The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e.11: Adding seed production to your veggie operation (re-run)

Episode Date: March 30, 2018

This episode: Part 1 of 2 of my conversation with Dan Brisebois, editor of the seed production blog Going to Seed and co-author of Crop Planning for Organic Vegetable Growers. In this part, Dan talks about the basics of vegetable seed production and suggests how to begin incorporating it into a small scale farm business. In part two, Dan discusses marketing strategies once you're ready to sell your seed.

Hey everyone, it's Jordan. So, Thursday evenings are the night I have been reserving to edit and publish podcast episodes. But, it has been one hell of a crazy week on the farm, and last night my one-year-old decided he was done sleeping at one in the morning. So, I'm tired. My wife's tired. We're going to go to bed early tonight. Meanwhile, I had a listener email to remind me that the first 15 episodes that I ever produced of the podcast aren't really available on the current podcast feed or otherwise just easy to find online. So I thought I would take this chance to publish one of those old episodes,

and I will do that from time to time through the summer to try and give you all access to that stuff, because there's some good ones in there. So for this rebroadcast, to give me a bit of a break from editing, I'm sharing with you part one of a two-part conversation I had with Daniel Brisbois, a longtime friend and friend of the podcast, who farms out at Fermet Ternesol in Quebec. For the record, this is episode 11 of the podcast,

and a reminder that this interview took place some years ago so there may be references made that don't make as much sense now although the reference to Dan and Fred Thoreau's book Crop Planning for Veggie Growers is still fresh and I recommend you check that book out. I'll leave it at that since the episode has its own introduction I hope you enjoy it talk soon this episode features my recent conversation with Dan Brisbois Dan is a member of the Ternusol Farm Cooperative near Montreal Quebec Dan produces a blog on seed production it's called goingtoseed.wordpress.com and in addition he's a co-author with fred tarot of a really good book on crop planning called crop planning for organic vegetable growers which you can find at cog.ca dan's also a recent

father congratulations dan and an all-around stand-up guy i invited dan on the podcast today to talk about incorporating seed production into your veggie operation. Dan is a very experienced seed producer and has been quite active in the seed saving community in Canada and elsewhere. And recently he has been giving a seminar on this very topic. So I think that's enough of a preface. Let's get to it. Dan Brisbois, thanks a lot for coming on the Ruminant Podcast. It's a pleasure. Dan, I asked you to come on today because I just happened to catch an advertisement that you posted on your blog about incorporating seed production

into an already existing market vegetable operation. And it's funny that you just this weekend gave a workshop on that in French in a conference in Quebec. And so I asked you to come on to talk a little bit about that today. Anyway, I'm looking forward to that. Maybe we could start by really briefly, you could just sum up your own entry into your own market garden business. Yes. So I studied agriculture in university. Yes, so I studied agriculture in university, and I mainly studied it because I was interested in more environmental applications, especially about soil and water quality.

And while I was studying, I started to work on farms during the summer and really fell in love with farming and basically kept working on farms during the summer until eventually I got tired of working for other people and started a farm with some friends and that kind of how we got into agriculture. And some listeners of the podcast will know or will have heard from one of your partners Frederick Thoreau who was on the podcast a couple episodes back talking about just the ins and outs of paying wages to your apprentices and laborers and that sort of thing. So did you start out just doing market vegetables or were you doing seeds from fairly early on, Dan? Yeah, we started doing seeds. We had seeds as part of our crop plan right from the beginning, though the bulk of our revenue came from market vegetables.

We were also growing cut flowers in our first year too. Subsequently, we also added seedling production and dried herbs. But in the first year, it was really the vegetables were the main thing. And then we did a little bit of seed production and cut flowers too. And that seed production was, some of it was for own use. We also were growing about four or five different tomato varieties on contract for a couple other seed companies. So it was a very small part of our operation, but it was there. And so what about now?

