Farmer Interview with Alan Kapuler
(third in a continuing series)
by Scott Vlaun

Alan Kapuler is considered by many to be the founding father of the organic seed movement. He was the first Research Director of Seeds of Change and, along with his wife Linda and his three daughters Kusra, Elyria, and Dylana, has been saving seeds and breeding plants for over thirty years. His Peacevine Cherry tomato, Rainbow Inca Corn and other varieties have become known throughout the world and are still mainstays of our seedlist. For fifteen years I've had the pleasure of visiting with Alan on his research plot and having my ideas about gardening, plants, soil and life expanded. The following lively and wide ranging discussion about plant breeding and the latest developments in soil microbiology took place in Alan's seed room on October 13, 2006. S.V.

Scott Vlaun: You've dedicated a large part of your life to breeding flowers and vegetables for the public domain. Can you talk a little bit about how you came to this work?

Alan Kapuler: Why breed for the public domain? Why not just be grateful for the heirlooms that we have and grow abundant, diverse, beautiful gardens?

SV: Obviously there must be a very good reason, or we wouldn't be sitting in a room with...how many accessions of seed are in here?

AK: Ten to fifteen thousand.

SV: That's what I'm guessing just by looking around. It's amazing. There are seeds of every size, color and shape. So why is it relevant?

AK: OK. We've been growing peas for thirty-five years (he throws a handful of pea seed on the table) and breeding peas for fifteen or twenty years. So, Pisum sativum. What got us into pea breeding was not actually a curiosity about peas per se, but that a very good vine snap pea was only available from commercial sources and was not being organically grown. I wanted to grow it and I wanted to offer it in the seed list, so I called up a company who had it and had a patent on it. They said “no, it's our variety and we won't give you permission to grow it organically.” That led my daughter and I to make some crosses and develop our own “Sugaree” Snap Pea.

SV: So the impetus here was that there was no good open-pollinated variety of snap pea?

AK: There was no good sugar snap pea that was public domain. There were only privatized varieties and this is a great crop for the backyard gardener. We're growing food. We're talking about how to improve plants for food. Why plant breeding? A good example in another legume would be a fava bean. The original fava bean was quite small. It got selected and grown up to be big and succulent with big pods that are good to eat, not bitter or toxic.

SV: The pods are good to eat?

AK: Yes, the young pods of fava beans are very good to eat, with olive oil and garlic... very good to eat.

SV: That works for just about anything, doesn't it?

AK: It works for a lot. (laughs) You get them before the seeds are real big and before the fluff is inside when the seeds are coming on.

So one answer to “Why plant breeding” is that you improve plants for human nutrition, for adaptation to your locale, for vigor and for productivity. All those things are directly accessible in food plants, and in flowers you get more beauty and more diversity, and you get things that you wouldn't expect. So every time you walk in the garden, you find things that you didn't know about. If you like to go into the garden and have other things happening, you have to ask them to come to you.

SV: Do you think everyone who gardens should be breeding?

AK: It would help if more people who gardened, first saved seeds, and then bred, because you would encourage more local diversity and more skills to take care of a common resource— because the resource of germplasm is common on the earth. If we find those varieties worthwhile we should maintain them and not expect somebody else to maintain them for us. But if we grow gardens we are maintaining them. It just means saving the seeds and completing the cycle. Breeding then is the next step.

We started growing peas in 1973 and we started breeding peas in 1992 perhaps. By that time we'd grown thirty or forty kinds of peas. That meant we had some perspective of what kind of parents are available. It's not very difficult to make a cross (between two varieties) in breeding. And what takes only a few moments in the first year, when you grow the plants the next year from the cross, and from one flower you may get five seeds in a pod, and if those seeds are fertile you'll get five plants which might give you a hundred or two hundred seeds. To look at the consequence of your cross you may need a thousand or ten thousand seeds. So what took only a moment to make as a cross, the next year will take more time and the years after that take more time and you find yourself in a serious endeavor when you start to look at what it takes to explore the realm of breeding.

SV: But do you think that just by making simple crosses and saving the seeds from your favorite plants every year, the home gardener can make some progress?

