is a online platform that seeks to connect farmers and gardeners with information on varieties from other growers. SeedLinked will be available to anyone, from plant breeders to commercial growers to home gardeners, in an effort to increase the amount and quality of information available on variety performance in different regions. It is particularly useful to facilitate participatory trials with real-time information shared among users.
Species
