The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e.98: Breeding for Better Flavour and Row 7 Seeds

Episode Date: March 23, 2018

Have you read The Third Plate by chef Dan Barber? Great Book. This episode explores one of the legacies of that book: a brand new seed company, representing a collaboration between chefs and plant breeders, that aims to improve the flavour and performance of our plant varieties. My guest is Michael Mazourek, plant breeder at Cornell and a partner in Row 7 Seeds. 

The ripple effect of increased conversations where other people are having conversations directly between chefs and breeders. The idea of being able to seek out flavorful produce that works for the farmer and has great flavor qualities, will continue to expand. And we hope that some of the varieties that we are offering now and soon will start to be household names. So you'll start to see more and more cultivars that are known by name. known by name. It's The Ruminant, a podcast about food politics and food security and the cultural and practical aspects of farming. You can find out more at theruminant.ca or email me, editor at theruminant.ca.

I'm on Twitter, at Ruminant Blog, and you can find me on Facebook. Alright, let's do a show. Hi folks, it's Jordan. And today you're going to be hearing quite a bit from this guy. Hello, I'm Mike Mazurek. I'm a vegetable breeder and associate professor at Cornell University at Cornell. I am breeding new vegetable cultivars in organic systems and researching the basis for what makes them great, training graduate students to also help in this mission. At Row 7, I'm a co-founder and helping to get great new seeds out in the world for people to grow or enjoy.

All right, so that's today's guest. And so here's how it came about. I was on Twitter, scrolling through my feed, minding my own business when I saw an announcement that caught my eye. Dan Barber, author of The Third Plate, which was a great book that I read a few years ago. He's a chef out in the eastern United States, announcing that Row 7 Seeds was a brand new seed company that he had started along with a couple other passionate seed people, including today's guest, Michael Mazurek. And as Michael said, he is a plant breeder at Cornell. So having read the book, a substantial chunk of which was devoted to seeds and seed production and the breeding of plants for better flavor, this got me really excited. And I

immediately went to the Row 7 website, checked out the first seeds that they're offering. And a few minutes later, I had bought a lot of seed and spent a lot of money. And then the next thing I did was contact the company to see if I could get Dan or Michael to come on the show to talk about what they're doing, because what they're doing is pretty cool. And that's all you really need to know. So in just a minute, you're going to hear my conversation with Michael. Before that a little bit of housekeeping. I want to acknowledge a couple donations that came in this week. One was from Daniel S and one was from Tristan B and thanks to both you. And that reminds me to remind all of the

rest of you that if you're enjoying the podcast I hope you'll consider supporting it which you can do at the ruminant.ca slash gift registry. One more quick note before we get going on today's episode, and that is to tell all of the livestock farmers out there that there is some livestock related content coming. We all know I tend to focus more on the plant side of agriculture because I grow vegetables for a living and it's what I know better. But I haven't forgotten you completely. So please stay tuned. In the coming weeks and months, there will be the odd episode, including one or two coming up over the next four weeks or so. All right, blah, blah, blah. Enough, Jordan. Here's my conversation with Michael Mazurek. Talk to you at the end. Michael Mazurek, thanks a lot for coming on the Ruminant Podcast.

I've been looking forward to talking to you. Oh, thank you. I'm looking forward as well. So, Michael, in 2014, Chef Dan Barber publishes a book. The book is called The Third Plate, Field Notes on the Future of Food. And I read that book, I don't know, a couple years ago. I thought it was fantastic. But anyway, there was a quote in the book that I actually never forgot because it really jumped out at me when I first read the book. And Dan attributed it to, I think he said,

a brilliant or hotshot young seed plant breeder. And here's the quote. In all my years of breeding new varieties, after maybe tens of thousands of trials, no one has ever asked me to breed for flavor. Not one person, end quote. And so that's something this breeder said to Dan. And when Dan was inquiring about breeding some plant varieties for better flavor, uh, that stuck out to me, to be honest, Michael, because I almost didn't believe it. Like I totally, I totally understood at the time and still understand that for decades, um, a lot of

the emphasis in plant breeding was on, uh, taking care of the needs of the people in the middle of the supply chain, but it, it too perfect a quote that this person had never been asked. So imagine my delight in realizing and researching for this interview that that brilliant plant breeder is you, and that I'd get to be talking to him. So I think I want to start by asking you, I want to ask you about that quote. First of all, is it really true that up to that point, you really hadn't been asked to breed for flavor um yeah yeah i think it's it's something that i hadn't been asked for and in fact um uh i would have i was being discouraged from um like many of my plant breeder colleagues i was uh you as you make new crosses see plants plants, you start to find all these different forms that exist and don't make it out into the world.

