Episode four 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.

This episode is a little different from the previous episodes; instead of a moderately uniform, finished variety, Rachel Hultengren will be talking with Don Tipping of Seven Seeds Farm about a diverse spinach population that he has pledged to be open-source. ‘Popeye’, which is available through Don’s seed company, Siskiyou Seeds, has been selected for traits that are important to farmers in southern Oregon, where Don’s farm is located. In addition to the details of the breeding work behind ‘Popeye’, Don shared his thoughts on broader topics relevant to the future agricultural system to which he hopes to contribute.

Find Popeye Spinach seed here at the Siskiyou Seeds Website

Don Tipping

'Popeye' spinach going to seed. (Credit: Don Tipping)

'Popeye' spinach growing in the field. (Credit: Don Tipping)

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Free the Seed!Transcript for S1E4: Popeye Spinach

Rachel Hultengren: Hello and welcome to Free the Seed! This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners, and food-curious folks – who want to dig deeper into the story of 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. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren.

This episode is a little different from the previous episodes; instead of a moderately uniform, finished variety, we’ll be talking with Don Tipping of Seven Seeds Farm about a diverse spinach population that he has pledged to be open-source. ‘Popeye’, which is available through Don’s seed company, Siskiyou Seeds, has been selected for traits that are important to farmers in southern Oregon, where Don’s farm is located. In addition to the details of the breeding work behind ‘Popeye’, Don shared his thoughts on broader topics relevant to the future agricultural system to which he hopes to contribute.

A heads-up about some of the sound quality – when I spoke with Don, he was out in his fields, and you’ll hear the wind blowing by a bit.

Our conversation started with Don explaining that his farm isn’t in a prime spinach seed growing region of the US, and how that inspired him to breed spinach.

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Don Tipping: I live in SW Oregon, which is known as the ‘banana belt’ of Oregon, because we have hot dry summers and cool moist winters. So a bit of a Mediterranean climate but perhaps a little more extreme in the winters. So typically spinach is grown as a spring and fall crop, just because it doesn’t do well in the heat we have here. But in early May, when spring spinach crops would be growing, it can easily get up into the 90’s which is not ideal spinach growing weather. So we hadn’t produced a whole lot of spinach seed after we learned when we did grow spinach for a few seed companies on commercial contracts that we were just not in the right area to be growing spinach because when it gets hot the plants bolt quickly and it doesn’t have the time to build the stature to produce a good seed head.

So ‘Popeye’ really started a bit as a learning experiment and a challenge to that notion of ‘should we only grow seed in the area of the country or the world where it’s most well suited’, which is the industrial model, I would say, that we breed for a particular market and we only grow the crop in the area where we can maximize production.

So ‘Popeye’ was a bit of an experiment to see, “Well, can we disprove that? Can we grow a better spinach for our area by breeding one here, for our conditions and pests and diseases and so forth?”

Rachel Hultengren: The first step in the experiment to see if he could create a better spinach for southern Oregon by breeding spinach in southern Oregon was to create what Don referred to as a “synthetic variety” by using many varieties as founders of a single population.

Don Tipping: It’s a way of getting a bunch of genetics in one variety, if you will So instead of a cross between just two known parents, you might have six parents. In plant breeding circles, this would be called a ‘synthetic cross’ or we’re creating a ‘synthetic variety’ from numerous parents. So inside of ‘Popeye’ is ‘Abundant Bloomsdale’, ‘Bloomsdale Longstanding’, ‘Winter Giant’, ‘Monnopa’ and a few other strains. I actually got some commercial seed that was bred for disease resistance that’s bred into it, so we have both savoy and flat leaf spinach crossed into it to just basically get the widest genetic profile that we can create. And that gives us something to select from.

Rachel Hultengren: In a practical sense, how did you go from having those different varieties that already existed to having a population that you could select from? We spoke with Carol Deppe in a previous episode about hand pollinations with squash. Is that how you go about making this synthetic variety, or is there a different technique there?

Don Tipping: The initial cross that we created was a cross of the varieties that I mentioned. And that came from … you know, we run a small seed company here on the farm, called Siskiyou Seeds. We grow about half the seeds ourselves, on the farm, and then I buy some seed from other small family farm growers.

