WOLCOTT, Vt. — The growing season in this speck on the map is not very long. It would make more sense for Tom Stearns to grow crops for seeds in, say, Pennsylvania or New Jersey, where spring comes earlier and frost arrives later.

But Stearns doesn't care. His company, High Mowing Organic Seeds, is growing as fast as he can keep up with it.

"We're crazy to do what we do. But we figured out how to do it," Stearns said.

High Mowing Seeds is an organic seed producer and seller, which makes it one of two companies in the country that sell exclusively organic seeds. It is the only company focused on commercial growers. Most companies buy seeds from other seed companies and put their label on them.

Because High Mowing both produces and sells, the company fills a niche within the seed industry. And because High Mowing sells only organic seed, that makes the niche very specialized.

That's exactly what the 32-year-old entrepreneur wants. Being involved in production actually expands opportunities for High Mowing because the company can respond more rapidly to marketplace demands, he said.

Still, High Mowing is as much about philosophy as about profit.

"If I were starting a company and wanted to make money, I never would have started a seed company," Stearns said.

Asked what motivates him, he said: "It's having a safe food supply. That is such an important piece that we seem to have messed up on for the last 100 years."

Altruism aside, Stearns' company has been on a steep growth trajectory.

In the six years since growing seeds went from a hobby to a business, the company has expanded from $35,000 in annual sales to $800,000.

This year, High Mowing will likely hit the $1 million mark, Stearns said.

In addition to the 150 acres High Mowing leases in the Northeast Kingdom area of Vermont — 40 to 50 acres of which are planted this year — the company acquires seed from domestic sources in Vermont, New York, Maine, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Colorado and Nebraska. Seeds are also imported from Italy, Israel, Germany, Holland and France.

Since 2002, the number of employees has jumped from two to 30.

Such explosive growth has created challenges for the company, which harvests its own acres, and cleans and packages its 350 varieties of seed. Much of the work is done by hand.

"What happens when you go through this kind of growth is you really test your ability to be flexible, to be resilient, to figure stuff out on the fly. Because everything is new, you can't rely on what worked last year, because the rules change every single year," said Meredith Martin Davis, general manager.

With a growing demand for organic food in recent years, it is no wonder High Mowing has taken off.

"There is not enough organic seed to meet growers' demand," said David Pickenpaugh, president and general manager of Incotec Integrated Coating and Seed Technology Inc., a multinational seed service company with offices in California.

Pickenpaugh chairs the American Seed Trade Association's organic committee. The main topic on the committee's radar is meeting the demand for organic seed, he said. Organic growers are required to use organic seed unless they can't get it — and many of them can't.

Of the land commercially planted in organic vegetables, only 1 percent uses organic seeds, Stearns said.

Organic acreage is growing at 20 percent a year.

"That means it's a 99-percent-unfulfilled market growing at 20 percent a year. That's a serious opportunity," Stearns said.