Like the honey nut squash that we developed, habanada pepper. These crops, they're delicious. You love them. You're sure other people would love them. Maybe they try and they do, but then there's no... They ask, where can they get the seeds? Where can they buy the peppers? And you say, well, you can't.

No one's offering them. Meeting Dan was this turning point for me where he could agree that breeding flavor for flavor was important. There's a lot of people working with heirloom crops where there's this return to flavor. So there's this movement. What we can do is we can take all those flavors that haven't really been worked on in a long time in those heirlooms, cross it to plants that have been worked on for all these other traits, and combine the best. This is something that works for the farmer. Now there's suddenly a movement for flavor,

and so it was time for Row 7 to step in and help to share these delicious flavors, great new crops with people, and hopefully make it so that quote isn't something someone will ever say again. All right. Well, I'm glad you brought up heirlooms, Michael. Let's talk about heirloom varieties. So because in a sense, you said that this kind of this company represents this new quest for flavor. In another sense, that already existed in terms of all the heirloom varieties that lots of smaller

scale farmers are after and people at farmers markets are after and chefs are after. But heirloom varieties are kind of a sacred cow in the sense that I think it's fair to say there's a lot of people who really celebrate the heritage nature of them and that they're these open pollinated varieties that have been passed down forever. From your point of view, what's wrong with that point of view? Yeah, well, you touched on one thing that is incredibly right in the open pollinated varieties passed down forever. That's something we're really looking to support and continue. So we're definitely aligned there.

We're really looking to support and continue, so we're definitely aligned there. The challenge with looking at heirlooms from a purely preservation standpoint is it doesn't really – it's a snapshot in time. It doesn't really capture what the intent of the people that created them had in mind. And you can really think about it as, and for some people, it's kind of a shock to think about the intentions of people that were creating the heirlooms. You know, they were, it's this long-term progression, as you said, we continue to evolve plants by selective breeding over many generations. And it's a really important cultural legacy, a culinary legacy, and something to really hand on that you know has this legacy, this longevity. As people then were eating the produce,

we found that they were selecting for things that were delicious and things that could give them a good harvest for their families or taking it to market. The thing with the heirlooms, though, is we started to get other breeding priorities in the mix for things that could be distributed globally, moving to hybrids and going for great uniformity, and these commodity food systems, we started to move away from the diversity, the flavor, the fresh-picked aspect. And now that people are clamoring for that again, it's a matter of not just saying, well, this is a vintage variety. The development stopped.

It's a matter of continuing that process. you're looking at restoring heirlooms, refurbishing heirlooms, not just keeping them as they were and preserving that, but continuing the process where many persons were able to take some wild crops and domesticate them and then work on them for flavor. Eventually, the classic example is a brandywine tomato. But people that grow brandywine tomatoes know it's extra challenging. You get many that are difficult to work with in the kitchen. Many of them might get lost in the field. And then diseases come and wipe them out. And in order to have a healthy plant, a great harvest, you know, having some

disease resistance thing, traits that were not captured from the wild, preserving all those great flavors, the everything we love about heirlooms, but not keeping them as the historical, but continuing to advance, modernize them, you know, with the things that, you know, those ancestors would be proud of us for maintaining and that we would continue to maintain and not just try to preserve. We can preserve, but we also have an opportunity to continue to make them even better, enjoyed by more people, more profitable for people to grow. Yeah, there's a lot of reasons to continue to invest and improve. Right.

