Woodland, California: Doug Heath, Monsanto tomato breeder.

Even though I grew up in suburban Detroit, I’ve been a vegetable gardener from a very young age.  I developed a love of that.  As far as I can remember back, one of my uncles was a gardener…and I remember eating peas from behind his garage when I was really little, maybe five or six.  And we grew up on the poor side.  My mother raised 4 kids and we had canned peas.  That was the cheapest thing.  So I thought, I don’t like peas…they taste pasty, yuck.  And I ate those things; it was like magic to me.  I was like, “Wow!  How can that be?!”  Even as a little kid I’m thinking, “these are like candy!  What happened?  How could things be so bad in that can?”  And it just kind of stayed with me. 


You've probably never met somebody so passionate about tomatoes.  Doug Heath spends his life with them.


*A caveat before this article begins:  Please be aware that the term "hybrid" is unrelated to "genetic engineering" or "GMO." Many assumptions are often made about Monsanto's seed development; STEWARDS attempts to present straightforward transcriptions of interviews with agriculturalists across the board, including their personal perspective on the current state of American agriculture.


We welcome comments and discussion; please feel free to ask for clarification of terms or offer critique.  If it has been a while since your last genetics class (do you remember Gregor Mendel and Punnet squares?), I recommend reviewing our previous blog post, which contains some videos of the basics, before reading the full interview.

 

It was another hot summer day when we arrived in Woodland, California at a Monsanto Company research station. We had traded multiple calls and emails with public relation folks in St. Louis (at Monsanto's headquarters) and they agreed to set us up for a couple of hours with Doug Heath.  We met him in the old farmhouse office and hopped in his truck to explore the plots.


I’ll give you a background of the place here. I’ve been here 17 years. When I came we were a small, privately held company called Petoseed and this station, which stared as a Petoseed station in the early ‘70’s…it was a farm. And the house you just came in through was the farmhouse that got converted a little bit into an office. Other than that there were basically just some barns. This was a Yolo County farm.


Basically, Doug is tasked with research and development of fresh market tomatoes.  Monsanto has breeders based around the world, working on crops in different climates and cultures.  Doug is responsible mostly for tomatoes that will be adapted to and grown in the Americas and Australia.  It's a big job, and he spoke of the satisfaction that comes when he stands in the field of a farmer abroad and looks out on a crop of a fruit that he bred here in California.

He walks us up and down rows of tomatoes in the research plots; it is a little late in the season, but many plants still have some over-ripe fruits that we sample.  


I’ll sort of take you on a tour through flavor here.  I’m going to go up in sweetness.  I’ll end up with something that’s really really really sweet.


We taste a diversity of his projects off the vine, and he often pauses one of his detailed answers to our questions to elaborate on the particular balance of a variety's acidity, sweetness, history, or nutrition.


We recognized the importance of interviewing people like Doug who are often under-represented in discussions of modern agriculture in the media.  There are many negative associations that are made about companies such as Monsanto and their work; unfortunately, no matter your positions on hot-topic issues, there is a lot of misinformation out there as well.  For the record, there is no genetic engineering happening with tomatoes here.  There are modern scientific tools used, but the methods are traditional: grow a crop, save the best plants, grow the crop again, and cross-breed lines of tomatoes to create successful hybrids.


I’m a traditional plant breeder; I’m doing things just like Mendel did with his peas, crossing things together and selecting for traits.  That’s really what we’re basically doing here still; my job really hasn’t changed.  You know, we’ve gotten new owners twice, but the job remains the same.  We’ve got these tools, like the molecular marker allows us to go quite a bit faster.  


The molecular markers that he mentions are small stretches of genes on DNA that scientists can look for to see if a desired trait has been introduced into a given plant.  This means that Doug can take a sliver of a leaf from a young tomato plant and send it to the lab; the lab analyzes the DNA.  If the genes that they are looking for are present, he can grow the plant out and save its seed for reproduction.  This cuts years off of research because he does not need to wait for an entire growing season to find out  if a plant has become disease-resistant, for example.

