Stefan Griesser
Owner and founder of Varietas, started in 2009.
Stefan grew up as the son of a farmer and a professional gardener and has been breeding plants for over 20 years. He is an expert in special and marginalized crops as well as forest gardens and other permaculture practices.
By trade, he is an evolutionary and population biologist with experience in marker assisted plant breeding. He started studying biology, went over to agronomy and finished in environmental sciences at the ETH in Zurich.
He did his bachelor thesis work on soft and hard species borders in wild tomatoes, crossing and breeding them. A paper he contributed to in that line of work can be found here.
His master thesis investigated regenerative agricultural practices. To this end he mapped permaculture and its application all over Switzerland and created a systematic classification of permaculture practises in an agrarian and garden context splitting permaculture into group work found mostly in urban agriculture, planning, implementation, biodiversity, animal husbandry, water-, soil- and energy-use as well as the ethical approaches.
Stefan has a wide interest in breeding and agronomy and is happy to assist in any capacity, alone or with his team, as a consultant or service provider for your breedings projects in this regard too.
(MSc ETH Environmental Sc.)
Kontakt: stefan@varietas.ch

Noemi Brom
Breeding & Administration
Noemi is the one that keeps everything going by organizing the whole work and pushing the rest of us!
(MSc ETH Environmental Sc.)
Kontakt: noemi@varietas.ch

Christoph Schiessl
Field work & Statistics
Christoph is a mathematician and enthusiastic gardener. He likes genetics, MAS, QTL-analysis and plant breeding in general.
(Dr. sc. ETH)
Kontakt: christoph@varietas.ch

Thomas Griesser
Statistics & Administration
Thomas grew up on a farm and has always been involved there. He did his doctorate on climate variability at the Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich with an additional degree in statistics. He has always been drawn to all things resilient and helps with that here.
(Dr. sc. ETH)
Kontakt: thomas@varietas.ch

Interns 2019

Miriam Geiser

Interns 2020

Richard Gruseck

Celia Bermudez Angulo

Varietas

is a small plant breeding company in Switzerland on the border of the canton Zürich and canton Aargau and Germany to the north.
We work mainly with wild and domesticated tomatoes and potatoes and some additional vegs. Our goal is to breed varieties that are more resistant to pests and have a health benefit.
We specially work on «Functional Food» with higher levels of anthocyanins and carotenoids because of their cancer benefits.
Our varieties are breed mainly for the Organic and Permaculture market but that does not exclude them from being grown conventionally too.
We offer our clients adapted exclusive potato varieties that can be named and marketed under their own name. This applies mainly to the Swiss market.

Because plant breeding needs a broad base of varieties to work with, we have a big collection of several hundred old and special accession we work with collected by ProSpecieRara and other European seed saver organisations as well as from collections like Gartersleben or Wageningen. Those are used as parents for our breeding projects and we hand out samples of those to interested parties for a contribution towards expenses in small quantities. If you are interested in those varieties, please inform us before we start harvesting end of August, so we can take some aside for you. The full list what's normally available is here. and the order slip here.

In the tomato area we offer some standard varieties, and additionally varieties with high anthocyanin levels too, those have a black-aubergine coloured skin. The inside of those tomatoes can be white, yellow, red or brown depending on the wish of the customer.

Additionally, we are specialists for alternative and marginalized crops and how to grow them in temperate climates and like to help with forest garden projects specially in regard to permaculture too.
Due to our good interconnectedness with other experts in the field we are able to find and get even exotic plants and would love to design a project for you with those plants too!