AK: I like it that you can take your favorite three beets or five beets and grow them all together, or your favorite kinds of spinach and grow them all together, or your favorite kinds of sweet corn and grow them all together. And every one of those things, you can just grow them together and eat some of it and save the seeds and plant them and you'd have a good time. You wouldn't have to buy any of the seeds again of a whole lot of stuff. You could take your favorite broccolis and do the same thing, but Brassicas are a little more complicated; if you really want broccoli you can't let it cross with kale; if you really want zucchini you can't let it cross with a pumpkin. You've got to know something about who crosses with who in terms of what seeds you save and which ones will make palatable varieties and which ones will make bitter varieties or ones that are not particularly attractive. But it's probably worth exploring...because it's exploration that's accessible to anybody. And in a world that makes it so hard to be empowered to do a whole lot of real things, gardening and growing seeds and doing breeding is available to anybody.

So the “Sugaree” came from a political response; to say that we can do something about it. It empowers everybody to say that you can make your own varieties. It can be quite simple. For example, sunflowers are outbreeders. You get a mix of sunflowers, you let them grow, and you save the seeds of the ones that you like. Next year they'll be different. And in the process you find new varieties. You can let yourself be involved in this instead of being this abstract uninvolved person.

SV: So anyone who's gardening can easily get started in breeding for themselves?

AK: Some things are more difficult than others. If you like basil you can grow ten kinds of basil, let them flower and cross-pollinate, and you'll have a real mess in the next year. But if you like basil, you'll have a good time, because every basil you get will be somewhat different than its neighbor. So if you are tired of that homogeneity that everybody seems to stress—because when you go to the market everybody wants to make sure all the zukes line up straight and all the carrots are the same size—you can discover things.

My daughter Kusra took humboltii (Lycopersicon humboltii), a tomato which had 30 flowers on a tress and makes orange cherry tomatoes in little clusters, and crossed it to some other tomato plants. When we got some cherry tomatoes with 150 flowers on a tress I realized that I never saw anything like that before. When you begin to realize that the vegetables that you have are not frozen in time, when the heirlooms that you have are not the limiting restriction on your activity, you realize that plant breeding allows you to move into the future of development, rather than saying that “everything was done in the past and I can't do anything.” Because in reality, the force of the change of evolution keeps on working. We keep on looking to the past to guide us in the present, but the reality is that the present opens up new things and you don't know the way, you have to explore the way and you're in the unknown. What are we going to do in a world where we're destroying the natural resource base of everybody's life? Some of this is solved by having more food grown locally, in the neighborhood, rather than shipping in food and saying “we've got you covered.” That doesn't have you covered. It's the quality of the soil and the attention to varieties that grow where you are that makes a sustainable, healthy food system. If you try to replace that with a marketing system that exploits the people, it's going to fail, eventually.

SV: You mentioned earlier that you have been learning recently about soil micro-organisms, specifically archaea and their role in fixing nitrogen and making it available to plants. Can you talk more about that?

AK: It has been a puzzle for a long time—what nitrogen sources plants use. So a recent observation shows that the vacuoles inside plant cells have a high concentration of nitrate, that is, oxidized nitrogen, that is then reduced to make amino acids, nucleic acids, amino sugars and a whole bunch of compounds that have nitrogen in them in different states of oxidation. So the storage of the nitrogen in the plant is in the vacuole as nitrate and the nitrate comes in from the soil. Now, how it comes in from the soil and what the rhizosphere of the roots are and all that is also an issue, yet the nitrate comes in from the soil and the plant uses it. So it's a question about: you've got nitrogen in the air and you have nitrate at the roots of the plants. So the discovery was really about micro-organisms that fix nitrogen from the air and bring it into the soil. They are distributed among tiny microbes of two major groups. They reduce nitrogen. They take nitrogen and add hydrogen to it. If you split water you get oxygen and hydrogen. So basically what happens is you're adding water to nitrogen. This is what the system is. So if you add hydrogen first you end up with these diazotrophic bacteria that fix hydrogen onto the nitrogen from the air and give ammonia soluble nitrogen. So the question was: how do you get ammonia from reduced nitrogen to nitrate, which is oxidized nitrogen? You have to add oxygen to this. It is done by Crenarcheota, or “crens,” part of a group of organisms called archaea, an unknown and unrecognized major group of organisms that are in soil.