So it just, it sounds like when you think of on one end of a spectrum, you know, the heirlooms and on the other end, all the traits you were being asked to breed for that didn't include flavor over many years, it's just about striking a better balance. Because we don't want to throw away those traits of high yields and better performance and disease resistance, but we also don't want to throw away the flavor. Exactly. And maybe not beyond striking a balance is kind of striving for both. And we have in some of the row seven releases, we've been able to start to combine both. The New York 150 Abundance Potato, I'm not the breeder of it, but it's delicious. And as the name implies, it's abundant, it's prolific,

and it has all the disease resistances you would need for organic seed production, organic farming production. It stores well. It doesn't compromise on anything. So why not have that be the new standard? Right. Okay. So Michael, I'm going to ask you to kind of in a nutshell, catch us up from what took place between you and Dan in the third plate, his book, and where we're at now with this new company, Row 7 Seeds. Essentially, in the book, it kind of focused on Dan approaching you and talking about the concept of breeding for flavor. And the book focused on this butternut squash that you were already working on.

You were, I think, essentially trying to shrink it down and enhance the flavor. So can you, as briefly as you can, can you take us from that scenery in the book to the formation of this company? Yeah. So from that example that led to the creation of Honey Nut, you see me learning the chef's technique and approaches to look not just for flavor, but also new functionality for food. Different ways to prepare it, different vegetables that might fit it. We are continuing to get Dan's Blue Hills restaurants' input and opinion and help us search through some of the best flavors and what techniques could be applied to selectors I'm making. We're creating some fantastic new crops, and people are asking us, well, where is the seed?

How do we get it? You have some things we help support showing up in the market. And there's not really the mention of who bred it, that public institutions are important. So the company, it does many things. I try to summarize it as if there's change in the seed system or the food system that's supported by the seed system. It became a way to encapsulate all the change we wanted to see that we could touch through seed

and start to be able to make people have a chance to learn more about that and to participate in that. So that was a great description of why and how the collaboration continued. But what was the spark that led to the company? I'm really curious. At what point did you guys say, you know what, the best? Because, for example, you could have just worked together to distribute this seed and have it featured in other companies. So what led to Row 7 specifically? Because it's just a pretty unique, exciting thing, this new company with the focus that it has.

I think one big advantage to us forming Row 7 is that we have an ability to not just feature the crops we've collaborated on and be able to share these collaborations. But we're also able to unite a lot of people that might have similar interests and don't have a platform, don't have a way to share their new seeds with the world. So with Row 7, not only are we sharing crops that we've developed, we're helping others share seeds that they've developed. We are helping to fund others in the development of seeds that wouldn't fit the current market, but there's a tremendous clamoring for. And also by our commitment to

having this U.S.-produced, organically produced seed, it's a way to help address some of the bottlenecks and the issues of scale in the organic seed industry, and really help build the organic seed capacity so we can have the production here and help others be able to also be able to expand the space. So it's also very much about expanding opportunities for others to be able to join in the company, but also looking at the potential for change we could create. Well, Michael, speaking of expansion, I was going to ask you at some point about what the ambitions for the company are. Like currently, it's a pretty small offering of admittedly some very interesting varieties.

There are about, I think there are seven different offerings available on the site right now. So is the intention to keep it small? Or what do you and your partners, let's see, there's Dan Barber and Matthew Goldfarb. What do you envision five years from now? What is row seven going to look like? Yeah, so for row seven in five years,

What is row seven going to look like? Yeah, so for row seven in five years, we'll have a more diversified portfolio of seeds. People will be able to see where we're making investments in plant breeding, seed production, enhancing the scale and scope. And I think you should also be able to see the ripple effect of increased conversations where other people are having conversations directly between chefs and breeders. The idea of being able to seek out flavorful produce that works for the farmer and has great flavor qualities will continue to expand. And we hope that some of the varieties that we are offering now and soon will start to be household names.

So you'll start to see more and more cultivars that are known by name. It's something we're able to do with honey nut squash, where it's a butternut squash. It's distinctive in appearance, use, and flavor. You see it almost nationwide. It's coast to coast, and it's sold by name. And so people have expectations when they grow it or purchase it, you know, or serve it, of what it's going to be like. What's the quality? What's the flavor? It empowers the consumer to be able to look for that. So normally we just reserve that privilege for some apple variety. Someone might know their favorite apple variety. Within every crop, there's also those varieties.

