The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - Participatory Plant Breeding (e110)

Episode Date: June 3, 2019

This ep: my interview with Alex Lyon, a UBC Postdoctoral Fellow focused on seed systems and plant breeding for diverse farm environments. Alex is involved in a number of projects that recruit commercial farmers to assist in the development of better seeds, and she joins me on the show to talk about them.  Show sponsor: The Small-Scale Meat Producers Association of BC

This episode is supported by the Small Scale Meat Producers Association of British Columbia, dedicated to voicing the needs and concerns of small scale meat producers in the province of BC. For more info, check out smallscalemeat.ca. This is 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, email me, editor at theruminant.ca, and you can find me on Twitter, at Ruminant Blog, or search for The Ruminant on Facebook. All right, let's do a show.

Hey folks, it's Jordan. Today you're going to hear about something called participatory plant breeding. And here's my guest. Hello, I'm Alex Lyon, and I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Sustainable Food Systems at UBC Farm. My main interest in the world is seed systems and plant breeding and everything that goes into having good quality seed for diversified farming systems. So before I did this, I was a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin. And there I was working on variety trials and plant breeding for organic agriculture with a big team of researchers, including Michael Mazurek, who you interviewed before.

And when I saw a job opening here at UBC, I proposed doing something similar. And it turned out there were other folks here who were interested in the same thing. So it all just kind of clicked into place. And that's what I'm doing now. All right, folks, I don't have a ton more to add before we get to the interview. Other than when Alex talks about being at UBC, she means the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia. And I'll also add that I met Alex at the British Columbia Organic Farmers Conference this past winter, attended a seminar she gave on participatory plant breeding, and I recorded this with Alex, oh, I don't know, a couple months ago now,

and you'll hear me refer to a pepper trial that I'm participating in with Alex and with some other folks she's involved with. And I've just signed on to also do a trial of winter storage carrots. So it turns out I drank some Kool-Aid. Anyway, it's a cool topic. I hope you'll enjoy it. And I will talk to you at the end. Alex Lyon, thanks a lot for coming on the ruminant podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's exciting to be on a podcast. Alex, we're going to talk about plant breeding today, specifically vegetable breeding. And I thought I'd just start with a general question. What got you interested in vegetable breeding in the first place?

Well, that's a great story. I had finished my master's degree at the University of Wisconsin, and I was at that point just generally interested in sustainable agriculture and had been for a long time. And I decided to keep studying it, and right around the time that I was thinking about doing a PhD, I had a conversation with Dr. Erin Silva, who's the organic agriculture specialist there, a professor in the plant pathology department. And she was getting involved with a project called the Northern Organic Vegetable Improvement Collaborative, or NOVIC. And it was a team of plant breeders and farmers, including the Organic Seed Alliance in Washington and several universities. And they were working on plant breeding for organic agriculture. And I hadn't really thought about plant breeding.

And as I got interested in that and started, I went to a few conferences with this group of researchers and just kind of got involved with this group of people and listened to what they were talking about. And the idea that, you know, we have organic agriculture and we have so much research that's gone into so many of the cropping systems and developing better methods to improve sustainability and improve yields and what have you. But there was this element of seed and of plant breeding that had not been addressed for organic systems. And I just thought that was really exciting to be working in some area that was like this

gap that could be addressed for organic farmers. So that is how I got involved. And I came to it completely not from a plant breeding background. I actually had an anthropology degree as an undergraduate, and I came into it as not from a plant breeding background. I actually had an anthropology degree as an undergraduate, and I came into it as more of a social scientist and really got, through the course of my PhD, more involved in the seed side of it, particularly working in a participatory way with farmers.