How does your revenue stream in terms of different sources of revenue break down now a number of years? What are you, seven or eight years into your farming with Turner's Soul? So at this point, seeds are now about 10% of the revenue of the farm. And of the remaining, maybe it's roughly 55% coming from the CSA, so about 250 members or so every year, and about 35% coming from the farmer's market. So at the CSA or through about 250 members or so every year, and about 35% is coming from the farmer's market. So at the CSA, or through the farmer's market, we are selling flowers, seedlings, vegetables.

So it's a mix there, but for the big marketing outlets, that's kind of the breakdown. Okay. So Dan, I've been interested in getting into incorporating seed production into my farm business, as I mentioned a minute ago, mainly because I don't like the vulnerability of being completely reliant on fresh market sales where I'm farming. It's quite competitive here in terms of selling to restaurants and at the farmer's markets and whatnot. There's a lot of growers.

So having a bit of diversification in my business is kind of appealing to me. So those are kind of the two main motivators I have for getting into it. Does that kind of reflect the reasons that you and your partners got in? And are there any other reasons that I'm not thinking of for getting into seed production? Yeah. So to some extent, I guess when we got into seed, some of it was just that I was really intrigued by growing seed and really curious to see what it was like. And I had, I guess, an ideal of how much seed that a market grower used could be produced themselves. a market grower used could be produced themselves. Initially, like we did, there was a little bit of revenue coming in from the seed production,

but it was quite modest. And so in our initial years, I don't think we looked at it as a big part of our, as really a diversification in terms of stabilizing our operation. In some ways, it was more diversification that created other jobs to do and taking away time from vegetable work. So initially, we were doing it because I liked to do it and it was fun and it was interesting. I mean, at this point, it's definitely an important part of our revenue and it's part of the business that I think there is the biggest expansion possibility with sort of the land base that we have and the business that I think there is the biggest expansion possibility with sort of the land base that we have and the labor that we have

and the kind of competition that there is in other market growers and stuff. A friendly competition, but still competition nonetheless. And amidst all that, I think it's really important to have bioregionally adapted seed varieties and having folks who are growing seed crops in their climate on in their growing conditions with their growing practices is how we get that so that's I think that's kind of like an ultimate objective of why why why we do this why I do this and overall did you find it difficult to transition into seed production I know that was kind of the main topic of or a

main focus of the workshop that you just gave. Is it very difficult to do when you're starting from scratch in terms of producing seeds in terms of knowledge and equipment? It's not particularly difficult. I would say it's no more difficult than almost any other farming task but pretty much every farming task can be pretty mind-blowing when you're starting off and can be pretty difficult to figure out. So I think that the challenge with getting into seed when we did about 10 years ago, or I guess it's 8 or 9 years ago, is there wasn't as much information available as there is now about seed growing. I mean, if you compare with the amount of information there is just about vegetable growing, there really wasn't that much about seed

production, a handful of books, if that. And they weren't set for our climate, which in eastern Canada can be quite humid, sometimes quite hot, which are really not ideal seed growing conditions for a lot of seed crops. So there was definitely a learning curve of figuring out how to get things go to seed, how to clean them and just, you know, how to make sure they just don't rot in the field. And so, yeah, so I guess there's a learning curve that has to be worked with and it's not necessarily a difficult learning curve. It just has to, you have to go through it. And we, and we started small doing a handful of different crops, and a lot of crops didn't work out. And some crops worked some years and then didn't other years.

So we had to learn the timing. And really, if you put the seed growing as a priority and make sure your crops are in on time, and you weed your crops in a timely fashion so that they don't have weeds growing in them, and then when they mature and you go out and harvest them on time, and then when you clean your seeds and if it's in a dry day and you're using good tools, which can be quite simple tools, if you're doing all that, seed growing can be quite easy. But if your crops go in late and then you lose control of your weeds and then you're not really sure when you're supposed to harvest and then you wind up missing the seed harvest.