And what traits is he working towards?  Resistance to diseases such as Fusarium wilt and late blight are big ones.  He makes the case that breeding resistant strains of plants lowers or eliminates the need for spraying.  Fusarium, much like the flu, is always changing and evolving.  Every few years a new strain of the disease arrives, which affects most tomatoes, whether they are heirlooms, grown organicaly, or grown conventionally.


Last year in particular there was a big outbreak of late blight on the east coast, so a lot of tomatoes were lost.  That becomes like a serious spray program!  Pretty powerful fungicides to control it.  So if we can provide something that’s resistant genetically, the grower doesn’t have to pay for the spray and the consumers get something that’s unsprayed.  So it works into the organic movement as well.
One of his projects involves the breeding of heirloom tomatoes.  This has drawn criticism; many people believe that there is a stark dichotomy between heirloom fruits and larger-scale commercially available ones.  Doug doesn't believe that this is necessary.  He repeats how important it is for him to maintain flavor, color, and quality.


So why does he work on heirloom varieties?  First of all, because he and his children love them.  Practially though, his focus is mostly to increase their disease resistance and their yield.  One particular variety that he likes typically only sets 2-3 fruits per plant.  The plant's flowers are often malformed, resulting in damaged or nonexistent fruits.  Through cross-breeding and selection, he has been able to come up with a line that contains all of the original flavor and color, but yields many more fruits per plant.  This is a boon to gardeners and farmers, and Doug does not believe that they need to choose between yield and quality.


There’s a lot of skeptics, and I expected that.  There’s a lot of stuff in the press on the topic and it’s a very emotional topic for people.  I’m not surprised about that because people know that there’s a heritage related to that, these seeds have been passed down…I started working with these because I recognized that they were so unique, the colors and flavors.  I’m just trying to improve upon a good thing.


There’s an emotional attachment, and they probably feel that a breeder like me is out to ruin them, but they don’t understand that I’m not.  I’m working with them because I love them too!


Apparently one source of pride for Doug is that he developed a seedless tomato several years ago, a remarkable breakthrough.  Others had tried, but he was proud to tell us that he had bred a tomato that was plump, delicious, and seedless.  It turns out that there is quite a demand for it, especially amongst people with diverticulosis, a condition that prevents them from eating things with tiny seeds.  He refuses to call a project complete until it matches his ideals for flavor and quality.  He doesn't just work towards a single trait; he wants the whole, tasty package.

We asked him about the negative media surrounding Monsanto and its projects.  He is frustrated at the assumptions that are made by the public, and wishes that he could explain his methods and passion directly, to open ears:


...the seedless tomato, which I mentioned was traditional breeding from my work the last 17 years…when people found out that it was from Monsanto, they instantly assumed that it was GMO.  It’s like, "here’s something new, it must be GMO!"  And I’m reading the blogs and I’m thinking, “My gosh!  People have no clue.”  


Some people were saying, “Yeah, Monsanto’s making everything sterile so they can control the food supply…” And it’s amazing.  So yeah, misinformation travels fast.  You can try what you can to set the record straight, I mean every time I read one of those I want to jump in a correct them, but at some point I can’t stay up all night doing this!

But it makes me sad that people understand so little and that they assume the worst, for sure.  I mean it’s far from the case.

Doug appreciates his predecessors, the researchers, farmers, and gardeners who have made strides in the tomato breeding community.  He tells us the story of a professor whom he got to meet that was working on creating seedless (parthenocarpic) tomatoes:


His name was Dr. William Frazier, we called him Tex Frazier and he was from Oregon State University up in Corvallis.  I got a chance to meet him before he died, and I knew he was working on these parthenocarpic tomatoes.  My predecessors told me, “go visit Tex!  We think he’s got a garden at his house.”  He’s retired, but he’s got a garden.  And sure enough, this guy had like a hilltop garden in Corvallis.  And having been a professor he was very meticulous, he had everything labeled...and the juiciness…I cut one of these things and my shoes got all wet.  I was like “woah!  What is that?!”  It was a really great thing to tap into the stuff he had, because he had a lot of the pieces of the great flavor that are here as well.  Didn’t have much disease resistance left ‘cause he was just selecting for the seedlessness and the flavor.  It really made a great impression on him that I was going to be able to commercialize this.  He couldn’t quite understand how I was going to do it.


