Market Growers > From the Field > A Conversation with John Navazio

A Conversation with John Navazio

by Steve Peters

Dr. John Navazio is a well-respected plant breeder who has dedicated his professional career to improving vegetable seed varieties under organic growing conditions. This past July I had the privilege of talking at length with him about a broad range of important topics including a brief history of plant breeding, the hybrid corn revolution, the difference between classic breeding and modern recombinant DNA breeding, the significance of plant vigor, current trends in the seed industry, and a number of other vital issues. John has a unique perspective, which is of tremendous importance for the further development of sustainable farming systems.

He teaches a 3-day intensive workshop called "Plant Improvement for the Organic Seed Grower." Please check www.abundantlifeseed.org for details for upcoming classes which are given regionally throughout the U.S.

Steve Peters: Tell me a little bit about yourself, how you got started in the seed business, the kind of experiences you've encountered over the years and some of your major influences during your professional career, that is, of people that have been very important in your development.

John Navazio: I can give you a real basic background. I was a suburban kid who always heard about the farm and farm life from some of my elders in my family. I thought it was pretty neat. I was coming of age in the 1970's when there was the big back-to-the-land movement so there were a lot of us in our late teens who were pretty disgusted with the way society was going in general so we thought getting back to the land 30 years ago was a solid ideal and really didn't want to be part of the rat race. I came from a family that had a strong emphasis on education so I knew there was no way I was getting out of college even though there were people back in those days who said, "The revolution is coming; there is no reason to even go to college, heck. Society's going to change." But I knew I was pretty locked in to the college experience. So, being a back-to-the-lander, at least on a philosophical level, I said, "Wow, if I'm going to have to go back to school I might as well learn about something that is truly practical" and chose to go to agricultural school. I went through that and actually worked on farms on the eastern shore of Maryland during the summer and got a little taste of farm life, at least migrant labor farm life. Had some friends who were doing some pretty extensive organic gardening, got a taste of it; but came out the other side of college asking, "Now, how do I be a farmer?" Every couple of years I worked for the Forest Service, and kept thinking, "Now I'm saving some money, how do I buy a farm?"

I stumbled into a health food store in Eugene, Oregon one day in 1981 and saw a shelf of organic produce from 5 or 6 different farms. I asked the produce manager about these farms and he directed me to who he said was the best farmer, Tom Lively. At present, he and his brother run one of the largest distributors of organic produce on the West coast called "Organically Grown Out of Eugene" a big cooperative they started back in the early 80's. Tom chewed my ear off and said, "Well, we can't pay you right now, but come on out and see if you like it." I ended up staying two and a-half years and working with the Lively brothers and gained a really thorough understanding of what good organic crop farming was. Those guys really were very good at it. We were one of the most successful farmers in the Willamette Valley of Oregon.

Tom Lively taught me all about varieties and that's where my career really began. Even though it was strictly a produce business, and we never saved seeds, Tom always did 'trials' which I realize now were actually observations. We had plots of 10 to 15 varieties of tomatoes, or 8 different varieties of broccoli. We always included our mainstay variety that we had identified as the work horse that pays the bills, along with several new varieties that may prove to be better. That bit me with the bug of what the real differences are between the varieties of any one crop that could make or break a farmer. It was real obvious early on that, if you grew the wrong kind of tomatoes, it could be the difference between making $8,000 or $1,500 that year.

After about two and a half years, three seasons on the farm, I was completely burned out with the dawn to dark schedule. I was still in my 20's and just needed the summer off; so I went back East and visited old friends in New England where I'd gone to school and ended up in Bar Harbor, Maine. I stayed for three years and eventually started to teach a sustainable agriculture class at the College of the Atlantic. I discovered that I truly enjoyed teaching, but realized I needed advanced credentials to pursue it as a full time career. I started checking out grad schools and was encouraged by my old friend, Laura Merrick, (Botany Dept. Iowa State U.) to consider plant breeding. It dawned on me then that this was my calling. Soon after that I was enrolled at the University Of Wisconsin, where I was particularly impressed with the scholarly atmosphere and people pursuing 'the truth' about how plant breeding should be done. The next five years of my life were working on cucumbers and cucumber breeding with the USDA program in Madison, Wisconsin.

My degree was in plant genetics and plant breeding, although I was learning as much about the history of plant breeding as l was about the actual mechanics of genetics. As one of my mentors, Stan Peloquin (Plant Breeder/Geneticist) used to say, "the history of the science is the science". The emphasis was on the practical nature--how you truly go to the field to breed better crops, rather than the high falutin' 'science of genetics'. I was not interested in the genetic modified biotechnology that was starting to be taught. Fortunately, at Wisconsin, even faculty members who supported the new technology realized that it was never going to wholly replace classical plant breeding. In fact, at Wisconsin it was considered the backbone of plant improvement. In my desire to be a true classical plant breeder, I was afforded every opportunity to learn how to do it the old-fashioned way. So I got what I consider a very good education that's served me well almost 10 years.

From there I searched far and wide to find a good seed company to work for that was truly interested in getting small, diversified organic farmers real options in new crop varieties bred for organic conditions. As you can imagine, there were not many seed companies that held that kind of ideal; and if they did they either couldn't afford to hire a plant breeder or didn't think they needed one. Some companies thought the heirlooms were going to answer all the questions; I don't share that belief. Good heirlooms can certainly be used in the modern world but there's always room for improvement. John Schneeberger at Garden City Seeds understood that and he signed me up and I was glad to have a job at a company that held the same ideals I did. We worked hard for a couple of years at Garden City and we got some varieties out using what I call, "quick and dirty plant breeding". You can pick an existing variety, clean it up a little bit by doing some good basic plant selection for a couple of seasons, and changing it just enough to put a new moniker on it. That's how we put together Montana Jack, an early season pumpkin, and Dragon Carrot, which was some nice germ plasm that I stumbled upon while I was in the USDA carrot program. We really had some nice things that held Garden City together for a number of years after that.

Times were tough at Garden City. The money wasn't coming in like we'd hoped. I was still paying off student loans so I looked around for another job and very fortunately found a position at the Alf Christiansen Seed Company in Mt. Vernon, WA. At that time, it was the last family-owned large scale seed production company in America. I liked that it was family-owned rather than some big trans-national corporation. I liked that they were in the Skagit Valley and did all their own seed production right there. The guy who became my boss, Larry Satterly, was an old seat-of-the-pants alfalfa plant breeder who now was learning vegetables. I count Larry among my short list of mentors, and he made the job all worthwhile. So for six years I learned about large-scale seed production, working on spinach, beet, chard, and carrot. It was a very nice place for me to work. We had hybrids, but I was afforded the luxury of working on good population development and I was in charge of their older OP's (open pollinates). This was where I really learned that if you maintain an OP you've got to select in every generation or you'll be moving backwards. You have to slowly move forward or genetic drift is slowly going to move you back. Fortunately, I was in charge of maintaining those OPs and I really learned how to work with them. At Alf Christiansen we did very thorough trialing of all our stuff and we often compared it with the same varieties from several other companies. Don't ever just say you want Ruby Queen beet, and go off and take the first Ruby Queen you get your hands on. Make sure you scour the countryside and find out who still produces Ruby Queens, (in this case about three or four companies), and then; run them all out in a trial and ask the serious question Ð is theirs better than mine? before you put all your effort into growing your own.