Yeah, Michael, it really, as you say that, it makes me think like in addition to just breeding for flavor, this is kind of an act of decommodification of different kinds of food. It is exactly an act of decommodification. So, okay, I want to give people a little bit of a better sense of what you're doing at row seven. So I want to just choose two of the current offerings. The honey nut squash, is that the same as your 898? Because I was going to ask you to describe the 898. They're not the same.

The 898 is a further advance. Honey nut was incredible, but didn't really have much storage. It would tend to dry out in storage. And so we wanted to continue to improve that. We wanted to keep all of the great qualities of honey nut, but continue to work on its shortcomings. So 8-9-8 is our step forward in preserving its longevity, so trying to keep all the great flavor and making it more practical and something that we have in the coolers until relatively recently. So I actually didn't know the honey nut coming into learning about row seven. So what we're talking about, because I should say, the moment I saw row seven, I made my order,

because I was worried you would sell out quickly. So I've got my 898 squash seeds, but we're talking about a butternut squash that has been bred to be much smaller. It kind of practically fits in the palm of your hand and much sweeter. And as you've said, you've also bred this cultivar to have decent storage. Are those the three main features? Is there anything else you would mention about it? It also has more provitamin A, about three times more of that essential nutrient derived from the carotenoids in the squash than other butternut. Flavor-wise,

it's a much smoother mouthfeel. The smallness also adds to convenience. So, we see as smaller family sizes, there's a lot of people that are moving away from either because their refrigerator or apartment isn't large enough. But there's a lot of older produce that's really large. And so by shrinking it, we can both give a more convenient size and also while we're at it really improve the enjoyment. Michael, let's do one more. Can you tell me about the Badger Flame Beat? Yes, I have been a longtime fan of Badger Flame. I first had one several years ago at a field days where its breeder, Erwin Goldman, was presenting. I had one pulled out of the ground, just kind of shaved the skin off, the dirt off with my knife in the field. And I started to kind of like bit into it for a taste and discovered I was just kind of like eating it kind of raw there in the field.

And I interrupted Erwin to say, this is delicious. And it's something you've never really done with a beet. It has a different flavor. So the similarity between the Badger Flame Beet and the Habanada Pepper is both the Habanero and regular beet have these really pronounced flavors, either the high heat or the intense earthiness, that dominate the flavor. heat or the intense earthiness that dominate the flavor. Like the Habanada and the Badger Flame they bred for a low level of that earthiness, that major chemical that's otherwise driving your perception. So the Badger Flame has much less geosmin, has much more of that dirty flavor. And so you get to taste all the nuances that are behind that in a beet.

So you can roll that back and taste everything else, and it makes it something that, yeah, I hope a lot of other people try it, just as I did, you know, plucked fresh from the field. All right, Michael. So I want to talk a little bit more about the company and kind of the ethos or philosophy behind it. I want to ask you this question because you make the company kind of make some some a couple claims on the website. And Dan has elucidated on them in his book that I want to I want to get you to touch on.

So can you can you tell me what, if any, connection exists between flavor and our produce and other food, flavor and nutrition? Yeah, the connection between flavor and nutrition is one of my favorite topics. Flavor, it's not just some thing that we spoil ourselves with is you look at many fruits especially, and fruits include some of the vegetables like squash. They have certain aromas in them, colors that they use to let us know when they're ripe. They are plants that are setting seeds and they need those seeds dispersed. And so they have this change of

color. They have this change of aroma. Many, most do to alert us that we should be able to come eat them and they'll be at their peak flavor and nutrition. You can imagine this happening millions of years ago, the dawn of the evolution of flowering plants, animals interacting with them. So these flowering plants were concentrating these nutrients, antioxidants, and sugars in the fruits. It was calling these seed dispersers in. And in exchange for us eating, dispersing the seeds, we were getting a great nutritional boost.