And whenever we’re buying seed in, I always grow some of it so I can get familiar with it. So I was doing a trial – this was the origin of where this whole breeding project came from – a trial of I think four different varieties, and evaluating them just so I can be familiar with them in terms of being able to sell it because I believe that you can’t sell what you don’t know. And then, we have a lot going on on our farm, a lot of diversity, so sometimes things get away from us. So that trial happened, I looked at it, made some notes, and then came back and noticed – oh, they’re all crossing. They’re all flowering and bolting.

Rachel Hultengren: This is a common thread in many plant breeding stories – the importance of serendipity and observation. Sometimes you find something that you weren’t expecting by paying attention and being open to possibilities.

Don Tipping: So I just let the initial crossing occur without any selection, just let them intermate freely. And that was something I learned from Frank Morton, was to make sure you have thorough mixing between varieties before you start trying to select. Because sometimes plant will largely, especially with wind-pollinated plants like spinach, plants will just pollinate with their immediate neighbors. So that first iteration they just flowered and pollinated amongst themselves. Then I grew it out again I think three more times, letting it intermate. And that’s when I started doing selection for bolting, because here, as I mentioned, the heat can come on really fast in the spring, and a beautiful bed of spinach will quickly just become just not harvestable from a commercial level.

And then at that point, too, I began to add in other varieties as I learned about other varieties of spinach. Another one we added in there is called ‘Noble Giant’ and I got that from Alan Adesse, who’s an organic farmer up near Eugene. And that one has leaves can get to be bigger than the palm of your hand. It’s a really impressive, large leaf.

Normally I don’t think people would cross flat leaf with savoy spinach. You’d say, “Well you’ll make it too wide and diverse.” And that was sort of my goal, of like, “Well let’s see all the possibilities of what spinach can do, and then narrow it down.”

Rachel Hultengren: And Don has done work to narrow it down since he created the population by selecting for a handful of high-priority traits. He’ll walk through the field, and rogue – pull out – plants that don’t fit with his vision for the variety.

He explained how spinach has separate male and female plants, which is a rare trait in crop plants. If you’re growing spinach in your garden, it’s not important to be able to tell the difference between males and females – both of them will produce tasty leaves. But if you’re going to save seed from the plants, whether a given plant is male or female can affect how you look at it. Don explained that when he selects for bolt-resistance, he has to take a close look at the flowers before deciding whether to pull an early bolting plant out of the ground.

But you talked earlier about the fact that you have done some selection work on it in the past few years. Can you tell me about the different criteria you used to do that selection work already?

Don Tipping: Yeah, so again my primary goal is bolt-resistance. So when the plants are just first beginning to bolt, I’ll go through the rows and pull all the plants that are bolting.

And you know, making note of… in a dioecious species, the males usually bolt first, so you know, can you really select for bolt resistance by looking at just the males? They’re always going to flower first. We really need to look at bolt-resistance in the females so that we know that the plants that we’re getting the seed from are going to be the most bolt-resistant.

So you have to get in there and kind of get down low and look and see, “Who are you? Are you a male or a female?...

Episode three 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 talks with Frank Morton of Shoulder to Shoulder Farm about his lettuce variety, ‘Hyper Red Rumple Waved’, and about his journey in breeding lettuce, from salad to seed. Frank and his wife Karen are the originators of Wild Garden Seed, a farm-based organic seed company based in the Pacific Northwest, and Frank has pledged as open-source not only ‘Hyper Red Rumple Waved’, but all of the varieties and breeding populations that he has developed.

Find 'Hyper Red Rumple Waved' lettuce seed here at the Wild Garden Seed's Website.

Frank Morton

Lettuce florets (Credit: Rachel Hultengren)

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Free the Seed! Transcript for S1E3: Hyper Red Rumple Waved Lettuce

Rachel Hultengren: Welcome to Free the Seed! I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren. 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.

We’ll be talking today with Frank Morton of Shoulder to Shoulder Farm about his lettuce variety, ‘Hyper Red Rumple Waved’, and about his journey in breeding lettuce, from salad to seed. Frank and his wife Karen are the originators of Wild Garden Seed, a farm-based organic seed company based in the Pacific Northwest, and Frank has pledged as open-source not only ‘Hyper Red Rumple Waved’, but all of the varieties and breeding populations that he has developed.

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Rachel Hultengren: Hi Frank, welcome to the show.

Frank Morton: Hi Rachel, thanks for inviting me. I’m glad you’re doing these podcasts.

Rachel Hultengren: Yeah, thanks for being with us today. So maybe you could describe ‘Hyper Red Rumple Waved’ for us?