So I was interested in that participatory research aspect, and that got me interested in how do we do plant breeding together, farmers and scientists to improve things for organic systems. Okay, well, that's, that's great. That's great, Alex. And before we talk about your work, I'd like to focus a little bit on kind of recent history. So my first question is, talk about some of those gaps, I guess, as far as sourcing seed for organic growers. Like I'm thinking, I guess what I mean, yeah, 10 or 20, 30 years ago, whatever. What was it like for organic farmers and seed sourcing compared to, you know, now? Right. Well, I'm sure that a lot of the organic farmers that you talked to who have actually been farming for that long would be able to speak to that better than me. But,

you know, my understanding of it is that most of the commercial plant breeding that was being done in seed companies was in conventional agriculture. And most of the plant breeding being done in seed companies was in conventional agriculture. And most of the plant breeding being done in the public sector at universities was also for conventional agriculture. So there weren't a lot of new varieties being produced. Actually, there really weren't any new varieties being produced that were selected specifically to be the best varieties for organic agriculture. And so my impression is that organic farmers were interested in seed from the beginning, but they were working with the older varieties, the heirloom varieties. They were some of the farmers who were reinvigorating those heirloom varieties, bringing them back

into the market and bringing everybody's attention to how much great flavor there was, there are in these heirloom varieties. But those varieties hadn't been, they hadn't been improved in a long time. They had just become sort of static. And so I think some of the comments I heard from organic farmers were that the heirloom varieties, especially like in heirloom tomatoes, they can be something that consumers are really excited about with the flavor and the whole idea of heirloom. But some of them are just really tough to grow, and you don't get a lot of tomatoes off of them. And so I think that's kind of what the situation was, is that there were varieties that were heirloom and older that were working for organic farmers. And then there were also varieties that were developed maybe more through modern breeding programs that happened to work well for organic growers.

They weren't developed for them, but organic growers were testing everything and they were identifying varieties that were out there that worked well for them. So there were, and there still are, some varieties that are bred for conventional agriculture that do really well in organic systems. The problem that I think growers are facing now is that those varieties that perform really well on organic farms, but are particularly when you're talking about hybrids, they're maintained and they're produced by seed companies for whom organic growers are not the biggest market. And so there's a phenomenon that happens sometimes where a variety that organic growers have identified

that's bred for conventional agriculture, performs really well on organic farms and is like a really important workhorse variety will just kind of disappear or go out of production because it wasn't a top priority for the company that was making it. And so that is a lot of the farmers that I talked to, that was a moment for them where they had a variety that they really depended on go out of production, where they realized they needed to be more proactive about seed, either through saving it themselves or through getting involved with larger projects that were focused on producing better seed

for organic agriculture and by supporting seed companies that were really focused on organic agriculture as a priority. So I think that's sort of the picture that I understand of the past few decades. Okay, well, that's a great picture you drew, and it sets us up for the rest of the conversation, so thank you. So I'm wondering, I guess my next question is, and I touched on this with Michael Mazurek when I interviewed him. I'm interested to get your take. I touched on this with Michael Mazurek when I interviewed him.

I just, I'm interested to get your take. Can you, right now, the best you can, make a case for why it's important for organic growers to have seeds that were, seed varieties that were developed in organic conditions? Like, why does it matter so much that, you know, this seeds over here were developed in conventional conditions for conventional growers. I mean, you work on organic seed development, so I guess I'm just asking you to make the case for this kind of work. Yeah, sure. Well, I think there's a few different ways to answer that question. There's certainly been research done, not in every crop that organic growers grow, but in certain crops there has been research, especially I'm thinking of Kevin Murphy's program, looking at the performance of varieties that have been selected in conventional agriculture and the same variety selected in organic agriculture. So sort of starting with the same thing, and then you plant some of those seeds in conventional system, and then some of those seeds in organic system. And for several years, you select them in those systems. And then they took them and tested them again in conventional organic systems to compare, does the one that's been selected in conventional agriculture, how does it conventional, the one that's been selected in conventional agriculture,

how does it compare to the one that's been selected in organic agriculture in each of those settings, and found that the varieties that were selected in organic agriculture did perform better than the conventional ones in organic agriculture. It's not something that's been proven across the board in every crop, but there's enough evidence of that to suggest that breeding for organic systems creates better varieties for organic systems. So that's one way to approach that question, just from the very kind of evidence-based side of it. I think another thing that's important to consider is that organic systems are very complex. And they are very much informed by a farmer's knowledge. Farmers have a lot of – each individual farm in organic agriculture is a little bit different because farmers are figuring out how to optimize that system for their microclimate

and their market and everything that they have going on. So one of the things that's important in breeding for organic agriculture is to understand the whole farm, kind of come at it from a holistic perspective. And so I think having a different approach for organic breeding that includes farmer's knowledge and includes selection on organic farms results in breeding that's better able to take into account all of the things that are going on in organic farms. Does that make sense? Yeah, it totally makes sense, Alex. And so, I mean, you're clearly a true believer and so am I. But I am interested in asking you, like because you came, it's interesting to me because you came from, you came at this from a non, from not this background.