These are the things that make it more frustrating and more challenging. And of course, that's all being done while you're harvesting a bunch of other crops for CSA and for market and doing tons of weeding and planting for those other venues too and just all that other farm stuff. I guess that's got to be a major challenge and it's one actually i've experienced as i've done my first you know couple seasons of really small amounts of seed production is just managing it in the midst of the craziness of a market veggie season so so dan i'd like to i'd like to kind of spend a few minutes just talking about you know

a few few pointers you might have for people who are starting from scratch. I thought maybe you could make some suggestions for how a grower would start out in year one, what you'd suggest they would do in year one of getting into seed production and then maybe year two and year three. Okay, so Dan, in year one, if someone out there is listening and they're already producing market veggies and they've kind of got the hang of that, what suggestions would you have for easing into seed production? What would they do in their first year?

Well, I think the first thing I would do is save seed from crops that I'm already growing for the vegetable and that I don't have to do any extra growing work for. So that would be stuff like tomatoes or peppers or eggplants, where you don't need that much seed. And if you save three or four tomatoes, the seed from that is going to be a couple hundred seeds easily, and that might be more than you need for the next year. And so I would start off by just saving seed from crops that you're already growing

and not worrying too much about cross-pollination. And tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants have very low levels of cross-pollination. Cucumbers or the cucurbit family, the squashes, melons, those guys also you're saving. They're quite easy to save the seed from considering that you're already growing the fruit, but they're very likely to cross up with other varieties that you might have in your field. So that can be fun to save those seeds, but when you grow it out, it's important to realize that you might, if you haven't paid attention and there's multiple varieties, you might definitely see some crossing up.

So cucumbers, that might not make as much of a difference. If you're just growing one butternut, which is in the mochada, if you're just growing one of those, and most people just grow a butternut, then it's not big of a deal. But if you're growing, if you're growing a pepo, which includes like zucchinis and delicata squash and acorn squash, you'll definitely see some massive crossing that you might not be thrilled with if you're trying to get, you know, a nice fresh zucchini.

So in year one, I would just start with peppers, eggplants, tomatoes. And if anything happens to escape, like if you have an early mustard green crop and you don't till it in time and it goes to flower, maybe just let it grow out and see you know what happens when it goes to seed and then you know harvest it a bit so I said in the first year is just kind of optimizing or taking advantage of situations that already exist and and also they cut flowers if you grow cut flowers for market or just for yourself these are crops that after they finished producing flowers you know the flowers

will produce seeds after so it's another really easy area to do some seed harvest. So I would say in year one, you're just kind of, you know, getting a feel for it. In year two, it might be good to think about what kind of crops you'd like to save seed from, and then intentionally planting some crops for that. Maybe some lettuce plants, or some beans, or peas, beans or peas or mustard greens, something that's an annual rather than a biannual because that means you plant it in the spring and then sometime in the summer you're going to get that seed harvest and you don't have to worry about overwintering anything.

And I would probably only grow 20 or 30 plants. So if you had, or maybe even less than well i would say ten to thirty plants and just kind of see how that goes that that year and that that's probably enough for some of your own use and um and kind of increase gradually over time and uh maybe every year try a new variety or two or a new species or two, but don't try to do everything right off the bat. So I'll interrupt there, Dan, and ask you, just going back to year one and maybe year two as well. So for year one and maybe year two, would you suggest trying to sell the seed, or is it better just to focus on producing for yourself, or does it not matter?

Or is it better just to focus on producing for yourself? Or does it not matter? I would say if you've never saved seed before, I would hesitate to recommend that you grow seed for sale in your first year. It's probably worth taking a season to just figure it out a little bit because there's definitely a timing issue that comes in at different steps. Like if you're saving tomato seeds, you have to extract the seeds and juice and let it ferment for two to five days before you clean it off. And it's fairly simple, but it might seem kind of complicated if you've never done it. What are you going to let them sit in?