Frank Morton: Okay. Well, it’s an upright leaf lettuce. It’s sort of a romaine shape, but it doesn’t form a dense heart. It’s very dark red, the leaves are puckered and savoyed. The margins of the leaves are wavy, that is the edge of the leaf is not smooth, but it’s sort of ruffled. It has good downy mildew resistance. I’ve gotten a lot of reports about its cold hardiness, and it’s a lettuce that, I don’t know, I think we introduced it about twenty years ago. So I’ve had to sort of refresh my memory about just it a little bit; it’s a lot of lettuces back there.

Rachel Hultengren: So it sounds like it’s been a while since it was released, but remembering back, how did you decide to take on this project of developing a new variety?

Frank Morton: Well, you sort of have to get back to where I was in terms of my farming life at the time. During that period of time, Karen and I were salad green growers, and we grew salads sort of on subscription for restaurants. It was sort of like a CSA, which is to say a restaurant was signed up for a certain amount of salad each week. And we would ship salad from our farm using UPS trucks and Fed Ex and the USPS and we would ship salad to… well we’re in Oregon here, but we would ship salad to Seattle, to Portland, Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, NYC…

Rachel Hultengren: That’s quite a reach!

Frank Morton: It was quite a reach. We did that for about 18 years or so. And during that period of time, I was learning about plant breeding as I was doing this salad thing. I’m really an accidental plant breeder. Lettuce sort of showed me what plant breeding was about. I saw my first off-type lettuce in a seed flat in 1983.

Rachel Hultengren: What does that mean, for a seedling to be ‘off-type’?

Frank Morton: Well, I had started saving seed for myself as soon as I started farming. And I had saved some seeds in 1982 from a variety called Green Salad Bowl. And one day in 1983,  I saw one red plant in the middle of all these green plants. And I had planted thousands of these seeds at this point. And here in this flat among 200 green plants was one red plant. And I thought about it, and right away I understood that that had to have been an outcross to a red romaine that I was growing at the same time for seed. Looking at it, it looked like a red salad bowl. It had oak-shaped leaves, and I was thinking to myself right away, “Well, if I save seeds of that plant, I could have myself a red salad bowl”, which in my experience would be a brand new thing. And I thought that would be a neat thing to do, so I let that off-type plant…

See, off-type plants are plants that are not the same as all their siblings. They are… off! And the normal advice, when you see an off-type in your lettuce flat, is you throw that thing away. Because it’s not what you mean to be growing. It’s a contaminant in some sense. But I immediately recognized that, “No, this is an opportunity. This isn’t something to throw away, this is something to save.” And that sort of defines my career, actually, finding things like that.

But I saved seeds from it, so the next year I plant these 65 seeds.  And yeah, there were some red salad bowl types in there, but what I really saw was the whole genetic spectrum. In plant breeding terms, this is the F2 generation. The cross would be the F1 plant in breeder parlance.

Rachel Hultengren: So two generations from the cross.

Frank Morton: That’s right. So the second generation shows you the genetic recombinations of all the original parents’ traits. There were green oakleafs, there were red oakleafs, there were green romaines, there were red romaines. Every possible combination of traits that you could think of in the original ‘ [Green] Salad Bowl’ by ‘Red Winter Cos’. All those traits were redistributed among these 65 plants.

And that’s when the light bulb really came on. It was like, “Oh, this is where new varieties come from! I see!” So truly this was a case of the plant showing me something, that if I’d really thought about it hard, I would have remembered all my high school biology and my college horticulture classes, and I would have had a much fuller understanding of what was going on, but I just wasn’t prepared to think of it that way until it was splashed out in front of me.  That’s why I call myself an accidental plant breeder. I didn’t intend to become a plant breeder. I just saw this opportunity and I realized that plant breeding could be a tool for my farming business. Plant breeding could be a method for me as a farmer to have new stuff that nobody else had. And since my customers were chefs at fine restaurants, that’s what all chefs want – they all want something new that other people don’t have.

And so, I realized that what I needed to do was grow all of these plants out to seeds and save the seeds of each one and then keep planting them out. I was basically figuring this out as I went along. So I did that, and within three years, I had these distinct lettuce varieties that I could put a name on. And one of the varieties that came out of that was something I called ‘Wavy Red Cos’. And that was one that I stabilized, and I started using in my salad business right away.

Rachel Hultengren: When you say that you stabilized that Wavy Red Cos, what does that mean?