I think you mentioned anthropology was like where you're from. Right. So, and I came to farming from a complete non-farming background. from a complete non-farming background. And I'm wondering now, so if I can broaden out to just the concept of seed improvement, of vegetable improvement in general. I'm just wondering if there was like

a quintessential moment for you when you started exploring this stuff that really convinced you just how important variety development is in general, like the power of selective breeding? Was there was there like a certain paper or set of research you read or an experience you had where you because to me, in order to do the work you do, you really have to believe in just how powerful or effective it is to to do selective breeding? And I know that's kind of a weird question. But the reason I'm asking is because the further I would think this is less

important for you, but the further away you are from the actual breeding, someone like me, the more you can definitely, I can listen to someone like you and who's citing research, and it's quite easy to be to have faith to to be a believer but it still kind of requires that leap of faith if that makes sense because i haven't done a lot of it myself um and and this is gonna this is going to help this question will help for like kind of the next question which is well i'll get to that but but but but the the the fact that so many of us market gardeners are just sourcing seed from very far away, not made for our condition. So I'm just wondering, sorry for quite a ramble here, but at what point did you really start to really buy in and get excited about the notion of plant selection, seed selection? Yeah, okay.

Actually, so many instances are coming to mind. I'm trying to narrow in on one of them. But I want to back up a little bit to that last part of your question, which was about farmers sourcing seed from far away rather than from local, like local seed growers. And I want to draw a distinction a little bit because local, I mean, look, I work on local seed systems. I work with local seed growers here in D.C.

I think there's a lot of value to people growing seeds locally from a seed security standpoint. But I don't think it's necessarily true that to have the best variety for your farm, you have to have a variety that was grown locally. I think what you have to have is a variety that comes from either it's an heirloom that you know works really well, but if you're talking about a modern, newly bred variety, that comes from a program where the plant breeding was done for conditions that reflect the conditions on your farm. So that might be somebody local selecting an open pollinated variety for your conditions. That might be a great option. It might be from a seed company that specializes in organic agriculture that is making hybrids that are selected with the needs of organic farmers in

mind. And that seed company actually might be doing that are selected with the needs of organic farmers in mind. And that seed company actually might be doing that breeding anywhere in the world as long as they're testing it in conditions that reflect conditions similar to yours and conditions that are like organic farms. So I think, you know, to me, like having better seed for organic farms, local seed is an important piece of that, but it includes the whole, our seed system is global, and it includes the whole kind of, if you think about up the value chain,

up to where there's just plant breeding decisions going on, it includes all of those, whether it's public plant breeders or private plant breeders, being aware of what organic agriculture is and needs. This episode is supported by the British Columbia Small Scale Meat Producers Association, a nonprofit focused on removing systemic barriers that impede small scale meat producers from competing fairly in the marketplace. Smallscalemeat.ca. One member of this association is Fresh Valley Farms, which sent me a huge box of meat for this sponsorship. association is Fresh Valley Farms, which sent me a huge box of meat for this sponsorship.

Steve and Annalise, thank you. I've been enjoying everything in the homesteader box that you gave me. If you're in BC and want to check them out, head to freshvalleyfarms.ca. And Alex, are there any kind of moments in your entry into this part of your career that stick out as moments where you really got excited for and convinced about this work? Yeah, absolutely. One of my mentors in my PhD was Professor Bill Tracy, who I've mentioned before, who's a sweet corn breeder at University of Wisconsin. And he had become interested in breeding for organic agriculture, and he was part of the project that my PhD was part of. And so I got to go with him and one of his other graduate students, Adrian Shelton,