As it turned out, I worked more and more on hybrid varieties of spinach, beets and carrots. These "prima donnas" were varieties highly selected for very specific growing conditions. For example, spinach was bred specifically for Salinas Valley or Yuma Valley for high input, highly-mechanized conditions. Everybody else in the world who wants to grow spinach is relegated to second-class citizenship, and must look at the hybrids that have been cranked out by the Dutch or the couple of American companies that still make hybrid spinach. They have to look at all of their hybrids and willy-nilly try to find one that fits their situation. That's why Space Spinach, a Dutch hybrid from Bejo; became so popular with organic farmers of this country. They found that it works under most conditions. It's a good work horse variety. Did Bejo breed that for the organic guys in Northern America? Not in your life - that just was dumb luck. So the Alf Christianson experience was one where it was too much concentration in my spinach breeding on breeding only for the Salinas Valley. I thought, if I could just breed spinach for all these farmers that are dying for good spinach varieties, who are either growing some old OPs that haven't been selected in years, and have been poorly taken care of, or are just growing some Dutch hand-me-downs that they happened to stumble upon. So I left Alf Christiansen and decided to start my own company. That led me to Iowa City, Iowa and the burgeoning vegetable scene in the Midwest and Great Lakes area. That region has many big cities that are hungry for fresh vegetables and no one breeding for local vegetable growers. It's the forgotten frontier, often called the fourth coast. ( The Gulf of Mexico is the third coast.) and it's getting no respect, as Rodney Dangerfield would say. Being one who likes good hot, humid weather and likes to grow watermelons as big as a German shepherd, I said, Why not? Let's try the Midwest for this thing. We're still going to do seed production with all my good friends in the Pacific Northwest and other places where seed is most aptly grown, but we're going to strike out and try to breed something good for the folks of the Midwest because no one has given them any attention. So here we are!

SP: I understand that you've started your own seed company. Can you tell me about that?

JN: Yes. Recently I formed my own company called "Seed Movement". A very big part of what we're doing is training the modern seed producers, the next generation of organic seed farmers. There is a lot of amateurish activity out there, and a lot of growers are trying to learn the craft without any elders around to teach them. That's a pretty hard thing to do. So I feel I've been blessed with all this information over the past 12 years on how to grow and select seed. I'm now training people in these 3-day intensive workshops like the one I gave at Seeds of Change this past Spring. My company is building a powerful breeder/grower partnership with these farmers. I work with them on-farm and via electronic communication to develop good, bio-regionally adapted vegetable seed varieties in a few of the better growing regions in the U.S. (Editor's note: Since this interview, John has moved back to Washington State, but he has continued to work with farmers in several regions including the Midwest. Besides his seed company, he is also working with Abundant Life Seed Foundation in grower development and seed collection management.)

SP: Could you describe the essence of classical plant breeding? What is its historical importance and how relevant it is for agriculture today?

JN: Good question! The original hunter-gatherers at some point stumbled on certain plants that they really liked and then later realized that the seed from the plant, from these reproductive pods, was what gave them the next generation. That little revelation followed by taking the seeds back to camp and putting them into the ground. There's also the trashy hypothesis that people were eating fruit and tossed the seeds in the dung heap or the big compost pile on the edge of the fire circle, and they started to grow. Lo and behold, because they were selecting the most succulent fruits from whatever the species were and then putting them into a good environmental situation in the dung heap, they were actually doing the very first plant breeding. Since that dawning of agriculture human beings have always selected in a very slow, methodical way. The people who practiced agriculture always selected, inherently, the best stuff for their environment. I'm sure there were always these keepers of the plant who were better at it than other people. They selected the tastier watermelon, or the juicier watermelon. That was basically the mode of plant breeding until the rediscovery of Mendel's Laws in 1900. Without getting into the history of genetics, suffice to say there was a monk in Austria who figured out some of the laws of genetics. Once some people in Europe and the US figured out what Mendel had discovered, and once they started to apply it to both plant and animal selection and breeding, they realized they could make some shortcuts. The plant breeding process could in fact be accelerated. They were still doing the basic selection, but now they began to consider the male and female pairing of what they were doing. Classical plant breeding really started with the understanding of genetics.

SP: So really, you're talking about just within the last 100 years.

JN: 102 years to be exact. From 1900 until the present.

SP: Before that there was 10,000 years of plant breeding to some degree.

JN: 99.99% of that early plant breeding was what we call mass selection, which is a very good, reputable technique of plant breeding. With a cross-pollinated species such as corn, however, mass selection is very slow going. Let's say you have a field of corn and you choose 15 of the best ears. The problem with that is you don't know who the dad was on those plants since the pollen is coming from every other plant in that corn field. Then there is the problem of what I call the dinosaur turd hypothesis. In any plot of land you can have a plant that is growing on a very good spot in the field, that is, a fertile spot in the field where a dinosaur turd may have been deposited millions of years ago and the tap root of that plant is mining that fertility. On that very good spot in the field that plant could look very beautiful. It could also be 99 percent of why it looks so beautiful and why you are attracted to it and want to select it. The take home message here is - don't be wowed by just images. It's an inherent truth to everything in life, as my grandmother used to say, "All that glitters is not gold". That plant might glitter in the field and look really beautiful, but don't be completely sucked in. It could be just a position effect, as some scientist might say.

SP: So you're saying that farmers up until 1900, who were only engaged in mass selection, didn't understand about whole populations?

JN: They didn't understand that there was more to how good a plant was than meets the eye. The part that doesn't meet the eye is the genetic constitution of the plant. In fact, before 1900, there were some good plant breeders. The dawn of modern plant breeding really started before 1900. Vilmorin, and there's still a seed company in France that bears his name, in the 1830's or 40's had the bright idea that some beets were sweeter than others. He would harvest off all the seeds of a single beet plant and plant them into an individual row. He'd have a series of these rows representing different mothers (since beets are cross-pollinating) from the generation before in the field. Then in the next generation, he'd be able to see, in a way checking the pedigree of that plant, that the mother plant might look really beautiful, but he needed to see what kind of progeny it produced. Now, animal breeders have been hip to this longer than the plant breeders have. They would do pedigree breeding based on how good a progeny was from a particular mother. Vilmorin was the first to do this with plants. By using progeny testing and actually doing a crude form of sugar chemical extraction, and checking which rows gave him the most sugar, he doubled the content of sugar in less than 20 years and became the father of the modern sugar beet. So that to me is the beginning of classical plant breeding, because instead of just looking at individual plants and how good they are per se in the field, he would in fact look at the progeny. In the early days, before they coined the word genetics, they called it the study of inheritance and that's really what plant breeding is all about - the inheritable factors that you can count on. Without getting into all sorts of breeding techniques, suffice to say, classical plant breeding really is the study of inheritable traits doing it the old-fashioned way - sex in the garden!

