Show notes
Episode one of the second season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks – who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it. In this episode, host Rachel Hultengren spoke with Andrew Still of Adaptive Seeds and the Seed Ambassadors Project about his work in seed-saving, open-pollinated variety maintenance and the process of what he refers to as ‘dehybridization’. Their conversation focuses on ‘Gypsy Queens’, a variety of pepper that Andrew developed and pledged to be open-source. Andrew Still Episode links Find Gypsy Queens seed at the Adaptive Seeds website. Learn more about the: Seed Ambassadors Project: www.seedambassadors.org/. Northern Organic Vegetable Improvement Collaborative (NOVIC): http://eorganic.info/novic/ Culinary Breeding Network: https://www.culinarybreedingnetwork.com/ Episode glossary Hybrid: a variety produced by the intentional crossing two distinct, stable parental lines or varieties. Commercially available hybrid varieties are generally highly uniform (individuals in the population will all have the same characteristics) because the individuals are all highly genetically similar. (Hybrid varieties are also often referred to as F1-hybrids.) F1: the first-generation progeny (offspring) of a parental cross. The ‘F’ stands for ‘filial’. F2: the second generation progeny of a parental cross. Produced by saving self-pollinated seed from F1 plants. F3: the third generation progeny of a parental cross. Produced by saving self-pollinated seed from F2 plants. Open-pollinated variety: a population wherein the seed from individuals that have been crossed with other individuals of the same population will produce progeny that are characteristically similar to those parents and the population in general. Off-type: an individual plant whose characteristics do not fit the variety description. Rogue: remove from the field individual plants are diseased, or that either don’t fit with the variety description (if the individual is a member of a well-defined variety) or the project goals (if part of a plant breeding project) in order to keep them from contributing genetic material to the next generation (i.e. so that seeds aren’t saved off them). —————————————————————————————————————————————— Free the Seed! Transcript for S2E1: Gypsy Queens Rachel Hultengren: Welcome to episode one of the second season of Free the Seed!, the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast that tells the stories of new crop varieties and the plant breeders that develop them. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren. If you’re new to the podcast, consider checking out previous episodes from our first season. If you’d like to learn more about the Open Source Seed Initiative’s history and mission, I talk with Dr. Irwin Goldman and Dr. Claire Luby in episode 2 about intellectual property rights in crops. In this episode, I spoke with Andrew Still of Adaptive Seeds and the Seed Ambassadors Project about his work in seed-saving, open-pollinated variety maintenance and the process of what he refers to as ‘dehybridization’. Our conversation focuses on ‘Gypsy Queens’, a variety of pepper that Andrew developed and pledged to be open-source. Early in the interview, Andrew mentions the Culinary Breeding Network and NOVIC, the Northern Organic Vegetable Improvement Collaborative. We’ll have links to both their websites in our show-notes. Rachel: Hi Andrew – welcome to the show! Andrew Still: It’s good to be here! Rachel: Thanks so much for taking the time. I’m excited to get to talk about ‘Gypsy Queens’. We haven’t highlighted a pepper yet, so it’ll be great to hear about pepper breeding generally, and the specifics of this variety and your process. Maybe we could start with you describing ‘Gypsy Queens’ for us – what does this pepper look like if you had it on a plate in front of you? Andrew: It’s kind of a Hungarian type, or eastern European sweet pepper. It’s a medium sized bell in a way, but it also has an elongated shape, so it’s kind of intermediate between a bell pepper and an Italian ‘Corno di Toro’ type pepper. It was kind of a cool process of pulling it out of a famous variety, I guess you could say, called ‘Gypsy’, which was a sweet pepper hybrid from Petoseed that a lot of farmers in the Pacific Northwest found quite helpful and really, really good to grow in our not-so-hot climate. It always performed well, and one of the main features of it is that it has a nice yellow-ish light green color when it’s underripe, and it starts to ripen a little bit orangey really quick, and so it’s one of those – it’s an interesting color and flavor in the early season, when there are only green bell peppers about or green peppers to harvest, so it kind of adds to that diversity of early season availability. Rachel: Mmhmm. And I’d like to ask you to get into the process of dehybridizing ‘Gypsy’ in a minute, but maybe we could talk about how you decided to take on the project of doing this work and developing ‘Gypsy Queens’. Did it come out of conversations that you had with farmers around you? Andrew: We’ve always kind of had the plan of dehybridizing it because we like to do that with cool hybrids that we like. But the inspiration really