A Seed Elder has passed: RIP John Navazio
Dr. John Navazio (PhD University of Madison-Wisconsin, Organic Seed Alliance, Johnny's Seeds), author/plant breeder, has passed.
Dr. Navazio held an outsized role in my intellectual fascination with plants and seed. Early in the life of the seed company, I read an interview between Steve Peters and John Navazio for the Seeds of Change eNewsletter (originally published in 2002, sadly lost in the annals of internet history). The contents of that piece just lit me up. I was a humanities kid my entire academic life, so any encounters with hard science, botany, or genetics were incidental and mentally a blur. The Peters/Navazio interview imparted a new fascination on the work I was involved in and gave it an intellectual depth i had been craving.
I have the heart of an ethnographer and a nerdy fascination with canon and continuity. I wanted to know what happened in the intervening years of that 2002 interview and the present (2012). John was still involved with the Organic Seed Alliance then. I reached out to him and later that year we started recording a series of interviews that I conceptualized as a spiritual sequel to the Peters piece.
The work took a number of months. There was no transcription software like Whisper AI at the time, and I certainly couldn’t afford someone to transcribe it for me, so I painstakingly listened to the recordings over and over again and did all the transcription myself. I then started shaping the content into the form of a written interview.
The original intention was to publish the interview in Edible Ojai, but it was too long and intellectually dense for a lighter fare publication. We tried to scale it down in size, but the editor at the time ultimately passed. This rejection turned into a positive, because I shopped the piece around to other publications, and the very prestigious Acres Magazine wanted to publish a version closer to how I originally conceptualized things. I also had seed company artist Goda Trakumaite do an illustration for the article.
The piece was apex of my agricultural journalism. I want to dig out the original recordings and the longer form transcription, but for those interested in the published interview, I’ve made a PDF copy available for download here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1D6ZrdYKt2xpTz83Iu08ohHYO-ILmK3Zc/view?usp=sharing
Here are a few other choice selections of John’s work and voice:
John’s book The Organic Seed Grower was an instant classic. I remember John telling me that he thought the book would be a success when beat up copies would end up in the back of a farmer’s truck.
Seed Elder series featuring Dr. Navazio recorded during the height of the pandemic.