Now, do you have to make crosses to be a plant breeder? When I first learned about what plant breeding was, I thought it was all these guys in white coats in greenhouses, with camel hair brushes and the glasses with the little lens on them so they could see the fine flower parts, moving pollen delicately from one weak plant to another. In fact, I never use camel hair brushes, although I occasionally rub flowers together. I'm fortunate to have crops that are a little easier to work with when I do want to make a cross. Some people think that plant breeding is only making crosses. Actually, there is a lot of plant breeding where you take existing populations that are genetically resilient and have some real genetic breadth to them and you just select good things out of it, or you narrow it somewhat to make it a little more uniform. But I am a great believer in not narrowing populations too much because then you lose the genetic resiliency. There are many very fine modern varieties which were developed by taking a good OP (open pollinate) parent and selecting it for a particular set of traits. There was a guy who bred beets a hundred years ago in Massachusetts, Josiah Crosby. He took the old Egyptian beet, with its flat top and squat, bulb shape, and selected a much rounder beet with bigger tops and better market quality. He called the crop Crosby's Egyptian. Did he do plant breeding where he took camel hair brush and did all that? No, he just took the Egyptian beet and selected a new variety out of it. Is that easy to do? No, it is not. It takes a lot of work to derive a good, improved OP out of an old OP. You don't just make one or two selections and get it to be stable. So someone like Crosby was a true plant breeder. Many of you reading this can be plant breeders by just taking something you know is good and deriving something better out of it. Just a word of caution - don't narrow it too much.

SP: A lot of people now claim that modern recombinant DNA plant breeding (Genetic Engineering) is merely an extension of classical plant breedingÑthat they're basically the same thing. Can you describe the fundamental difference between classical plant breeding and this new biotechnology-based approach?

JN: The fundamental difference is that biotech breeders concentrate on developing a single, really fancy trait such as insect resistance in the case of Bt corn, or herbicide resistance in the case of Roundup Ready soybeans. They take the best soybean variety out there and pop in a gene for Roundup resistance and don't look at any other traits! Furthermore, this gene splicing has essentially ground to a halt the evolutionary process (which has been going on forever) in order to create one very selfish kind of cash cow trait. In contrast, a person practicing classical plant breeding is selecting for a whole raft of traits at once. The quality that makes a classical plant breeder a good breeder is they have a feeling for the organism that they are working with even though they don't necessarily know the genetics behind all of the different traits.

SP: What are some of those important traits?

JN: First and foremost, you always have to think about adaptation, adaptation, adaptation. Does it do well in the environment? That's fundamental. There are so many plant breeders unfortunately, who baby their plants to try to keep them safe and secure from all the things that can go wrong in the field. You always want to breed under real life field conditions. Whatever's going to come down from the skies and make it tough for that plant, let that happen because that's your basic adaptation.

A key trait you have to think about is the stature of the plant. You can breed the best eating beet in the world but all that doesn't matter if the tops flop over and touch the ground. You want something where the tops stand up straight. Another important trait is the ability to handle drought. Do you want to go out and baby your plant and give them lots of water? No, you want to put them under real life field conditions. I'm going to use the beet again for an example. If you're edging on drought conditions and certain beets are wilting every day, then you've got to be mindful of them. You don't want to carry them along in your program.

Another thing, beets and carrots, for example, need a certain amount of foliage to be healthy and you have to consider where these plants will be grown and how they will be used. They probably will be grown in places a lot sunnier than where I'm planting. Is the crown of the plant going to get sun-scalded if it has too few leaves on it? Yes, it is going to get sun-scalded. So I've got to make sure that I've got enough foliage to shade the 'roof', and also be suitable for bunching. There are lots of fancy European-bred carrots that have so few leaves, I don't know how they get a root at the bottom of them, but they certainly don't have enough foliage to bunch, and when you take them into a sunny climate they invariably get sun-scalded on the crown. If they get hammered by a foliage blight disease you want a lot of foliage on the head. There have been a lot of plant breeders who have bred carrots and never looked at how much foliage there was. So I'm talking about a bunch of traits here - drought tolerance, the amount of foliage for bunching, the amount of foliage for sun-scald, how erect the foliage is, that have nothing to do with the real crop of interest - the real part of a plant that is the economic part of the plant. Those are some examples. How about in beets? The beet can be a very good eating beet - very sweet, but with such an awful rat tail on it I'd only sell it to my worst enemy.

SP: What's wrong with the rat tail?

JN: Rat tails are just unsightly. Whether you like it or not, regardless of how good it tastes, as plant breeders and as seed people who are selling things to the public, we've got to make sure the vegetables look good enough to be able to sell at a farmers' market. I was on the frontline at a farmers' market for three seasons in Eugene, Oregon and, I wanted plant breeders who cared enough about me to make things to look pretty enough. As Buck Gabelman (U. of Wisconsin plant breeder Ð beets, carrots, onions) used to say, "you want the vegetables to smile back at you." Everybody wants something that looks good. Does that mean it has to look blemish-free and look perfect? No. Does it mean it has to be a waxed apple that's ready for shipment to Japan where they are very finicky? No, that's not what I'm talking about. Don't get me wrong here. I'm talking about things needing to have a semblance of some good looks so that people go "Wow! I want to put that on my table!" It's called eye appeal and it's a reality in the produce business. Anyone trying to ignore it is foolish.

SP: So what you're talking about is really moving forward and addressing a whole host of inter-connected traits, including traits that are acceptable for the market?

JN: Yes. I haven't even gotten to where I'm looking at the color of beets, although there are probably health benefits for the good color. Whether there is or not, I want to make sure that the health benefits are there. I want to make sure that the sugars are there. I want to make sure it tastes good. So a beet plant breeder could say, what's most important? It's got to have a good red color, taste good and not have too many of the bitter flavors often associated with beets. We have to be obsessed with tasting the beets because frequently there are beets that have way too many bitter compounds.

SP: When you're breeding, do you sometimes find you have to prioritize and sacrifice?

JN: You have to prioritize and sometimes you don't get everything you want in one package. Again, looking at beets, you have to look at all those traits I just mentioned. Then you have to come up with a synthesis of at least minimal qualities that offer those traits to even consider testing for again. If it's really good in most of those things, but lacking in a couple, then it may be back to the drawing board. Maybe now I can cross my variety with something else because its got such good flavor and color and so low in bitterness that I've got to use this for a parent. So you have to synthesize those 10 or 12 traits in a way that truly borders on art. But if you just do it as an artsy pursuit, and don't understand the inheritance of some of those traits, it can take you years to accomplish. Also, some of those traits are expressed differently depending on environmental conditions. If I have a really hot, droughty year, my beets are going to perform differently than in a more normal year. So I take that knowledge with me as a plant breeder and decide, for example, that I'm not going to eliminate all the bitter roots because I know what the environment is like. That's part of the synthesis, having to process all the data that goes in and coming up with an answer on the other side.

