Michael Mazourek

Michael R. Mazourek is a plant breeder and associate professor at Cornell University notable for developing the honeynut squash, a cultivar of a cross first developed by Cornell University plant breeder Richard W. Robinson,     creating the Habanada, and Row 7, a seed company co-founded with Dan Barber of Blue Hill and Matthew Goldfarb.

Biography
Mazourek attended Cornell University to study pepper biochemical genetics and through his work with Molly Jahn and Henry Munger became interested in plant breeding. Mazourek earned his PhD from Cornell in 2008. Mazourek is a public breeder who works on breeding for quality and disease resistance in peppers, peas and cucurbit crops. Notably, he has bred the honeynut squash and is working on breeding a cucumber that resists downy mildew. To breed crops, he uses recurrent selection, crossing two plants that exhibit certain qualities to mix in diversity, with the final resulting plant having locked in traits of its parents. He licenses his breeds out to seed companies with a portion of the revenue going back to the lab.

In 2018, Mazourek founded Row 7 Seed Company with chef Dan Barber and seedsman Matthew Goldfarb, with the goal to connect breeders with chefs.

Honeynut Squash
As an associate professor in Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell, Mazourek had begun to breed a mini butternut squash but was having trouble selling the new breed to seed companies. In 2009, he met chef Dan Barber at a meal at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. During a kitchen tour, Barber asked “If you’re such a good breeder, why don’t you make this thing taste good? Why don’t you shrink the thing?!” Working closely with Barber, Mazourek began breeding the squash for flavor rather than yield, uncommon in the industry at that time. The resulting honeynut squash is more concentrated in flavor and was rapidly commercially successful.