How often do you stir? Is it hot enough that you can only clean them after two days? Should you wait a little bit longer? These are all things that, you know, a lot of questions that you have and they're happening at the end of August where you're trying to, you know, starting to bring in your earliest squash and your potatoes are coming in. So there's definitely a lot of questions that you have and you might not have time at that point to go and do the research to figure it out. And some of the questions, and you could definitely do the research before the season starts, but some of the questions that you'll have, you're only going to have once you start doing it. So I would say in your first year, I probably,

if you've never saved seed, it's probably not great to save seed for sale. Now, if you have saved a little bit of seed, I think tomatoes specifically are a good first crop to grow out for sale because they're not, and actually that might be different in your climate, but where we are, you know, tomatoes work pretty well, and we have a nice hot summer summer so it's not that hard to get them to mature. It's fairly easy to extract them. A lot of the smaller seed companies that specialize in heirloom vegetables might carry a number of tomatoes and sell a lot

of tomatoes. They might be interested in buying a couple ounces of a few varieties. It's important to talk to them before you grow those. It's important to kind of contract out or get a contract for the variety that you want to grow because you could just grow anything and then someone just might not want it. And I guess if you're completely new to seed production, you kind of, even to see the success rate, you're going to have to, outside I guess of doing some germination tests in the late fall, early winter, you kind of have to wait until next year to see how well you did in terms of your production techniques and that sort of thing, hey? Yeah.

Yeah. So that's definitely, when you're selling your first seed crops, there's definitely a lot of fear about germination rates and whether they're crossed up or not. And you can do your own germination tests, but sometimes it's finicky to do a good germination test. And so you might send the seed off to the company and not know the results until they do a germination test in better conditions. And if you have tomatoes that are grown with a bit of isolation distance, you know, you probably don't have any crossing,

but until you've grown it out, you definitely don't know that. And I think that's one of the things that you have to do is grow a lot of seed crops to start to get your confidence. And if you want to sell seed, it's really much easier to sell seed that you have confidence in than seed that you don't trust. And if you are working with a seed company who's buying seed from you, they'll probably be very hesitant to buy a lot of seed from you right off the bat if you haven't proven yourself already. And the best way to do that is to, you know, grow one or two varieties for them in the first year in smaller quantities and, you know, deliver on that and then add a little bit more

every year. And over time, these companies will probably be, you know, trust you about anything that you send them. And if you manage to get your reputation, get a reputation and a good relationship with them. And so for us doing that, initially we grew out tomato seed for a couple seed companies, and then we added a couple peppers too, and that's what we mainly grew for a few years with maybe one or two flower seed crops. But while we were doing that, I was growing out a lot of brassica greens,

so stuff like arugula, mizuna, taxoy, and other Brassica greens. Initially, maybe I was just growing half a pound at a shot, but after a few years, I was growing like four or five pounds, and I knew that the seed was pure because we were growing it out for a salad green, so I could see that it was doing well, and we were using quite a bit, but we were producing more seed than we needed. So I mentioned to some of the seed companies that I was already selling seed to that I had this and they were happy to get some from me and so it kind of broadened out our seed

offering and by the time that I offered the seed, I'd already been saving these seeds for about maybe four or five years, so maybe three years on our farm and a couple of years offering. And by the time that I offered the seed, you know, I'd already been saving these seeds for about maybe four or five years. So maybe three years on our farm and a couple of years before we even started our farm. And because I was growing them out so often, I really knew that we, that I really did trust these seeds. Like we'll seed salad greens, you know, almost every week from the last week of April to, if it in tunnelsSeptember. So we really get to see that the germination is there and see the seed purity. So it was very easy to be behind those seeds. Yeah. And so, and at this point, you know, I've been doing that for a number of years. And when it comes to the Brassica greens,