we were getting a great nutritional boost. So there's that long-term co-evolution that we're reminding people of, but also you can look very specifically technically. If you consider the smell of tomatoes and watermelon, they share some aroma notes. One of the main nutrients, antioxidants, lycopene, in both of those, it's a carotenoid. It gives them the red color. When it breaks down, you get compounds like geraniol, these aroma volatiles that the more geraniol, it's kind of correlated with the amount of lycopene. And so, or much more, it's making that aroma at the time when the tomato is at its peak for flavor nutrition and is also turning red to let, to cue us in. There's a lot of the aroma volatiles

that are important for our enjoyment of plant foods, that many of them are derived from the essential nutrients, ones we have to get from our diets we can't make for ourselves. So it's a very important, close, intimate relationship that gets to who we are as a species on the planet and some of our relationships from food and what they should be. Michael, what's the connection between flavor, breeding for flavor, and healthy soil? We were doing some experiments with Blue Hill a few years ago where I challenged Dan a little bit on this in terms of, you know, is there really this relationship? There was. We were growing produce in a controlled setting where we had conventional,

like, chemically fertilized crops, and then we had the compost and naturally, organically fertilized crops, everything else is the same. We have replications, just those differences in terms of what we were feeding and how we're maintaining the soil over a couple years. We sent produce samples down, and not only were the Blue Hill cooks able to identify which of the randomized samples were different, but they even were able to assign those to the organic fertilized and the synthetically fertilized, which blew me away. And that's when I really became a convert to really looking at soil. And as we, this was several years ago and now, I think there's still much more to be known, but there are different communities of microbes that can exist in different fertilizer regimes. And we're increasingly becoming aware they're important. We know that our gut microbiome is important. There's a root microbiome that's also really important.

Maintaining that through the right sorts of fertility and management is, we're going to learn soon the details of that and how critical it is for a full both agroecological management and the tastiest produce so okay so another one thing i wanted to ask you about was the decision to be to only feature certified organic uh seeds and coming from certified organic conditions in the breeding it it i was surprised by that because normally as a certified organic grower, I'm used to having less variety available, which has just kind of, I guess, led to my assumption at the back of my mind that most breeders just want to be breeding under conventional conditions. In your previous answer, it almost sounds like maybe you came from that direction and you're kind of more recently a convert to this approach. Is that, to what extent is that true? You know, if you look back 10 or 15 years in your career, were you mostly breeding in conventional conditions?

Yeah, no, I was. If you're looking back that far, I am breeding in conventional systems and working with the growers, finding different grower collaborators, some of them organic, many of them conventional. We all recognize agriculture has a big footprint on sustainability in the world, and it can go either way. So in organic agriculture, you're looking for an agroecological management. You're looking for petroleum-free agriculture. We put billions of pounds of synthetic petrochemical-derived pesticides on the planet each year. So why not breed for something that doesn't do that, for something we know nourishes, works with ecosystems?

We have the tools and technologies to work for more precise tools and understanding. more precise tools and understanding. You see in medicine, looking at not just antibiotics, but probiotics. So in organic, we're moving towards a system that we all know is more sustainable in the long run. That makes sense. That's a very thoughtful answer. But I'm really, and I've already told you, I'm an organic grower, but I'm so curious to know as someone who kind of, you know, had their come to Jesus moment, if I'm allowed to use that phrase, who became a convert in this way?

What do you, you know, there's a reason, there's a lot of reasons that conventional agriculture is the most dominant as a plant breeder i'm really curious to know what you what you what new challenges exist in in in growing under organic conditions for you in terms of plant breeding or what you clearly you're converted over to this but what you miss like what you know you know, what, what features of conventional, um, conditions did make your job easier or whatever? Like what, what, you know, what, what do you miss or what, what are the biggest challenges now? Yeah. Yeah. So the, the conveniences, um, back when we were conventional, my program is now all my projects are now my whole breeding program is organic. is now all my projects are now my whole breeding program is organic. It is unconventional.