But this guy was so passionate evidently that they buried him with some tomato plants and tools.  It was so great to have met him in his house and this handoff of some important seeds that I was able to put into production...I hope I can name one after him.   Big Tex or something like that! 


He also notes Jack Hanna and Charlie Rick as two significant contributors to the tomato world.  Charlie Rick collected samples of wild tomatoes from around the world and stored them at UC-Davis so that breeders could "delve into the past" to find disease resistance and other genetics that might be bred into existing commercial crops.  Doug references this as we sample a sun-warmed tomato off the vine:


Isn’t that amazing?  So now you can taste the acids too, but this is kind of high-sugar, high-acid.   The typical old-time flavor, “oh my grandpa had tomatoes like that!”  Check out the juice on that thing.   See, we just do not see that anymore in modern varieties.  And I really had to delve into the past to grab stuff like that. 


He agrees with the common perception that commercial varieties of tomatoes have been fairly bland in recent decades, and is happy to see the market moving away from that.  As a breeder he is victim to market demands for the most part, but he also must forecast the future as best he can.  Because it takes anywhere from 4-12 years to develop a commercial variety, he must predict the desires of the public.

It’s nice that we are able to keep on discovering things too, that’s the fun of it.  You never know everything; you have to keep an open mind.  That’s important, I think, as a scientist, to keep an open mind.   Because if we didn’t we’d still think the world was flat and if you went you went off the edge, you went off the edge of the turtle’s back! {laughs} We never know everything; we’re always discovering new things. 


Towards the end we asked him, as we asked all of our interviewees, "What would be some ideal changes you'd like to see in the ag system?"  His response was not unlike many farmers:


I would like to see more land trusts and things like that, preserving the land.  I don’t want to see ever-shrinking farmland, ‘cause there’s probably only so far we can go with this mega-production on a small piece.  I would like to see more land trusts and things where good prime agricultural land is maintained for that, or even just wild wetlands and things like that.  But for farming, not developing really good farmland…putting buildings on top of prime agricultural land, that doesn’t make sense to me!  That’s what I would like to see.  That’s probably another political question, but I think for the good of the planet and the populations in the future, we better think about stuff like that, maintaining good farmland. 

And then being good stewards of that land you have. 

Click the jump to read the full interview with Doug Heath.  It is a long one, and includes some practical information about field rotations, more personal stories, explanations of nutrition and sugar analysis, details of disease-resistance genetics, and perspectives on the agriculture system.

DOUG HEATH, MONSANTO: FULL INTERVIEW


DOUG HEATH: Monsanto
California

I’ll give you a background of the place here.  I’ve been here 17 years.  When I came we were a small, privately held company called Petoseed and this station, which stared as a Petoseed station in the early ‘70’s…it was a farm.  And the house you just came in through was the farmhouse that got converted a little bit into an office.  Other than that there were basically just some barns.  Let’s see, I think one of the barns still stands next door…there it is.

This was a Yolo County farm.  Don’t remember exactly how many acres, but you can visualize it; it might have been about 80.  These little greenhouses, these are the oldest ones here.  These go back to before I started, so I don’t know exactly how old they are, they’re not super old because they’re Agratech.  We had older houses from the original station that were wood frame that the Petoseed guys built themselves.  They just cut out the middleman and got lumber and did them.  These are the remaining older houses; they’re small, and they used to be just survivor houses.  You know, all of our disease-resistance work before molecular markers was literally…you had to grow the plants out…and we still have this; we still apply the pathogens, select the surviving ones, and we would put them kind of like in quarantine in there, keep everything clean.


And that would take a lot of generations, I’m sure.