to a farm in Minnesota, Gardens of Egan. And the farmer there, Martin Diffley, was very enthusiastic about sweet corn. And he and Adrian and Bill worked together over the course of several years to develop a brand new sweet corn variety. It was an open pollinated sweet corn variety that they selected together and I watched them do it. And I was there as they were tasting ears and deciding which ones were going to move on to the next generation to develop a variety that was selected for those conditions of the upper Midwest and selected for organic conditions. And that being involved with that and listening to, you know, the farmer's perspective on what a good sweet corn should be and what qualities were important to him, understanding why they wanted to develop an open pollinated variety rather than hybrid, which is what most of the sweet corn varieties are,

and kind of following them through that process showed me an example of what breeding for, not just breeding for an organic system, but really breeding in partnership with a farmer can look like. And that variety is called Who Gets Kissed. It was released a few years ago and people may be familiar with it but kind of being able to just kind of be a fly on the wall because I was doing variety trials at that farm and be there when they were making selections

and understand that process was really inspirational to me. So Alex, I want to now come back and jump back to a point from a couple minutes ago. Is it fair to say that just because I buy some seed from a seed company that's organic, that's not sufficient to assume that the seed variety in question has been developed for organic conditions? assume that the seed variety in question has been developed for organic conditions. In other words, there must be plenty of seed out there that's available as certified organic seed that hasn't necessarily been rigorously tested for organic conditions or developed for organic conditions. Is that fair to say?

Yes, that is definitely fair to say. But the ultimate test of it is how well it performs on your farm, right? Ah, but we've done it. We've gotten to a segue. I was gunning for this segue, Alex. So this brings us to our segue to your work. So great. The ultimate test is how it performs on your farm. And one way to dive into that and for all of us to get a better sense of what performs well is something called participatory plant breeding, right? And so I'm wondering if you can tell me what that is, and then we can start talking about some of the cool work that you're doing right now.

Yeah, for sure. Well, participatory plant breeding is an approach to plant breeding that tries to develop a collaboration between farmers and plant breeders. And it's been around for a long time. a long time. It has been used around the world to develop varieties that are selected for all types of environments, for drought, for organic farms, for lower income farmers. It's been used in developing countries very successfully to improve varieties. So it's something that has been seen by organic plant breeders as a good fit with organic agriculture because of that farmer knowledge piece that I mentioned earlier and how important it is to be able to incorporate farmer knowledge in the breeding process when you're thinking about organic agriculture.

when you're thinking about organic agriculture. So participatory plant breeding can take a lot of different forms depending on how able and interested farmers are in getting involved in the breeding process. But I think there's some great examples in the organic seed world lately of farmers who really are plant breeders in their own right, working with a public plant breeder maybe to access additional germplasm or to implement methods that speed up their breeding process, and then working together to release a new variety.

Okay. So Alex, we are, I want to write right off the bat here. I just want to, I want to clarify something. We're going to be using the kind of the umbrella term participatory plant breeding. And yet I know we're going to spend a decent amount of the rest of the conversation talking about variety trialing or testing. So can you, can you just, can you, can you talk about what relationship the trialing or testing of varieties plays in the participatory plant breeding or draw a distinction if one needs to be drawn?

Yeah, for sure. I think that's a really good distinction to make. So variety trialing is growing existing varieties to compare them in any environment. You can do variety trialing on a research station. We're doing variety trialing here at the UBC farm quite a lot. And farmers can do variety trials on their own. So that's just sort of comparing what's out there. I think most farmers do some sort of informal variety trialing all the time because they want to have an alternative or they want to test something new.

Variety trialing that I have been involved with is a bit more organized and trying to involve multiple farm sites so we can get a sense of how varieties perform across different environments and maybe across a broader geographical region. So we try to make them a bit more uniform so they're comparable to each other across farms. So that's variety trialing. And variety trialing has an important relationship. You can do variety trialing without doing plant breeding. But if you're doing plant breeding, it's very helpful to start with variety trialing because if you want to make something new, you want to start with understanding what's