The weed control, we've had our expensive but effective herbicide cocktail. If different diseases moved in and we were focused on one, we could use different selective chemistries just to see the response to one disease and not the other. As we were growing plants in the winter generations and doing pollination, so a whole, you know, not just transplants, but from seed to seed over the winter into greenhouse. The fertility was already worked out. But I think what we were relying on is just there were a lot of systems where kind of one community had it all worked out and there was, you know, just a lot of other knowledge that we've been able to tap into as we've learned to, okay, well, how are we going to manage weeds on an organic farm as we're doing these selections and are

looking at individual plants, have things spaced out more? How are we going to be able to have plants-round in the greenhouse where we've learned to, where we don't need to add any pesticides. We're managing everything with beneficial insects. So it's been, I think, as others have invested in organic, it's become a lot easier for me to breed in organic because I can now just, if there's a pest insect in the greenhouse, I can hop on the phone and get the predator of that pest come in. So I think it was a lot harder a decade ago, and it's really hard, and it seemed like going backwards to use the techniques we're using. But now, as people have been investing and sharing and communicating with each other, their approaches, we've grown in leaps and bounds in the information and the knowledge we have to share about ways to do these

processes in organic systems. So the system has changed. As we look at organic seed, one of the big gaps has been helping to get enough supply for people to use organic seed 100% on their organic farm. Like you said, having to use this kind of other seed because it wasn't available. One of the things that we're learning in plant genetics genomics is that this idea of epigenetics and that some of the past environments, past generations, changes a plant might make, an organism might make, are inherited, are passed on. So one of the things that is a good potential direct benefit for someone using organic seeds is really the potential for you to have a plant that is more successful because it was a plant where the seed was grown in an organic condition,

so it's potentially more adapted. There's been a couple of research studies to support that recently. Michael, one thing that you kind of make very clear on the website for Row 7 is that none of these innovative, and I would assume painstakingly developed varieties, are patent protected. And that really is interesting to me. And I'd like to know the thinking behind the decision not to patent protect these varieties. not to patent protect these varieties? Yeah, it's a very simple one where all of the produce that we're working with, the legacy of seeds, we're building on things that others have left for us. And so the ability to continue to be able to freely take things we find in nature and to be able to continue to work with them is, I think, a fundamental human right. There's like,

seeds can get ignored a little there. So like fresh water, clean air, and the ability to have unrestricted access to the seeds and things from nature you need to grow food is critical. It's something that allows humanity to continue to improve seeds as really a common good, a common genetic heritage. Last question, Michael. Last question, Michael. In the third plate, Dan spends quite a bit of the book or the last part of the book, which is on seeds, quite a bit of that section, focusing on grain, different grains. He works with a specialist to try and develop a new cultivar of wheat that is called barber wheat. called Barber Wheat. He's working with another seed guy called Glenn down in one of the Carolinas, I believe, on some really interesting rice. I'm just wondering if it is in Row 7's future to be selling the grain

equivalents of these really interesting vegetable varieties. Oh, definitely. And I think it's important because that's another huge part of our food system where there's great flavor and nutrition coupled options for improvement. Chances to have things that don't fit the commodity markets that people would really want and be nourished by. that people would really want and be nourished by. There's also a great relationship on the farm between grains and vegetables. The idea of cover crops or crop rotations, having alternation of, as you were mentioning, the grains with the vegetables, Mentioning some of these, the grains with the vegetables, you know, those at least looking for ways to be kind of all the seeds you would need on the farm and to have them all be. And what we try to do with row seven for really have traits for the farmer, work with organic systems, non-GMO, and be something that really helps to work with the soils and be a delicious harvest. Well, the company is called Row 7 Seeds and I have a feeling, listeners, you better get there.

They can't have unlimited supply of this stuff. Row7seeds.com. Michael Mazurek, I sure enjoy talking to you. Thanks a lot for coming on the show. No, thank you. All right. That's it for this week, folks.

Now, every once in a while, I like to delay the outro song by just enough so that you don't have to hear me talking over my wife. Vanessa's singing. Since I know a lot of you like the song. For those of you

who are new to the podcast, you can find it and even download it at theruminant.ca if you look around. I get pretty regular emails asking about the song. It's an original by my wife. She likes to goof around with writing and singing, and so she recorded this one just for me. All right, here's the ruminant outro song by Vanessa Simor. Today I learned I don't need anything to live on except for a little old you. I've met a whole army of weasels, a legion of leeches, trying to give me the screw.

But if we bury ourselves in the woods in the country, we're no closer, we never have laundry. We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves. Live life like it was meant to be Ah, don't fret, honey I've got a plan to make our final escape All we'll need is each other 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 graces. We'll keep close quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and 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 going to lie.