SV: Do you think that this recent discovery will revolutionize how we look at soils and how we understand soil biology and the whole organic fertility system? Is this going to revolutionize organic agriculture?

AK: Well, molecular biology is going to revolutionize organic agriculture just like it's revolutionizing medicine. If we recognize the way that the body is built, we have a better chance of providing medicines that deal with where the problems are. The same is true with the soil if we know what organisms are doing what, and what the major systems are that lead to fertility, or mobilization of phosphate, or translocation of calcium, utilization of iron, all the different parts of the minerals and materials that are used by the plants to photosynthesize, to be able to split water, to make sugar. To develop that whole photosynthetic ability all takes connections of all the resources coming into the plant. By knowing more about how it works, we can make developments in those areas, which means that those microbes that are doing it are providing an industry to the organic movement and providing a way to enhance fertility that is broader and of a much more general scope. And this means growing more organisms. Since organics grows vegetables and plants and biodiversity, it also grows organisms. So we can provide the organic system with the rest of the biosphere that helps with what we do. That's what we're missing.

SV: Do you think this is the only path to truly sustainable agriculture? Do you think there is actually sustainable agriculture at this point?

AK: No, not much.

SV: Because of the external inputs?

AK: Because of mono-cultures.

SV: But there are people growing in some pretty diverse systems. It's the permaculture mantra, to try and emulate natural systems, whether it's the forest or the prairie. Can we utilize genetics to help make these systems function without outside inputs?

AK: Microbes, the fixing of nitrogen, the mobilization of minerals, these are microbial activities. The plants utilize it at different stages. So that's a missing part of it. It's all in the bacteria and fungi in the soil. Those are where the developments are going to come from that are going to reflect in the growing of organic food.

SV: Do you think that plants will be bred to have better relationships with all of these bacteria and fungi?

AK: Yes, there are different ways to approach it. You can work the plants to have a more adapted relationship. But, to me, the primary direction would be to figure out the microbiology that will feed the existing stuff that we've got.

SV: Is this anything like compost tea? Growing microbial activity, then introducing it into your system?

AK: It's very much like a wild fermentation. The issue would be where you take your inoculant from. If it's from worm compost you'll have one inoculant, if you take it from other compost you'll get something else. For twenty or thirty years we didn't understand enough about the combination of organisms. When I can relate to you that precursors to plant hormones made by Azospirillum brazilense stimulate nitrogen fixation and growth, that is science. Does anybody use this stuff to grow crops and develop agriculture? The answer is: it has not happened yet. Until you discover what those relationships are, and which organisms to grow, you'll make compost tea and never know if you are spraying the right thing.

SV: I think that some would argue that there has been too much science in agriculture.

AK: That wasn't science. That was business. The prodigious use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides in the western world to grow food is not necessary, and is not sustainable. Developing real sustainability in organics is going to mean that we have a lot of different issues to explore and resolve and develop. How can we expect, when there has been no support in this country for organic agriculture research, that we could have this stuff in place to even figure out what needs to be known? Nobody has been willing to support it so far.

If science helped increase the yields of the crops and developed chemical fertilizers and pesticides, then we have a problem because all that is doing is poisoning the water and destroying the soil and poisoning people. That's not science per se. I do like to believe that science is there to serve humanity, not to exploit it, and that's possible.

Take the petroleum economy. Why would we want to grow food far away from us? It doesn't make any sense. The more we grow locally, the more we'll have a secure society.

SV: Could you compare recent advances in microbiology to Newtonian physics in terms of its effect on our understanding? Is this the next revolution in science?

AK: It's the age of biology. It's really coming. Bio-cybernetics, and nanotechnology, they're all converging a billion-fold smaller, the realm of the invisible. It's where the action is that's spilling out into the whole of human society.

SV: Do you think that there is a danger there?

AK: Of course! Ignorance is dangerous. Look what it's doing.

SV: I'd rather not.

AK: I know. I'm glad we can work with seeds, and work with life.

To learn more about seed saving, follow this link to read an excellent article by Jordan Rainwater and Scott Vlaun from our December 2004 eNewsletter.

You may also find Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties and Seed to Seed helpful resources.

Scott Vlaun
Editor