Technical Abstract: Fodder crops are becoming an increasingly important component of organic agriculture systems in the USA. However, due to wide array of production environments in the USA, the large number of species targeted by breeding programs, and the large demand for new and improved products for traditional agricultural systems, there are currently no efforts to breed cultivars of forage crops exclusively for organic livestock systems. Rather, an increasing number of forage breeders are working on traits and breeding methods that lend themselves to development of dual-purpose cultivars. Some of these traits include seedling vigor, interspecific competitiveness, various stress tolerances, resistance to pests, nutrient-use efficiencies, improved interactions with soil microflora, increased forage quality, and pharmaceutical or nutraceutical production. On-farm activities, such as natural selection, participatory breeding, and field evaluations, are a mechanism to improve the process of developing, evaluating, and marketing organic fodder-crop cultivars. Farmer-owned organic cooperatives would be a logical mechanism for seed multiplication, marketing, and distribution of organic fodder-crop cultivars.