came from some work with the Culinary Breeding Network and NOVIC (the Northern Organic Vegetable Improvement Collaborative). They had been trialing sweet peppers and evaluating flavor and such, and one of their concerns was that ‘Gypsy’ hybrid was going to be dropped commercially, so they were trialing varieties that were similar, or could be good in other ways as a replacement. And it was kind of my, like, “Well, if you like ‘Gypsy’, why don’t I just grow it out and see what happens?” It’s kind of a funny thing where I hadn’t actually grown it for quite a few years, but a friend of ours on the coast – a farmer, Carolina Liddy – and she was growing it, and I was like, “Can I have some of your fruits?” And I just grabbed some seeds from her and grew it out from there and have been growing it out for probably 5 or 6 years, I think, and just selecting it out for various traits. But yeah, it’s always collaborative and influenced from different people, and we like to take the things that we’re excited about and then double down on things that other people are excited about too, because we’re all so excited about so many particular, peculiar things that are weird. So it’s nice to have someone like the Culinary Breeding Network or NOVIC to push us in a more appropriate direction. Rachel: So it sounds like the motivation was to create a potential replacement for if ‘Gypsy’ was no longer carried by the seed company that was carrying it. Andrew: Yeah, the backstory of ‘Gypsy’ is that it was bred by Petoseed, I think in the 90’s. Petoseed was purchased by Seminis, and then Seminis was purchased by Monsanto. And a lot of organic farmers were very uncomfortable with the fact that Seminis was owned by Monsanto and was supplying a lot of their seed. And also when these seed mergers happen, they tend to drop varieties that are only regionally popular, or like more specialty varieties like ‘Gypsy’ was very likely going to be dropped, and there was a period of time where the seed was not easily available. I think it’s still available from a couple places, but for various reasons people wanted to get away from it but still wanted it, so that was really the main reason we wanted to dehybridize it. Rachel: And were there any intellectual property rights associated with ‘Gypsy’ when you started? Andrew: Not that I know of. And I believe that there isn’t… partly because it’s a hybrid and was developed quite a while ago. And hybrids tend to not be patented or have much intellectual property about them. Rachel: Why wouldn’t a hybrid have a patent or other intellectual property rights associated with it? Andrew: Well, at the time, there wasn’t as much need for patents and intellectual property because the seed company has the parent lines that make the hybrid, and those are pretty proprietary and secret. So they’re the only ones that know how to make the hybrid, therefore they have a de facto kind of patent on it. They’ve doubled down on control and protections recently, but back then it was common not to patent or have intellectual property about hybrids. Back then, it was more of patenting techniques for making hybrids, and I think that the patenting system has gotten out of hand recently as sort of a recent development. Rachel: Can you define for us what ‘dehybridization’ means? Andrew: Dehybridization is… pretty much it’s just taking a hybrid – F1 seed that’s a commercially available variety – and planting it out and saving seed on it, and trying to select for something that resembled the original variety. As opposed to making a cross and trying to create something completely new, I would usually say that dehybridization is to take a hybrid that you like and make it open-pollinated, so you can then save seed on it and then that seed that you save isn’t mixed up and variable, it’s more predictable like a traditional OP or heirloom variety. So it’s kind of untangling the mess of hybridization and making it more of an open pollinated line. Rachel: And are there reasons why farmers might prefer to grow a hybrid of a given crop? Andrew: Well, certain types of plants and species tend to have more or less benefit for being a hybrid. Something like a cabbage or a broccoli, they tend to benefit a lot from hybridization. They have – they gain a little bit of vigor, and have uniformity at the same time, which is not very common for outbreeding crops. Typically you can get one or the other – uniformity or vigor. And so hybridization is really helpful for that; you want to be able to harvest every single head of cabbage on the same day with your giant field crew in the central valley of California. But something like a pepper or a tomato – there’s not as many big reasons for hybridization, other than for the proprietary control over the variety. Sometimes hybridization can be helpful for making certain traits more available or predictable. You can achieve a disease resistance really quickly with hybridization, as opposed to having to go through a decade of backcrossing or whatever for making it open-pollinated, it can be more challenging. But I think that for self-pollinating crops, the main reason for hybridization is for the proprietary control. And also the hype around hybrids. A lot of farmers