already out there. Or another outcome of the variety trialing process is you identify some varieties that are a really great starting point. Like they have most of what you want, but they have some things that are missing, maybe disease resistance or bolting or whatever it is. And so then you can use them as perhaps a parent in the first stages of a plant breeding process. Right. So then we essentially, and I might be simplifying, oversimplifying a bit, but we essentially are going to talk about a type of participatory plant breeding that starts with trialing to identify some great varieties and that may or may not lead to further breeding of those varieties to ultimately improve them. Is that, is that roughly fair to say? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. So variety trialing in plant breeding, variety trialing kind of gives you a baseline. And then you would also want to use

variety trialing if you have, if you have been doing plant breeding and you are almost finished with a variety. You want to get more feedback on it than just observing it in one place. So you want to send it out to many farms and have them do variety trials with the new variety and get feedback on it. So that's another area where variety trialing can be really important for plant breeding. Okay. So then let's talk about your work. So I think I have the title right, but can we talk about the Canadian Organic Vegetable Improvement Program or Initiative? Yeah, absolutely.

And that is the right title. BC in 2016, I started a project called the BC Seed Trials along with our partners at the Bouta Family Initiative on Canadian Seed Security or Bouta Initiative. And we were working on just variety trials. But I always kind of had it as a longer-term goal that it would be great to then lead to some plant breeding because we're basically testing varieties that already exist to see how well they work in BC, and then we started testing them in other places in Canada. But it seemed to me like the next step based on feedback from variety performance and really what farmers were interested in that we were working with was to create new varieties that are better adapted to BC. And then it turned out there were

already farmers out in Ontario who were working on plant breeding and peppers with Michael Mazurek. So we joined these things together and proposed a new project. And we're very fortunate and grateful to get funding from Organic Science Cluster 3, and that's from the Canadian Ministry of Agriculture, to start this new project, which we're starting this year, which includes plant breeding. I'm a simpleton, Alex, so I simplify. But you start in a lot of cases, or maybe in this case, with conversations with growers about the conditions that they feel are lacking or could be improved. And then you start a process of trialing. And then there's conversation back and forth over a period of probably, I'm going to just say a few generations of growing.

And then at some point, the breeder, in this case, you can start to do some crossing to try and, I guess, taking the information you've gleaned from the growers and improve the variety, and then it goes back to them for more trialing. But ultimately, if it's done with care, the end result, hopefully, is one or more improved varieties for growers of a specific type of growing condition or region. Yeah, exactly. That's a great summary. And the next step, my goal, which would make this even more participatory, is I've made the crosses, or I'm trying to make the crosses right this moment. I just put more flies in there before I got on the phone with you.

So there's some unknowns here. But if we get them to successfully cross and we have enough seed, my goal would be to grow some of that seed at the UBC farm where I can keep a close eye on it, but then to grow some of that seed on an organic farm, hopefully within driving distance of UBC, where I can actually have a farmer doing the selections. And so this is sort of mirroring that process that I observed as a PhD student with the sweet corn variety. The actual selection during the breeding process, the selection of parents to move on in each generation is done on an organic farm with an organic farmer. Like the farmer is really deciding like, yeah, this is what looks good.

This is what we need. And then that guides the selection process. So that's my ultimate goal with this carrot breeding process is to have it happen mostly or at least half and half on an organic farm. I mean, UBC farm is an organic farm, but on another working farm in the area. Right. So I should say that I met you roughly a month ago and heard about participatory plant breeding and signed up to participate in one of these projects. In my case, it's a pepper project and the seeds are coming soon, I think. But since we're talking about carrots, let's just stick with carrots. I'm interested to know when you send seeds to a farmer who's agreeing to

participate in the trialing. We're running out of time, but can you try and in a nutshell, explain the farmer's participation from seeding the crop to, to, uh, I guess harvesting. And in this case, I want, I want it to be an example where I prefer an example where it's actually trialing a new genetic line with variation in it so that you can explain. Cause one thing I, this is a dumb question, but okay. So he or she needs to actually select because the genetics are young, right? So how does that work with carrots? Because don't you have to pull them and actually taste them if taste is flavors one of your characteristics? And then how do you ultimately produce seed? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great question. It's not a dumb question. So, I mean, so with the variety trials that we have going on, like the ones that you signed up for, you're not necessarily going to be getting breeding lines because with breeding lines, we have very little seed. So what's going on most of the variety trials is existing varieties. So that's just a side note. But if a farmer is helping with the selection of carrots, so let's say we plant out, I don't know, 500 carrots on their farm. And you're right,