You're never just improving something for only one trait and if you are, you're not a real plant breeder! It's not real plant breeding because there's always a multitude of things that you can improve at any step of the process. You're always selecting a little bit for this or that, for example, any of those dozen or so traits I already mentioned.

SP: Wasn't it Darwin who first observed, or maybe it was someone before, that evolution never stands still?

JN: Exactly! Plant breeding has been called accelerated evolution. What we do as real plant breeders is work inside of evolution, and we do some artificial selection by looking for the little goodies that we like, such as really sweet flavor or a plant that stands up well in the field. We are, however, working with all the other natural conditions of our environment such as drought, diseases and insects. We're working with nature and just accelerating the process a little bit by making the selection pressure just a little heavier toward the traits we prize so much like sweetness.

SP: So classical plant breeding recognizes the inherent nature of dynamic evolution, whereas biotech techniques are in fact arresting evolution?

JN: Biotechnology is truly arresting evolution and it's geared to be pretty damn selfish.

SP: I'm concerned about this and maybe you can comment on it. In classical plant breeding, which is grounded more or less within the laws of evolution, the inter-mixing of pollen that occurs is within a fairly narrow genetic range, usually no wider than a species or genera cross. Therefore, an undesirable cross is likely eliminated by lack of fitness by nature's complex system of checks and balances, which would prevent, or at least greatly reduce the chance of undesirable progeny of this cross from getting out of hand or becoming an environmental problem. In contrast, many modern biotech methods have used much wider crosses, and in some cases plant genes crossed with animal genes, to create organisms that never would be possible without the human being going in and actually cutting up a chromosome. I worry that some of these types of crosses will be and could potentially pose enormous threats to the environment.

JN: I couldn't have said it better. I think that one of the great dangers of biotech is the crossing of those species or genera boundaries. There's a real chance of putting together some combinations of wide crosses outside the realm of natural law that could potentially be harmful in a very big way.

SP: Going back to classical plant breeding - you mentioned that it got its jump start after the discovery of Mendel's Law around 1900. At that time, most of the work was done with open pollinating populations; i.e., allowing plants to breed naturally without human intervention. Then the hybrid seed industry developed in the 20's?

JN: Yeah, the first commercial seed hybrid, I believe, was made in 1929.

SP: And that was in corn?

JN: Yes, that was in corn, and it started in Iowa with Henry Wallace, former Secretary of Agriculture on a quarter acre plot.

SP: And by 1940, the hybrid seed industry had really taken off with a lot of very positive effects. Could you give a brief history of the hybrid seed revolution?

JN: Okay, let me preface this by saying there are two reasons why people want hybrids. The first reason I'm going to describe is what the original group of people who bred hybrids were looking for. Then, there is the second, more modern reason of why seed companies like them so much.

Hybrids started very soon after the discovery of Mendel's Laws in 1900. Shortly after that, there was a group of highly-motivated, brilliant people who started talking to each other and spurred each other on. They were all Midwestern farm boys who grew up on the farm and were looking for the real stuff. The early leader was George Harrison Schull and Edward East and then some of East's students followed. These folks were, in fact, some of the very first geneticists in America. The other thing you have to remember is that they weren't just doing plant breeding as an academic exercise. They were looking into the true practical nature of how it would play down on the farmÑvery good common sense. It was really a synergy of these 10 to 15 guys coming together. The only thing I can relate it to in the modern world is the synergy of the four Beatles coming together. You know, it doesn't happen very often where people get together and click like that and the ideas really flow. These people chose to work on corn for their experimental organism. What is so marvelous about corn is that the male and female parts are separate on each plant. You can easily control the pollination and you can easily make crosses. Furthermore, corn was an incredibly important plant already on the American landscape by 1900. It is the crop that built America in many ways. From 1904 to 1910 was the real beginning. Remember that corn is a cross-pollinated species and when you talk about plant breeding you have to distinguish between "crossers" and "selfers." Cross-pollinated species, when allowed to reproduce in nature, have a fairly high amount of crossing from one individual to another in a population. The pollen from a corn tassel blows around all over the field. Beets are also wind-pollinated and the pollen flows freely. Carrots are also cross-pollinated but in this case insects move the pollen. Self-pollinated species include beans, peas, tomatoes, and lettuce, and pollen movement is much more restricted. Most of those crops, except tomatoes, have still never been hybridized as far as commercial F-1 hybrids being sold.

SP: And F-1 means...

JN: First filial generation. An F-1 hybrid is a cross between two separate parental lines and the resulting seed from that first generation cross is what is sold to the farmer. Whereas, if I were to make a cross in beans (a self-pollinator) and started selecting out of the progeny of that cross, I may release a new bean variety several generations later, but it is no longer an F-1 hybrid. The bean will breed true in subsequent generations, whereas when you plant out seed saved from an F-1 hybrid corn variety the plants in the next generation are going to segregate into several different phenotypes (observable physical forms). You will get a reshuffling of all the parental traits between those two parents that made the F-1 hybrid.

SP: So what about the self-pollinators?

JN: All self-pollinated species have perfect flowers which have some sort of mechanism for pollinating, or "selfing" themselves as it is called. They are able to self-pollinate before insects or any other environmental influence can make a cross. Now, all selfers will cross to some degree. All selfers cross at different rates depending on the environment, but usually it is less than five percent. Cross-pollinated species, which are what I work with, are a whole different ball game. If you select only a single plant of a crosser and try to make a whole new variety out of it, you are going to run into such severe in-breeding depressions so fast it's not going to survive.

SP: In-breeding depression means?...

JN: ... it means once you start in-breeding any cross-pollinated species and artificially selfing it, deleterious traits come out that are normally hidden within that big sex orgy that occurs in a field of cross-pollinated plants. In a cross-pollinated species there are a lot of deleterious traits held by the population. For example, one out of 40 people carry the recessive gene for albinism, but there's only 1 out of 14,000 human beings that actually are albino. Cross pollinated species have lots of traits similar to albinism in that they are being carried in a very high percentage of the population, but are hidden because they are recessive. If you start selfing, a lot of these recessive (and often deleterious) traits would emerge in much the same way as albinos would become more common if only people carrying the albino gene were mating.

SP: So, in a cross-pollinated species you want to encourage a lot of crossing.

JN: You want to encourage crossing, and you never want to reduce the size of your selected population too much. Now, let's get back to the early corn breeders who realized this. Were they hung up on total uniformity that some agriculturists talk about today? No they weren't, but with their new understanding about inherited traits and the science of genetics, they started to self plants just to see what would come out. All of a sudden, when selfing these corn plants, they started to see a couple things. First, they saw some bad traits that came out and they threw those plants away. Then they realized that a few selfing plants from this naturally cross-pollinating species resulted in plants with some really nice traits.

SP: In other words, by selfing, they were identifying and teasing out the key individuals.