have been marketed to that hybrids are better, because the seed companies and plant breeding companies can make more money off of the hybrids because they’re a monopoly. But it’s not always true. Sometimes open-pollinated varieties can be just as good as hybrids. Rachel: So there might be benefits to a given variety being a hybrid, but then there are also the tradeoffs of it being potentially more vulnerable to loss when a seed company drops it. Andrew: Yeah, and seed companies drop stuff all the time for various reasons. And not because they’re bad varieties, necessarily, just because they had particular reasons to do it. Rachel: Let’s talk about the process you went through in this dehybridization of ‘Gypsy’. You said you started by taking some fruit from a friend’s farm. What did you do next? Andrew: The first year, I just planted out that F2 seed, and planted out probably 30 or 40 plants just to see what it would look like, and most of those plants were fairly similar. There wasn’t much diversity or segregation in the F2, which was kind of a shock to me. Rachel: You would have expected it to be more diverse? Andrew: I was, but I’ve recently kind of seen that saving seed of off F2’s, sometimes you don’t get tons of variety come out of them. I’m not sure exactly why. But I’m guessing for ‘Gypsy’, it was because the two parents were fairly similar to begin with. Rachel: So there wasn’t a lot of genetic diversity in the parents that created the hybrid? Andrew: Yeah, and they might have even been sibling inbred lines, and might not had a lot of much variation between them at all. I did see a little bit of variation, but it wasn’t that significant. Mostly what I did was, I saved seed off of a few of those plants that seemed to be the most healthy and vigorous. Because there wasn’t too much bad in that first population, I did that positive selection on a few plants just to go for vigor and production and health. And then I planted out the F3 the following year. Rachel: How often did you go into the field to look at that plot of plants and evaluate what you were looking for? Andrew: It was at a time when we were growing market vegetables for our CSA and we would take vegetables to town. So our seed company was pretty small at the time and we had to make a living as market farmers. I would probably go there every couple weeks and look at stuff, and we would harvest fruit off of some of the plants. I guess the selection process really did start in the greenhouse, when we planted out the plants, and we tried to make sure that no low-vigor seed was up-potted into pots for transplant. And if there were any particular transplants that were weak or sick, we definitely did not plant those out. So just the typical every chance you get to look at it, you give a look. But the first year of doing it, there wasn’t a ton to do. It was just like, “Oh wow, this is a slightly variable version of ‘Gypsy’. This is kind of cool.” It was pretty easy. Rachel: And when you were out in the field, how did you mark the plants that you thought looked the best or had the most fruit or the best vigor? Andrew: Well, I guess the first thing we would do is just put a flag on the plants that we wanted for stock seed, for replanting. And when we’d flag a plant, that plant typically wasn’t harvested for market, so it would ripen up a good amount of seed, and not have the… someone else on the farm come and pick all the fruit, which is always the tension when you’re growing vegetables on a farm for sale and doing plant breeding or seed saving. It’s been a little bit of a challenge to organize that over the years. But we pretty much just flagged what we wanted and didn’t, weren’t really concerned with making sure it self-pollinated or crossed. Because we were hustling on being a vegetable farm, we didn’t have tons of time to emasculate flowers or self-pollinate things or whatnot. I guess we could have caged it – that would have been helpful. But also, maybe not. Rachel: So if you had caged it, then insects couldn’t have come visit the flowers of a specific plant and then visited the flowers of another plant and transferred pollen between those plants. How often do pepper plants outcross? Or how often do insects come and move pollen around in the field? Andrew: Well, peppers are kind of the intermediate between self-pollinating and outcrossing, and we’ve seen anywhere from 20% to 50% crossing, but it depends on the conditions and the particular fruit. We usually expect there to be up to 30% between plants nearby, and any plants that are within a couple hundred feet will probably be a little bit crossing. But also knowing that a majority of the seed in the fruit has been self-pollinated is an interesting fact to think about when observing the next generation. Rachel: And if you see more variation, or plants that are much more different from their neighbors in the next generation, do you assume those are outcrosses, and pull those out? Andrew: Sometimes. It depends on the project. But for ‘Gypsy Queens’, what I ended up doing, the third generation I noticed that they were starting to be a little bit more unique from each other. And some of the fruits were a…
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