they'll grow them out, they'll have the roots. So to grow a carrot, so you harvest it that fall and taste the roots and look at them and evaluate them. And as long as we still have the crown intact, like the upper half and the carrot, we can still grow that out to seed. Ah, okay. So yeah, yeah. This is like kind of, I mean, with each crop there are certain advantages and disadvantages in the breeding process. Like with peppers, it's really easy to save the seed and plant them out again. With carrots, it's a little bit more complicated because it's a biennial crop.

So that's part of what I think is a nice partnership with the university is that we have the facilities here to produce the carrot seed in the winter in the greenhouse, which normally would take two years to go from seed to seed. But because we can, like we did at UBC Farm last year, select the carrot roots, actually taste them as long as we keep track of what root we're tasting, save the top half of the carrot, plant it that winter. So we've, you know, say we harvested our carrots in October, we tasted them, maybe we put them into storage for six weeks, do a storage evaluation. As long as I planted these carrot roots the first week of January in the greenhouse,

they are going to produce seed, hopefully, by mid-May or the end of May, and then we'll be able to plant that seed right away. Right away. Okay. So, yeah. So, we've gone from seed to seed in one year. Okay. And so I'm going to, again, Alex, this is a participatory program where you're working with farmers and I'm curious to ask you, you know, you're a scientist and a scientist wants to control all the variables involved in research as much as possible. And yet in almost, almost inevitably or inherently when you work with farmers on working farms you're going to get a mix from farmer to farmer of like different thoroughness or meticulousness and I'm wondering like how you reconcile the two do you have to just like be comfortable with I'm

just going to use the word messiness and and and a little more variability than is ideal? Or does it not matter as much in this case? Or what do you have to say about that? And are you asking that question about the plant breeding side or the variety trial side or sort of both? It could be both. I mean, I'm just picturing I'm about to participate in the pepper trial. And as far as farmers go, I'm less meticulous than the most meticulous ones in general, which is also

good. I'm going to, you're going to give me a set of instructions for, uh, how to grow the peppers. Um, but you know, this farmer over here is going to follow your instructions to the letter. And this one over here is going to get a little busier and, and not be able to, to follow them as, as closely to me that that seems inevitable. So I'm just wondering how you, you know, if you just have to be accepting of that in a process like this or how you deal with the variability that scientists typically are trying to eliminate. Yeah, that's a really good question.

Well, some of that variability is the whole point of doing on-farm variety trials. If you wanted to control things so much that you didn't have any of the influences of different farms, then you might as well just do all your variety trials in one place on a research station. So there's some amount of that that is really beneficial, and really the whole point of doing on-farm variety trials is that we want to see how varieties perform in the intended environment. In plant-based, it's called the target environment, the farms where the varieties are going to be used. So to that extent, we want farmers to treat the crop the way they normally would so that they can comment on it and provide

feedback on how that variety actually works in their farm and in their system. I think, you know, I've been doing on-farm variety trials for quite a number of years now, and for me, it's a matter of striking a balance between that aspect where you want the real conditions of the farm to be reflected and how the trial is managed. Striking a balance between that and then having data that is uniform. I don't know if uniform is really the right word, but in a consistent enough format that you can compare it to other farms. And I think my approach to that has developed over the years, partly from advice from other people that do this. And I think as we move forward, I'm trying to make the trials as easy for farmers to do and as flexible as possible.

So with the peppers, I think we tell everybody to please grow 12 plants and just take observations from the middle 10 plants. So you're not getting the plants on the edge that tend to get bigger or have other issues from being on the edge. So that's sort of maybe a way of controlling some of the variation. But then with those 12 plants, it's really grow them the way that you normally would. We will ask you to make some notes so we know, for instance, like how wide apart your beds are, if you're growing them in a hoop house or out in the field.