Frank Morton: Well, when you cross two unlike plants, like a green oak-leaf and a red romaine, it is as if you have shuffled the deck on their traits. And in the next generation, each plant that comes out of that is sort of like a new hand of cards that’s been dealt out of that shuffled deck of genes. At least that’s the way I thought of it at the time. And what happens is that with each generation, those genes sort themselves out again. Each generation, the amount of variation within each line is decreased, so that if you keep selecting something that, let’s call ‘Wavy Red Cos’, if I select for that in the second generation, and then I grow all those seeds out and select for it again in the third generation, and then I grow those seeds out, in the fourth generation they’re all going to sort of look like Wavy Red Cos, with some outliers.

With each selection that you do, assuming that you’re selecting for the same thing each time, you develop a genetic heritage that becomes more and more stable and uniform with each passing generation. And so it takes about eight steps to get close to 100% uniformity.

And so from any one cross, like that one that accidentally happened for me, each one of those F2 plants could be bred out to become a different thing. I mean, I could have had 65 different varieties from that first cross. Some of the varieties would look quite similar, some would look very different, but each one would be its own genetic entity, even if they did bear similarities to their siblings.

Rachel Hultengren: How many varieties did come out of that initial accidental cross?

Frank Morton: That’s a good question. I’d say there were at least 8 varieties that I ended up stabilizing out of that. And most of them don’t exist anymore; they were sort of stepping stones to the next step.

In some sense, this was step one of my plant breeding with these lettuces, because now, because I had these, say, eight stable lines that I took from this,...

Episode two of Free the Seed! the podcast of the Open Source Seed Initiative.

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 second installment, host Rachel Hultengren interviews Dr. Claire Luby and Dr. Irwin Goldman, two of the co-founders of the Open Source Seed Initiative.

We’ll discuss the importance of genetic diversity in plant breeding, the evolution of intellectual property rights as they apply to plants, and the efforts of the Open Source Seed Initiative to maintain fair and open access to plant genetic resources. Dr. Irwin Goldman is a faculty member in the Department of Horticulture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has taught and led research in plant breeding for the past 26 years. His breeding program focuses on carrot, onion, and table beet. Dr. Claire Luby conducted her PhD research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Goldman Lab, and was the first Executive Director of the Open Source Seed Initiative.

Dr. Irwin Goldman

Dr. Claire Luby

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Free the Seed!Transcript for S1E2: Open Source Seed Initiative

Rachel Hultengren: Hello and welcome to Free the Seed! This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners, and food-curious folks – who want to dig deeper into the story of where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues, and onto your tables. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren.

In this episode, we'll be joined by Dr. Claire Luby and Dr. Irwin Goldman, two of the co-founders of the Open Source Seed Initiative. We’ll discuss the importance of genetic diversity in plant breeding, the evolution of intellectual property rights as they apply to plants, and the efforts of the Open Source Seed Initiative to maintain fair and open access to plant genetic resources.

Dr. Irwin Goldman is a faculty member in the Department of Horticulture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has taught and led research in plant breeding for the past 26 years. His breeding program focuses on carrot, onion, and table beet.

Dr. Claire Luby conducted her PhD research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Goldman Lab, and was the first Executive Director of the Open Source Seed Initiative.

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Rachel Hultengren: Thanks for joining us today! Maybe we can start pretty broadly – what is the OSSI, for folks who have never heard of it before?

Claire Luby: So the Open Source Seed Initiative… it is a project to basically liberate plant varieties from the constraints of IP rights and facilitate sharing and exchange of crop varieties amongst plant breeders and amongst farmers and gardeners.

Rachel Hultengren: For those who maybe aren’t familiar with intellectual property as it relates to plants and might be familiar with patents for things like electronics or other physical invented objects, Irwin maybe you could tell us a bit about the brief history of IP as it relates to plants?

Irwin Goldman: Sure, yeah, and I think you know I’ve been fortunate to have a front row seat in that. I’ve been involved in plant breeding first as a student and now as a faculty member for the last 35 years or so. And during that time, I’ve watched seeds go from something that you would just freely send to somebody, anybody who requested your germplasm…

Rachel Hultengren: When you say ‘germplasm’, what does that word mean?

Irwin Goldman:  Yeah, so, germplasm would be the raw material that the breeders are using to develop something. So it’s their seeds, but it could be cuttings, it could be, you know if they were breeding a vegetatively propagated species. But just their raw material, let’s say the unique material that they’re using to improve a particular crop.