JN: They were teasing out the individuals and by selfing they could lock in a desirable trait. They already had realized how hard it was to breed crossers even with progeny testing (described above) to consistently get every, or most, of the plants in the field to be productive. Most importantly, no matter how carefully they planted and cared for their field of OP corn, a good Midwestern gully washer rainstorm would come along and 20 to 30 percent of the plants would fall over and they'd only get 70 percent of the potential yield. These early corn breeders started to find they could produce plants with resistance to lodging by identifying the particular in-bred (selfing) lines that had improved stalk strength. Now the problem was that this in-breeding technique produced little runty plants that never could be sold to the farmers. The plants were little and the ears were 4 inches long instead of 10 inches because the in-breeding was bringing out some of the deleterious stuff. It wasn't a trait like root rot susceptibility or something that would take a whole corn plant out, but it would be things that would cause the plants to shrink. They knew the only way out was by making a cross with a different parental line, which would restore all of that vigor, and a combination of the best traits of the two parental lines would be retained in one package. Guess what? All of the plants in the field would share those important traits. The key trait that really sold hybrid corn in the early days, more than anything else, was stalk quality. All those guys who worked on hybrid corn found that improved stalk strength meant that many more plants would still be standing at harvest time and yields were much higher. They weren't worried about how good the ear looked, or how many rows of corn were on the ear. They all grew up on farms and they knew that yield as far as bushel yields of corn per acre was the bottom line. It meant how many mouths you could feed and how much corn you could sell. That's why farmers with their hard-earned cash in the depression years, who normally were saving their own seed, went in and plunked down greenbacks to buy hybrid corn seed. That's the god honest reality of it.

SP: So to this day, most all corn varieties are hybrids.

JN: Yes, they are. I want to mention two footnotes to the hybrid story. First, a guy named Merle Jenkins was the head of USDA corn investigation for the whole country during the hybrid revolution. I think it was 1936 when Jenkins came right out and said, "You know, the hybrid method has been very good for us thus far because it solves the problem of how we get these good traits into varieties for farmers in pretty quick fashion. Eventually, however, we'll move on to another method and this is just a transitional method we're using." That's very important. The early people who were working on hybrid corn saw that it was a quick way to get all the traits into the rows they could get them into, to produce the best possible varieties for the farmer. It wasn't the end-all or supposed to be the only way we ever bred corn from then on. Second, a fellow named George Sprague, trained by one of those 15 early corn breeders (Sprague died almost at the age of 100 just a few years ago) was a young man in the 20's when they were first doing all of that research. Irwin Goldman (current U. of Wisconsin beet, carrot, onion breeder) asked Sprague in a video, "Dr. Sprague could we have done it another way? Was hybrid the only way to get to the corn we wanted in that early corn revolution?" Sprague, one of the great plant breeders of the 20th century said, and I'm paraphrasing him, "No, it wasn't the only way. We could have found another way with good variety matches, like different forms of OP's." That leaves me to believe that the whole hybrid thing wasn't essential to our progress. In fact, in my own plant breeding I found ways of crossing different populations of plants that resulted in highly resilient and vigorous progeny without relying on hybridizing in-bred lines. It also meant that the people who buy this seed have something that they can reproduce and keep selecting.

Now, can we get to the point where 100% of the plants in the field are uniform and productive? That fact is that even with modern hybrid vegetables you never get a 100% pack-out, meaning 100% of the plants are worth taking out of the field. Partly that's an environmental effect, and partly it is just the nature of plant hybrids. Hybrids are never as good as some of their proponents tell you they are. With open-pollinated varieties we won't get 100% pack-out either, and probably will have a lower percentage pack-out than with the hybrid. But I can get in all of the good traits, get in all of the vigor and I can get in more horizontal disease resistance (muti-genic, durable disease resistance) and more adaptation in a well-selected OP. In order to accept an OP, however, the grower must know that there will be some plant variability in the field.

In summary, after several years of selecting specific traits and packaging them back together, the early corn breeders could more consistently impart the best traits to almost every plant in the field. They never viewed it as something where the seed company would have some sort of a weird monopoly or control. It was strictly a way to solve a problem. As Jenkins said, we're going to find another way to do it in the future. Unfortunately that was 65 years ago when Jenkins said that and everybody got locked into the hybrid paradigm.

The second reason F-1 hybrids dominated the landscape has to do with protecting intellectual property. Seed companies had always been miffed that they would put time and energy into producing a new OP variety that bred true, (unlike a hybrid), whether self pollinating or cross-pollinating, and they would release it on the market. A competitor would then buy some seed of this variety, grow it up, produce some stock seed, and contract to get it grown on a large scale. Within 3 years all the competitors would have the variety. In those days, however, the power of a variety was how good the seed company kept up their own strain. To this day people still say, for example, in open pollinated varieties, "For Red Core Chantenay carrot I only want it out of an Alf Christiansen bag." Why? Because they knew an Alf Christiansen Red Core Chantenay was the best maintained strain in the business. Traditionally that's how seed companies did business and kept customers. Nevertheless, seed companies still didn't like everyone getting their variety. It stole their fire. So when F-1 hybrids came along the seed people quickly found out that they could develop two inbred lines or simply get them from the USDA. Then they could take the two parental inbreds, which they kept secret from everyone else, and make a hybrid combination. In that way the seed company could control that seed. It was instant proprietary control of your variety. Nobody else was going to get Burpee's Big Boy hybrid tomato because Burpee was the only one who knew what the two parents were. You could save seeds off the hybrid and get tomatoes, but all the parental traits would be reshuffled and you'd never quite be able to reproduce that Burpee Big Boy. You can still come up with some good varieties from an F-1 if you have the time and resources, and there have been many plant breeders that have used that as a breeding strategy. I encourage people to save seeds from their favorite hybrid. If you don't mind some variation to select from, there's nothing wrong with saving seed out of a hybrid tomato or hybrid pepper. But then, you've crossed the line into plant breeding because it requires a lot of selection to get something good, and it'll take several years. The only thing I'd advise to watch out for are onions, beets and carrots because those three crops use something called cytoplasmic male sterility in their female parent and you'll get a lot of sterile seeds in the progeny.

The beauty of hybrids, for the seed company, was that they could control the proprietary nature of their variety without needing any sort of patent or without getting royalties involved. The bad part was, it limited access to some of the best germplasm and hence slowed overall progress. When a good OP variety is released, it gives all of us a chance to change it according to our own needs and our own environment. The message for seed companies is that if you release a good OP you just have to be very sure that you have the best quality seed, the best uniformity, the best selection, so that your customers will keep purchasing your strain and not somebody else's. The first half of the 20th century involved a bunch of farm boys who became breeders trying to get the job done. The second half of the 20th century paved the way for seed companies to profit from those earlier efforts.

SP: This leads into the term vigor. We've heard so long about how vigorous and robust the F-1 hybrids are, particularly in corn. Maybe you can explain how vigor is achieved, and can you achieve an equal amount of vigor in an open-pollinated crop?