I, you know, I do do a germ test and I, we do grow them out in the field, but I don't really worry too much about them. Whereas when we first got into cucurbit seed like squashes, I was, you know, we grew some out, we sold some, but I was always afraid that there'd be crossing because you're only going to grow it out the next year. And so we grew some out and we didn't see any crossing and happy with that, but it's taken much more long or much longer to feel confident about our cucurbit seed. At this point, though, I do feel pretty good about it because we have seen the results and we do put a lot of work in isolation distance. Now, Dan, I don't think I want to get too much into technique in this conversation because that can get really in-depth and there's lots of great resources out there. Maybe we can talk about resources in a minute, but do want to ask you if in your mind there's some

essential equipment to start out with or whether i mean because i mean i found that i was able to just start producing seed on a really on a really basic level with no special equipment purchased and it was okay but is there some essential stuff you would recommend people start out with if they want to play around with seed production? Well, basically get a couple of fans and some screens. It's really what I would say, a bunch of buckets. We have just bought some specialized seed cleaning screens, but for the years before that, we just used hardware cloth from the hardware

store, you know, quarter inch cloth and half inch cloth that we made our own frames on and a bunch of different colanders, like you'd use like a spaghetti strainer with different sizes. And then we have two box fans that we put one behind the other to clean seed with. And that's essentially what we do. For the first few years, I did most of my winnowing out and outside and used the wind. And it just seemed like so much work to set up a couple fans to clean seed with. But after about three years, we started doing that, and I realized how clean you can get seed if you have a little bit more control over the wind and so at this point there may be beans or peas they pretty much do all the windowing with with the fans in the barn yeah I

would again I would agree with you I found that you can get by with very little now are there any typical are there any mistakes you can point to that beginners typically make in their first go around? I guess one of the, I don't know if I would call it a mistake, is one of the first challenges is really knowing when the crop is ready. So when to harvest is definitely one challenge. And you might have an arugula seed crop that seems to almost be ready and you can, you know, there's some mature seed in, and you're kind of waiting and waiting. And by the time you harvest it, you realize that half of it's already shattered,

and you should have gone in a little bit earlier. So there's definitely a learning curve on that. And then I think one thing that really, one understanding that really, really changed my life was how much the ambient weather and humidity had, how much impact it had on seed cleaning. So if it's, you know, an overcast day and it's kind of humid and you take out a dry seeded crop and you try to thresh it, there's going to be a lot more chaff and dust that kind of sticks to the seed. Where if you take a nice, it's a nice sunny dry day, and you do that, you'll have much better results. So, I think that some beginning seed cleaning, beginner seed cleaning, really gets frustrated just by

doing it in the wrong weather. Alright, and perhaps we could move on now and just talk about maybe... Okay, so that's part one of my conversation with Dan Brisbois. In part two, which I'll release in a week or so, Dan talks about how to go about selling your seed once you feel ready to do that. So that's it for this episode, but before I sign off, I want to invite my listeners to send me an email to tell me what you think about the podcast so far. This is a total work in progress and I'd be really interested to know how you're enjoying it and perhaps whether you have some suggestions for

topics that you'd like covered. So far I haven't received a lot of inquiries about the podcast so it kind of feels like I'm producing it in a bit of a vacuum and I'd really love to know what people think. If you want to get a hold of me you can do so at editor at theruminant.ca and of course you can find lots more other interesting content at my website theruminant.ca and of course you can find lots more other interesting content at my website, theruminant.ca Thanks a lot everyone and talk to you soon. Well, if nothing else, the sound

quality has improved since the early days, wouldn't you say, folks? Anyway, I hope you liked that. The Jordan that you heard at the end of the conversation lied to you in this case because i am not going to put part two up next week most likely but i will put part two up sometime soon when i am in a baby led time crunch okay hopefully next week i will come back at you with new content i certainly have it recorded i just need to edit it and between now and then i'll be thinking about all of you deeply okay

see ya and maybe a roll of duct tape and we'll run right outside of the city's reaches we'll live off chestnuts spring water and peaches we'll own nothing to this world of thieves and live life like it was meant to be Because why would we live in a place that don't want us A place that is trying to bleed us dry We could be happy with life in the country With salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands I've been doing a lot of thinking Some real soul searching And here's my final resolve.

I don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong. So we'll run right out into the wilds and graces. We'll keep close quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees, and live life like ah, ah, ah. Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.