And then it'll still be valuable and relevant, no matter how they've grown the trial, because we have a lot of different farmers participating, so you can still see overall which varieties are favorites either across the whole country or across BC or in specific regions. Does that answer your question? It does. So all of that said, Alex, I would like you to think about all of the farmers you've worked with and all of the work you've done in participatory trialing and

breeding and finish this sentence. A farmer should think twice about participating in a seed trial like this, if? Okay. A farmer should think twice about participating in the variety trials. I think if they have never grown the crop before or have only grown the crop maybe once and really are still learning how to grow that crop, it might not be a good time for them to do this variety trial. If they don't have room for it, so they won't, like, if the total amount of space they have devoted to peppers is going to be completely taken up by this variety trial. I think that would be actually more risk for them to take on than I would really want them

to do because not all these varieties are going to perform as well as what they might normally grow. And then if they just really know they won't have the time or the interest to go out and look at it at least twice during the growing season. They don't need to be going out there every day or even every week. They really just need to get out there or make some notes once after they plant the crop and make some evaluations about how well it came up and then once at harvest. So that does take a little bit of extra work at harvest to keep track of each variety, maybe put it in a separate crate as you pick it with the variety label so that you can taste it and look at it later or be taking notes in the field.

at it later or be taking notes in the field. So they do need to be able to make sure either they or somebody in their farm crew is going to be noticing when it's time to harvest that variety trial and getting out there to do the evaluation. But I would add that we're here to support you in that. So hopefully it isn't too much of a burden. Well, great. I think it's, I mean, I asked you because I think it's important. I assume it's important for farmers who are considering doing this to be realistic about their situation. I for one, like one strategy I use for projects like this is I plan, I have a couple of employees who are real, just real keen. And so it's easy for the owner to get distracted. But if I stick my employee Shannon on this, she'll be so excited

and she'll do a better job than me. So it's kind of like you're overseeing me and I'll oversee Shannon and then we should get good conditions for the pepper trial. Okay. Yeah, I think that works really well for a lot of people. Let's have like one person on the farm crew who's like, they're going to do that trial. Yeah. and the U.S. to say nothing of Mexico. But can you just quickly talk about how a Canadian farmer might try and get involved,

whether just the right term to Google versus an American market gardener who wants to be involved? Sure. Well, our trials are just in Canada. So there are a lot of options in the U.S., and I can go into those in a minute, but for growers in Canada who want to get involved in the Kenobi project, probably the best way to get involved is to search for the BCSeed Trials. That's B-C-S-E-E-D Trials.ca, and you can find contact information on our website there. Find contact information on our website there. So people can get in touch with me directly. I can put my email address on your episode webpage or something, but my email address is alexandra.lyon at ubc.ca.

And you can get in touch with Farm Folk City Folk with Chris Theroux, who is our local partner in coordinating the variety trials. He's the one that does most of the communication with farmers during the season when I get too busy. So, yeah, for Canadian growers who want to do these trials, I would really encourage you to get in touch with us. Like, I mean, for the peppers, as you know, we're a little late getting seed out. It's getting almost too late for peppers, but they can still sign up for the carrot trials this year. And certainly they can sign up to be notified about trials next year. Okay, and a couple, maybe just no more than two noteworthy American projects?

Yeah, so in the U.S. there's a lot of variety trials coordinated by the Organic Seed Alliance. And the project that got me started on all of this, the Northern Organic Vegetable Improvement Collaborative, is still going. And they have variety trials across sort of the northern tier of the U.S. in a lot of different vegetable crops. And you can find information about that on the Organic Seed Alliance website as well. Alexander Lyon, with a Y, L-Y-O-N, and I'm saying that for the email address reference you made earlier. Thanks a lot for coming on the Ruminant Podcast. This is just so interesting, and I'm really looking forward to taking part in part of your trials. Thank you so much. It's been great to talk to you.

All right, folks, that's it for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. If all goes according to plan, you will get an episode within the next week or two about ruminant digestion. I think that's what my sometime co-host Tristan has planned for you, if everything goes according to plan. And I've got a couple more scheduled for after that before I end this latest little run of episodes. I hope your farming is going well if that's what you do and I will talk to you soon. Oh, 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 the bees and live life like it was meant to be 다음 영상에서 만나요!