We would share that quite freely in the early days and in the late 80’s and into the 90’s, there became a much greater interest in controlling those seeds and controlling those genetics. And some of that can be controlled by tools like the Plant Variety Protection certificate, which is available through the government, and is an instrument that allows the breeder to essentially protect the variety that she or he develops, but still make that variety available for breeding by other breeders. As time went on, people began to pursue more restrictive forms of intellectual property protection, which extended to US Patents, utility patents, which would cover in some cases, the variety and what anyone could do with the variety. It might restrict breeding, it might even restrict research on a particular variety, to particular traits that became patented, where a particular very interesting , say, agriculturally important trait might be patented, which would essentially foreclose the opportunity of any other breeder or gardener or farmer to start working with that material in a breeding context.

Rachel Hultengren: What’s a good example of one of those traits that might be patented?

Irwin Goldman:  A good example is the exserted broccoli head, where the mutation or the genetic variant where the head is exserted, making it much easier to harvest, that trait was patented. And so anyone breeding broccoli anywhere would potentially be infringing on that patent if they were to release their material. And I think that kind of patent… it has a very chilling effect on the plant breeding community, because I think people then start to wonder, well if my material is infringing, then I don’t have any what is called “freedom to operate”.

So we became concerned with how Intellectual property impinged on our freedom to operate. We were worried that our freedom to operate was being limited by extensive intellectual property rights of all different kinds.

Rachel Hultengren: In a practical sense, Claire, what is the impact of that impingement? What does restrictive IP protection do to plant breeders?

Claire Luby: So plant breeding is basically based on selecting plants, making crosses and then selecting plants, with various combinations of characteristics that are beneficial for your…whatever you want to select for. And you need genetic diversity in order to do that. You need to be able to access all of these various potential combination of traits as a plant breeder.

We’re still trying to figure out exactly the effect that intellectual property rights on plants have had on the actual genetic diversity that are in our crop plants, however one of the things that we have found is that it is much more challenging to exchange, as Irwin was saying, exchange material amongst people and also there is this chilling effect of IPR on using existing varieties. So basically plant breeding is based on improving varieties iteratively over time and for different environments and situations, and if you can’t access varieties to continue to improve them, you can sort of stall out.

Rachel Hultengren: So that chilling effect you talked about on plant breeders and their inability to exchange seeds -  what’s the fear there with downstream effects? How might that affect a farmer, or a gardener, or consumers?

Claire Luby: This can have an effect on what genetic diversity is available to farmers, how fast we’re making improvements. I think there’s a lot of questions that don’t have sort of specific, researched  answers or tested answers, but I think there’s sort of the thought that that if you don’t as a plant breeder, have as big a pool to draw from, to use in your breeding program, you may not be able to make as much gain from selection, if you don’t have access to those materials. Our whole agricultural system is based on the exchange of varieties over time and space, and we should be able to keep exchanging things to continue to do plant breeding.

Rachel Hultengren: Would you say that the slowing down of plant breeding means that farmers have, in the future, potentially fewer options of what to grow in their fields? 

Claire Luby:  Yeah, and I’m not sure that we can totally say that you know plant breeding has slowed down. We can say that the landscape of where plant breeding is happening has changed over time.  Yeah, I think to a certain extent it’s a food security issue. It’s a making sure that farmers growing crops in all places have access  to varieties that will perform well in, in their environment, um… and making sure that if they choose to save their own seed, um, that they are able to do that. Whereas intellectual property rights can infringe upon the ability of a farmer to actually save their own seed.

Irwin Goldman: And I would say, too, Rachel, that the… you know, as the world continues to urbanize, and as the sources of our germplasm – our raw germplasm –  go away, we as a civilization I guess need to hope that we’ve preserved the useful genetics that are out there from the wild, before it disappears, and hopefully we’re supporting the gene banks that hold that genetic diversity, and it would seem to me with climate change and with all the things we’re facing, we want to do everything we can to not just make sure that we have that diversity in gene banks, but also that we do as much plant breeding as we can and exchange useful germplasm. So it seems to me that intellectual property rights sort of go at the future of food security in a way that makes it more difficult for us as a civilization. So this is a concern.

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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 we’ll talk with Dr. Carol Deppe about her OSSI-pledged variety ‘Goldini Zucchini’. Oregon plant breeder Carol Deppe holds a PhD in Genetics from Harvard University, and focuses on developing superbly flavorful, organic-adapted, open-source crops for human survival for the next thousand years, and in teaching others to do the same.

Full transcripts are available on the Open Source Seed Initiative's website.