It took a lot of time because you had to go the full generation.  You had to grow them out, take the survivor, take the seed.  In fact, there’s an interesting story on that from my predecessor that goes back to the beginning here, the early ‘70’s. 

I started in ’93, like I said, 17 years ago, and when I came on the place was still very much like it was in the beginning.  In fact there was even kind of an anti-computer bias among the old guys.  That sort of quickly changed.  In addition to computers, molecular markers came on.  It really came on first with tomato.

So my predecessor that I trained with, he went from really flat-out not trusting the molecular marker results…and I think by about 1998 I was taking over his program but I was really rebuilding it completely.  He started to see the quick results I was making in the field and…you know, we had a good report he and I, so I saw him start to change his tune, he says, “So this thing you’re telling me, it really works, huh?  Take a little tiny piece of leaf like that and you’re getting all the results in there right?”  And I said, “Yeah for the most part, they’re right!”  And all he could say was, “Oh you got it made!”  And then he told me this story about one of the resistances we have with tomato and some other crops against nematodes, microscopic worms that affect the roots.

He said, “Let me tell you the story about the first nematode survivors.  We went down to the old thrift store downtown and we bought an old claw foot tub.  And we filled it with soil.”  That was because they wanted a drain.  “We had five plants in there.  One of them was a survivor!  All your stuff descends from that, don’t forget that!”  Kind of to put it in perspective, ‘cause here I am getting a little, couple-millimeter-sized leaf, sending it to the lab, they extract the DNA, they tell me what’s happening with all these different genes…


And I’m sure nothing in the lab was as cheap as the thrift store bathtub.

{Laughs} Oh, we’re getting very efficient, actually, on the cost of that; it’s really coming down.  One of the good things that Monsanto’s brought us is economies of scale.  

{We are still in Doug’s truck and he points out the old ranch border fence and speaks a bit of its history.  He then points out the zucchini plants and tells us we just missed a field day, which is why all the different varieties are marked.}

So you’re growing a pretty wide variety of veggies out here?

Well, what it is mainly…you’ve got the solanaceous crops, which are the tomato that I work on, peppers, we’ve got both hot pepper and sweet pepper, and then you’ve got the cucurbit group, which is everything from the zucchini, the summer squash, to the winter squash, which includes pumpkins.  Cucumbers.  You can’t see…well there’s a few cantaloupe in the field over their, but all the watermelons I think have been disked.  They’re all done.  So those three main groups out here.  We have onion here, but it’s kind of done mostly offsite.  The carrot is done up in Idaho.  So we really concentrate on what we call the wet seeds: the tomato, pepper, those cucurbits. 

The broccoli, cauliflower, and lettuce are done down at our Arroyo Grande station south of Pismo Beach a little bit.  So we’re putting the things in the climate where they do the best.


How does it work when you’ve got…how does just practical crop rotation and soil fertility work in a situation like this where it’s mostly research?

Ideally we would be able to rotate a little bit better than we do, because now we’ve got so much demand for space.  We used to have a nice chunk of wheat in the rotation and I’d like to see us kind of get back to that if we could.  I think we’re just so limited on land right now is the problem.  But yeah, we do rotate among the crops.  I {tomatoes} would usually follow, say, melons, something like that. 

The fertility is pretty well standard for the business.  We are doing a little bit different irrigation than most growers in California use with the drip line right on top of the ground.  It’s simpler; when you’re done with the crop, you just roll it up, and we’ll reuse it again if it’s working well.  Whereas a lot of growers, if they’re doing drip irrigation, they’ll bury it.  It’s kind of wasteful because you just rid of it.

{We pass the melons in the truck and pull up to a tomato plot}

So this is my breeding section here.  All the flags are things that I selected and they’ve been harvested last month.  They were selected in July, and that’s why the plants are going down.  We’re just making sure we got seed of everything before we disk it. 


And so what are you actively selecting for now? 