JN: I've got some very new thoughts on this because I've been working on vigor for the past two years. First, vigor is what people associate with hybrids. It's also called heterosis, a term coined by George Shull in 1914. Heterosis was first described by the early plant breeders when they would make a cross from two unrelated parents, or two very different corn varieties. They were having all sorts of fun crossing, for example, popcorn and sweet corn. They were like kids in a candy store, because when you cross popcorn and a sweet corn you get an amazingly vigorous plant that is much more vigorous than either of the parents. They realized it wasn't something they'd bred since it isn't a selectable trait but something that happens via some part of genetics that we still don't understand. So they called it heterosis. The shorter, more common way to say it was "hybrid vigor". In fact, many people went espousing the virtues of the hybrid, saying, "Boy my hybrids jump out of the soil, so if a plant breeder just picks two good, fairly unrelated parents, they'll surely get something with lot of vigor!" As a plant breeder I contend that, particularly in a cross-pollinating species where you're mixing a lot of divergent material, you can get just as much vigor in an open-pollinated variety as in an F-1 hybrid.

SP: Can a home gardener or small-scale grower select for vigor?

JN: Yeah, you can always select for vigor. My friend, Frank Morton, an independent breeder in Oregon, selects the plants from a seedling tray that exhibit the most vigor, and grows these out for his breeding program. Sometimes he'll get a cell that's a little bit of an old dinosaur turd that does really well. The most vigorous plant in the flat aren't always truly the most vigorous. Remember, all that glitters is not gold. But if you select for vigor consistently you will get results. In a lettuce trial I just completed, I planted out 20 varieties. Some of the lettuces were from the best seed houses in Europe, some were from various American companies. Four of the 20 were from Frank Morton's program. Guess what I found? The four most vigorous varieties were all Frank's! That's what gives me hope. We can make some of the most significant improvements right at home, and don't always need all that fancy professional breeding. There are two ways you can get vigor at any time. You can select for whatever inheritable factors there are that make a plant vigorous. If you select, over generations, for the plants that are always the most vigorous, you are going to get some of the inheritable genetic traits which are not single gene traits. There is no such thing as a single gene trait like a vigor gene. It's a whole complex of genetic factors that make that plant more vigorous. What are they? These are all important to organic farmers. When you plant a heat-loving crop in cold soil it probably isn't going to get enough phosphorous. One of the things you might find is that the best plants can scavenge for phosphorous better than their siblings, or, they are able to photosynthesize a little better at 52 degrees than the average plant in that population. Who knows what all the factors are? They might be a little more resistant to damping off, which sometimes causes many seedlings to die when you're not using fungicide. If you're selecting for cold tolerance you're actually selecting for a whole plethora of traits. Does it really matter what contributed to that plant being more vigorous? No, I don't care. When I'm selecting for vigor I just want the most vigorous plant. Is that going to translate into subsequent crops from that population that will be more vigorous? You bet it will, like my friend Morton is doing.

SP: It seems like if there's enough genetic diversity in that population, like your example of that hybrid corn and the two unrelated kinds that you were crossing for vigor; you'd want that same type of genetic diversity in an open-pollinated population.

JN: Right. There are times when you can have quite a lot of genetic diversity. The biggest problem in getting a hybrid that's really uniform is that you have to inbreed the two lines. You get diversity with the two lines contributing to the progeny in the F-1 that are fairly unrelated. That's where you gain your heterosis. At least that's the running theory that still holds in 2002.

SP: Isn't there an additional challenge maintaining an open-pollinating population in that it has to be pretty uniform to be acceptable at market? You've got to balance these two elements, the genetic diversity and the uniformity.

JN: That's why the plant breeding of the future for organic is going to be such a wonderful challenge. I say that for the rest of my life I'm devoted to breeding for organics. You have to think about things like seedling vigor. Why? We can't use fungicide treated seed. I was talking to couple of Iowa farmers who are a little miffed about not being able to use treated seed anymore because they don't get a good stand, such as in their soybeans. Part of the problem is that nobody is selecting for good seedling vigor in soybeans that I know about, and nobody has selected for good damping off resistance in any crop. It's a big trade secret that good seedling vigor and damping off resistance seem to go hand in hand to have fast-growing seedlings that outgrow the complex of diseases that are present. Although I'm not against all hybrids if done in the right spirit and by the right people, I think the best populations are the good OPs. I believe it's possible to get more genetic diversity into an OP, maintain it, and then give people something they can work with in their own climatic conditions. But, as a plant breeder, maintaining a good OP is a constant challenge. You don't say "Here, I'm done, a new Ruby Queen beet - you can take it now and reproduce it ad infinitum, it's done forever." You can't say that because genetic drift always occurs. If you don't keep selecting for the good traits, that population is going to drift and change. Many good varieties have changed, some to the point of not being good varieties anymore from lack of attention by good seed people. By taking on this mission as a seed grower, seed saver, or plant breeder, you have taken on the responsibility of shepherding that genetic line through. If you don't practice good stewardship with those varieties and maintain a constant selection pressure on them, then they're going to change and those good traits are slowly going to go away. It's inevitable.

SP: Could you comment on how to preserve heirlooms and traditional varieties?

JN: Some preservationists, like the USDA preservationist guy in Iowa who takes care of the corn collection, do not do any selection at all. Their goal is not to put a value judgment on what is saved, but only to preserve all the genes that currently exist in the population, and there's a place for that. Now, for those of us who are growing seed that will be used by human beings in the modern world, we have to apply some selection pressure to keep things moving along. The human beings who have saved seed have always selected for their needs. That's a natural part of being in an agrarian society. My job as a plant breeder is to get things out there that have enough genetic resiliency and breadth, that if I bred and selected kale in the Pacific Northwest, for example, that someone in say, Montana could take that population and improve its cold hardiness for Montana conditions. When I bred that plant I put in enough genetic diversity, so you have some latitude there. You can start selecting some members of that cold hardy population and it's still good and resilient. You're probably not going to narrow it too much and you'll ultimately have a good Montana version of that kale variety.

SP: Right, like you said earlier, adaptability...

JN: Adaptability has to be built in. As good plant breeders, we have to have enough breadth in the population when we release in our varieties so that there's some resiliency and some adaptability in the plant. Whatever you select for, I know you can make some progress in your environment if you're starting with something that has some genetic resiliency.

SP: That may be perhaps the most valuable reason for maintaining and improving open-pollinated varieties. It enables a broad base of agriculturists to adapt it to their own conditions.

JN: And that is how so much diversity has been created since the birth of agriculture. For example, kale was first cultivated in a very small region by a few extended families of agrarian people in Northern Europe. It has since spread all over the world. By taking it to all those different places in the world we've really expanded its adaptability because we've selected for different things. We're realizing that there is a lot of genetic resiliency built in all our germ plasm. The well-spring of new diversity that we have today from crops spreading around the world and being selected under vastly different environments is our true genetic wealth.

SP: Now, please describe what some of the recent trends are in the seed industry regarding varietal selection and genetic diversity.

