The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e.11: Seed Production with Dan Brisebois

Episode Date: November 7, 2015

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.

Hi folks. So, I'm giving you one more rerun before we get on a pretty good run of new content. I've got a number of good interviews lined up and I've been getting some great responses from you, the listenership, on the questions of what do you do for winter work and how do you deal with farming with young children. So, I don't think I'll need to put up another rerun for a while. However, that said, this rerun is only part one of a conversation I had with Dan Brisbois about seed production. And when it first went up, it was pretty popular. So I kind of expect I'm going to get requests to put up part two. So I'll make sure that happens in the next few weeks. But next week for sure, I will get back to some new content. And then after that, it should be pretty smooth sailing.

My schedule is truly opening up. So hang in there. And I hope you enjoy this conversation with Dan. I will talk to you at the end. This is the ruminant podcast. I'm Jordan Marr. The ruminant.ca is a website dedicated to sharing good ideas for farmers and gardeners. Most of the content on the site involves me posting other people's photos of their innovative farming tools, techniques, and ideas. I'd love to have a contribution from you, so please take some photos of what you're doing and send them to me at editor at TheRuminant.ca. Okay, let's do a podcast. 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 Turow 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 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 farming during the summer until eventually got tired of working for other people and started a farm with some friends. And that's 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, some of of it was for own use, but we also were growing about four or five different tomato varieties on contract

for a couple other seed companies. And so it was a very small part of our operation, but it was there. And so how does your, 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, let's say 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 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. it's a mix there but but for the big marketing outlets that's kind of the breakdown okay so so dan i've been interested in getting into seed incorporating seed production into my 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 um where i'm farming it's 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. 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, you know, created other jobs to do and taking away time from potential, from vegetable work. So initially, you know, it was kind of, 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 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, in their growing conditions, with their growing practices, is how we get that. I think that's an ultimate objective of why we do this and why I do this. Overall, did you find it difficult to transition into seed production? I know that was kind of the main topic or 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 eight or nine years ago, is there wasn't as much of 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 is definitely a learning curve of figuring out how to get things to 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 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, other venues too.

And just all that other farm stuff. I guess that's gotta 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, 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 a 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 know, you don't need that much seed. And if you save three or four

tomatoes, you know, 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. If you, like cucumbers or the cucurbit family, the squashes, melons, those guys also you're saving, you know, they're quite easy to saveons, 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 cucurbit machada, if you're just growing one of those and most people just grow butternut, then it's not big of a deal. But if you're growing a cucurbit apeppo, 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 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 what happens when it goes to seed and then harvest it a bit. So outside of the first year, it's just kind of optimizing or taking advantage of situations that already exist. And also like cut flowers, if you grow cut flowers for market or just for yourself, these are crops that after they've finished producing flowers,

you know, the flowers will produce seeds afterwards. That'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 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, if it was a, or maybe even less than, well, I would say 10 to 30 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, and kind of increase gradually over time. And maybe every year try a new variety or two or a new species or two, but 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? 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. 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. 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, tomatoes work pretty well and we have a nice hot summer, so it's not that hard to get them to mature. And it's fairly easy to extract them. And 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. And it's important to talk to them before you grow those. It's important to kind of contract it 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 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. And so you might not, 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 try 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 grow one or two varieties for them in the first year in smaller quantities and deliver on that and then add a little bit more every year. And over time, these companies will probably be trusted about anything that you send them if you manage to get your reputation, they can 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. And initially, you know, maybe I was just growing like half a pound at a shot, but after a few years, I was growing like four or five pounds, and I knew that I had to get, you know, 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, 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 I really did trust these seeds. Like we'll seed salad greens, you know, almost every week from the last week of April in tunnels to mid-September. So we really get to see that the germination is there

and to see the seed purity. So it was very easy to be behind those seeds. Yeah, and so at this point, you know, I've been doing that for a number of years. And when it comes to the Brassica greens, you know, I do do a germ test and we do grow them out in the field, but I don't really worry too much about them. Whereas when we first got into carpet seed, like squashes, 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 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 and maybe we can talk about resources in a minute. But I do want to ask you if in your mind there's some essential equipment to start out with or whether, I mean, because I found that I was able to just start producing seed 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, 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 outside and used the wind. It just seemed like so much work to set up a couple of 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, it's going to be beans or peas. We pretty much do all our winnowing with the fans in the barn. Yeah, 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 know there's some mature seed in there, 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 beginner seed cleaning really gets frustrated just by doing it in the wrong weather.

All right. And perhaps we could move on now and just talk about maybe... All right, so that was a rerun of part one of my conversation with Dan Brisbois, which was episode 11. I know that having put that up, I'm going to get some requests to put up part two, so I will get that up soon one way or the other, folks. But probably not next week because I really want to get some new content out to you. So thanks again to Dan for that great interview. And I will talk to you next week with, cross my heart, some brand new content.

Thanks, folks. Take it easy. We will owe nothing to this world of thieves. content. Thanks folks. Take it easy. A hundred dollars 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 owe 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 braces We'll keep close quarters with gentle faces.

And live next door to the birds and the bees. And live life like it was meant to be. Bye.