JN: Okay. It's a mixed bag. Let's talk about the positive first. One of the recent trends is to incorporate new diversity. There has been a revitalization of some crops with the introduction of more unusual germ plasm, because people are demanding more color, different shapes, new tastes, and other variations that may not have been acceptable 20-25 years ago. That's a very healthy trend. Even some of the most specialized plant breeders working with crops from the biggest companies are dipping into some of that diversity. Unfortunately, the trend that is the most troublesome is that many plant breeders are overly obsessed with the search for the perfect vegetable in terms of how it is grown and how it looks on the shelf. Plant-to-plant uniformity of each particular variety plays a bigger part in the production today than ever before.

SP: Does this also include harvesting times?

JN: Harvesting time is actually one of the biggest components of it. It's not necessarily a bad thing. People who are harvesting produce want it all to be ready on the same day. Even if you're a small truck farmer you may have an onion crop drying in the field. When you get ready to harvest, the tops just flop down. Nobody wants to have an onion where a third of the crop is done and their tops are flopping over while the other two thirds are still in various stages of needing another week or two to mature. When I was a truck farmer growing onions on a few hundred square feet, I'd want to get all the tops down so I could get them all down into the curing shed on the same day.

In broccoli, you'd want to create some variation because you don't want to sell all of them on the same day. But in the big world of commercial vegetables when you're cutting broccoli along the coast of California, you want to get through that 5 to 8 acre field in one afternoon with a team of harvesters with sharp knives. You want every plant to be ready to cut, box and ship off. So the pressure is pretty intense on commercial plant breeders to get uniform shape, size, color, harvest date, and vigor. What do plant breeders do to get those things? They select for inbred lines (used to create F-1 hybrids) to be absolutely, meticulously uniform. One of the great myths about hybrids and inbred lines is that every plant is exactly the same. In most vegetable crops that I've dealt with in the seed industry, hybrids and inbred lines are actually a far cry from being truly uniform. Historically, in the development of the inbred line there has been a balance between the need for uniformity and the hesitation to inbreed too much because it could jeopardize seed production. Well, now the pressure is on for more uniformity in the field, as well as for decreasing the number of locations where vegetables are grown. Despite the trend that there are more market farmers growing all over in little pockets, such as near the bigger cities in the Midwest, the big seed companies are narrowing their markets to those they believe are worth pursuing. In the spinach industry, for example, nobody breeds for the old traditional markets of coastal Virginia and New Jersey, Texas, Arkansas or New York State. All breeding work is done for Salinas Valley, California growers, who also run spinach operations down in Yuma, Arizona. That's it, as far as spinach breeding goes in North America. It's all done for two valleys - Salinas and Yuma.

SP: In Yuma, it's actually winter spinach, right?

JN: Yes. The winter is the perfect time to grow spinach in that area, while in spring, summer, and fall it's grown in Salinas. It's a very narrow focus. Part of that is the consolidation of the seed industry. They say, where's the money? Well, it's an $8 million seed industry between Yuma & Salinas. The Texas, Virginia or Arkansas market is small potatoes for them and they are not willing to spend any time and effort in those places. So the financial incentive is a key ingredient in leading to a narrower focus of breeding plants for a very particular adaptation--to climate, to specific fertilizer and pesticide inputs, and to machinery used to cultivate and harvest crops. Everybody's fighting to get those markets. We were talking about broccoli--seed companies are taking the older inbreds that made the good early generations of hybrids that were around 20-25 years ago when I was growing broccoli, including the original 'Marathon' strain, and rigorously reselecting them. The result is a further narrowing of the genetic diversity of both the inbred lines and the newer generation of hybrids.

SP: What is the alternative to this over-selection process to avoid weakening a varietal line?

JN: A good plant breeder like Frank Morton makes a cross and lines out his F-2's (2nd generation) and F-3's (3rd generation), and always leaves some variation in there. When he breeds a 'Flashy Troutback' or a 'Butter Oak' lettuce, for example, he doesn't narrow it down to single crop selection to get a really perfect, uniform phenotype (the physical form of a plant). Instead, he leaves a lot of distinctly different genetic individuals in and takes them as a group. In contrast, when you buy a modern variety of lettuce (a self-pollinating crop) from Europe, you're getting the equivalent of a single inbred line of a cross-pollinated crop like broccoli or carrot, where the entire population is derived from one plant, or you get an inbred line derived from several plants that's been rogued like crazy to produce an extremely uniform crop without regard to other very important characteristics.

SP: So for most modern cultivars we have increasingly narrow genetic lines that have been bred for very specific locations. Now explain the cultural conditions for producing of this seed.

JN: In an effort to grow a clean, uniform crop, commercial producers are achieving more precise control of the chemical inputs being used. In the Salinas Valley a huge amount of the acreage is fumigated with methyl bromide. Plant selection is done in sterile soils. They're using treated seed, spraying fungicide and putting it in the furrow before planting, and then planting into fumigated ground. All of this eliminates the damping-off organisms, which include a complex fungi and bacteria that attacks young root growth. That means the varieties we get from that kind of environment have never been put under any natural selection or exposed to these root destroying fungi and bacteria. What happens when you shield plants from the natural slings and arrows of outrageous fortunes that already exist in the environment? They get weaker and weaker and become what we plant breeders call prima donnas. We've got to treat them with kid gloves to get them to grow. All of the inputs have to be lined up perfectly. That's what is happening in the vegetable breeding business. In many cases we have spinach varieties today that are more susceptible to Fusarium wilt and other damping-off diseases than many of the older varieties because the old seed people didn't want to spend money on all those inputs. Our germ plasm today, because it's not being selected under harsher conditions, is really getting weaker. If we don't select for damp and rot resistance, any inherent disease resistance that may have existed has been slowly lost by genetic drift.

SP: What is the alternative to this modern breeding style? How do we challenge our plants and make them stronger?

JN: You make them stronger by starting out with good, hardy, diversified germ plasm. Then, I would recommend to anyone getting into seed growing or seed saving, whether on a commercial or home-scale, to do a little observation trial when checking out a new crop, and become familiar with it. Grow several varieties of a particular crop type, evaluate them, and pick out plants to save seed from that have some adaptation to your environment and that survive the diseases that may be present in your area. In Iowa City, I was selecting for early blight resistance in tomatoes. I had about 40 different breeding lines and commercial varieties. There was a huge amount of difference in early blight resistance. No variety was completely resistant to early blight, but there was some real variation out there. So grow a bunch of plants and begin looking for the tough ones.

SP: ..and grow them in less than ideal conditions...

JN: Absolutely. Don't plant your stuff under the best conditions or give it the royal treatment. Give these plants no better than average conditions. In fact, sometimes plant into the crappiest piece of ground you have. Make sure your plants go through some difficult times because you want to locate what I call the work horses. "It always makes" is my definition of a work horse, or a variety that delivers in both good and bad years. Don't do what the California breeders are doing where they treat their plants like prima donnas. Then, once you've found the ones that have some toughness, start selecting for a particular desirable trait such as flavor. Go look at individual plants and be amazed. For instance, I'm growing Super Sioux, an old tomato variety bred at the University of Nebraska in the 40's. There's a lot of variation for early blight resistance and fruit size. It's a great tomato and a great place to start some selecting. If you get tuned into your crop, you can see it. The mission of the seed companies is to be really observant and start to select against the diseases.

SP: All of the Seeds Of Change growers are growing our seeds under organic conditions. What that means is that the nutrients, for example, are often released much slower than under conventional chemical farming methods, and greater weed pressure may exist than in chemically sprayed fields. These are the conditions that a plant "sees" if it is grown organically.

JN: Very often in the commercial seed business, they think that only growing seeds that are nice and plump and firm and then applying a coat of fungicide coat is all you need to ensure good vigor under tough conditions. As several of us breeding for organic conditions have now found out, if there's lots of variation in a seed lot, you're going to see the differences in the vigor of the seedlings. Start selecting right from that initial seedling stage because plant breeders have been ignoring seedling vigor for years. During those first few days of growth, the young seedling is establishing its first set of roots that are out there scavenging for nutrients. The seedlings that are most vigorous, especially heat-loving crops, are the best scavengers of those nutrients. That's something worth selecting for. Is there true genetic variation for that? You bet there is. I've seen it countless times. Frank Morton always selects for seedling vigor in his lettuce breeding, and compared with even the fanciest competitors, I can immediately pick out Frank's seedlings because of their superior vigor. That is something we should all be doing, right from the ground up.

SP: What about weed pressure?

JN: Very important. In carrot breeding there has always been the propensity to only select the root. One thing I came upon while breeding carrots was the huge difference in the amount of carrot top growth. So much emphasis of the old-fashioned Nantes carrot varieties was on good-tasting, juicy, sweet roots, while the amount of leaf was completely ignored. In fact, there are carrots from different parts of the world that have 3 to 5 times more carrot tops than the Nantes varieties. What I've found is that certain carrots are notoriously slow-growing, and aren't able to compete with weeds early in the season. If you can find a vigorous-growing carrot that cranks out a lot of foliage early, you still may have to do a first or even second "hands-and-knees" weeding of carrots, but you'll never have to do a third or fourth weeding because it's eventually going to out-compete the weeds. This can save an organic carrot grower a lot of money in the long run. That's a classic case of good, sound breeding for organics. In my current program, one of my primary goals is to get good-tasting, tall top carrots for the organic grower. I'm very hopeful on that project. I know that's going to pay off in the long term.

SP: It sounds like there's tremendous opportunity for great improvement for all organic growers. So, John, in summary, could you explain the basic steps necessary to attain improved germ plasm and seed varieties?

JN: Yeah, it is comprised of what I call the quality triangle with three essential steps, and is important for any serious seed saver, whether you're on a small plot or you are a commercial seed grower. It begins with the evaluation step. Don't just take as gospel that, for example, an heirloom variety with a good reputation is necessarily all that good. Go out and grow some different varieties, talk to different people, go to the farmers market, find out what the best varieties are in your area. You may be stumbling along, growing an heirloom tomato that only gives you 6-8 ripe fruits per plant, when you could be growing something producing much better yields. So always go through the evaluation step for understanding what has the best characteristics, the most pest resistance and toughness for your climate. You need to determine these, and that's going to pay, with interest, for years to come. The second step in the quality triangle is the improvement stage. Try to have a couple of hundred plants to choose from to increase your odds of selecting in the right direction. Always go out and look at your plants. I'm new at saving edamame soy bean seed. This past summer I found 3 or 4 plants that had some sort of foliar leaf blight that I couldn't identify. They were ugly so I pulled them out and they were obviously more susceptible to the leaf blight than the others in the population. It's absolutely worth yanking out those 3 or 4 plants to increase my likelihood of having improved stock seed-- which is the third part of the triangle. Larry Satterly, an old plant breeder I used to work with, always said, "If you don't do anything else, always pull out the uglies." It's a pretty simple philosophy and straight forward. There's no mystery. Don't be intimidated by the process.

SP: Once you've made a selection, do you begin bringing in new genetic material?

JN: Once you've made a selection, you may decide you have something unusual or a true heirloom and should send a sample to Seed Saver's Exchange. However, there are times when you've got a variety you're not necessarily saving for posterity. For example, you have a lima bean variety that always has 3 seeds per pod. You may look at that lima bean and decide that 3 beans per pod is too much shelling, too much work. You could cross in a Fordhook lima because it may yield more seeds per pod, give you something more vigorous, and perhaps be more resistant to the Mexican Bean Beetle. It's OK to make a strain crossing like this to add more vigor. Yes, you too can become a plant breeder.

SP: Then the progeny from that strain cross would go through another selection?

JN: You're going to go through years of selection. That's the fun. Don't be intimidated by it. See it as a work in process. You're not going to get instant results, but you're going to have years of fun selecting out and segregating material. Once you get something that's really nice, stable, true-to-type, and grown in isolation to avoid unwanted crosses, whether it's your own creation or from an established variety, then declare this as your stock seed lot. That's the top of the triangle. Evaluation is one bottom corner. Improvement is another bottom corner. Up at the pinnacle is the stock seed ideal. Grow a goodly amount of that seed and store some away under dark, cool and low humidity conditions. That's your Fort Knox seed lot that you really like. Then grow a little seed out of that, and that's your production seed.

SP: So, what you've just outlined is really at the core of any advance in seed quality.

JN: It is the core for anyone doing true plant improvement. You have to consider the quality triangle. People latch on to a variety, grow it for 3 or 4 generations, save seed every year, and never compare it to the original stock seed. If you do that, you may find that your variety has changed considerably from the original stock, because of out-crossing, from genetic drift in the way you select, or, in the case of cross-pollinated species, an insufficient population size. The quality triangle will keep your breeding program on track.

SP: It certainly appears that there are opportunities for regional, as well as organic, seed production throughout the world.

JN: We are at a real new horizon of opportunities because the big companies are getting bigger and narrowing the focus of their breeding programs. Dr. Dick Lower (cucumber breeder, U. of Wisconsin) in his retirement talk spoke about the very discouraging fact that a lot of minor vegetable crops are being completely left by the wayside by the big companies. It's not big enough business for them. In one way that sounds discouraging. But in another way, it puts those of us growing seeds into a position to really start developing regional seed production. A lot of small seed companies are crying out to find good seed growers to produce more seeds because the big companies are dropping the older and more unusual varieties and crop species. So there truly is a golden opportunity for smaller seed companies, and certainly the future for vegetables is in bioregional production. We see this in the Midwest already. Chicago is using more and more Midwest vegetables than they have since probably before World War II. Toronto is booming in its use of vegetables from all over Southern Ontario. People want locally-grown vegetables, and the best way to get them is to select, breed, and produce seed of those vegetables organically and well adapted to the local environment. That is a powerful goal, and the resulting seeds will ultimately be better than those produced by the large trans-national corporations. Grow those seeds, folks!

SP: John, thank you very much for your time, and your willingness to share your amazing expertise on this complex subject. I look forward to continuing this conversation in the near future.

Steve Peters is the Commercial Seed Manager for Seeds Of Change