So, I’m doing the fresh market tomato, as opposed to the processing tomato.  And my regions of the world that I cover here are basically the Americas.  I don’t focus so much on the east coast because we have a breeder in Florida that takes care of the east coast, which is more humid.  With his stuff he can take care of other humid areas like Brazil, selecting under rainy conditions and stuff like that.  It’s bone dry here during our cycle, we don’t get any rain; it’s like semi-desert here basically. 

So from here I’m selecting things for California but also for Chile; if you go to Santiago in February, which I do, it’s like you’re standing out here in July, it’s really just like a 6-month flip.  It’s real close.  The selections I make here work very well for down there.  They would work well for the Middle East also.  A lot of times my hybrids end up doing well in Lebanon or Morocco, or some kind of place like that too, so…

Tomato is a crop where it’s really an environmentally sensitive crop.  You can grow the same variety here, and if you grow it in Florida it might be almost unrecognizable.  The plant might look different, the leaf might be different-looking, the fruit size may change.  So we’ve got a lot of tomato breeders worldwide.  We’ve got a breeder in Korea; we got breeders in Holland, Spain, Italy, here, all over the place.  So we kind of have these areas that we cover; like I said, I’m covering most of the Americas.  Mexico is a huge market for me.  And I also take care of Australia, and it’s kind of by default of having this leading variety there now. 

And I’m doing only round tomatoes now, mostly large round tomatoes.  I used to also do what we call saladettes.  Saladettes is a sort of combined term for something that has some degree of elongation; you might of heard of like Roma or Plum, or something like that.   I used to do those, and that program got transferred to our breeder in San Juan Batista, California. 

So I’m focusing only on the rounds; the determinate vine which can be grown on the ground like this {we are getting out of his pickup truck at a row of tomato plants, about 6 feet tall, many still with fruits hanging on them}.  And then the indeterminate stuff which is grown up like this.  They may be a little over the hill, but we’ll try some stuff and you can kind of see where I’m at. 


{We are now out of the truck and he asks us how long we’ve been in California.  We mention that we were in Davis for a couple of days prior to visiting him.}

Well actually, since you were in Davis, that’s a good story that ties in… So I was talking about the molecular markers and the disease resistance work.  These disease resistances that we have in tomato, it’s pretty extensive now, and we can really owe it to a man that was a professor for many years there at UC-Davis, Dr. Charlie Rick.  He’s passed now; I was glad I got to meet him before he died.  Very interesting guy, and one of the things he did in his tenure as a professor there at Davis was, he took excursions to South America to collect the wild tomatoes.  You know, they’re in the region of the Andes, but some of the stuff was coastal, some of the stuff was in the hills, and they had various adaptations, and they had various resistances. 

And so it’s really really important to remember the contribution of Dr. Charlie Rick because they keep those seeds still in a repository there in Davis.  You can request them.  Everything from, you know, fungal diseases, viral diseases; most of these things we got from the various wild accessions in that gene bank.  We put them in through, over the years, through traditional breeding. 

I’m a traditional plant breeder; I’m doing things just like Mendel did with his peas, crossing things together and selecting for traits.  That’s really what we’re basically doing here still; my job really hasn’t changed.  You know, we’ve gotten new owners twice, but the job remains the same.  We’ve got these tools, like the molecular marker allows us to go quite a bit faster. 

We still have to check for disease resistance at the end.  So let’s say we have a marker for a particular gene, for a particular disease resistance, and the testing says that it’s what we call “fixed”, so it’s not going to segregate.  In the end we have to take it to the pathology lab and confirm that before we go out to the grower and make that claim, “hey, this is resistant to this.”  But yeah, if Charlie Rick hadn’t made that collection, I don’t know how much…that’s a really really really important thing to remember.  He had the foresight to go get that stuff and maintain it, maintain that diversity so that the breeders could go back in.

And we’re still going back in for other things!  I mean, we’re always looking for…there are some new resistances that come up, or sometimes the particular resistance changes and you have a new race.  We’ve had that with a disease that’s causing a lot of the browning in here, it’s called Fusarium wilt.  It lives in the soil, the fungal spores, and this ground has been in tomato…probably too long I’ll say! {laughs}  And we do have the third race of Fusarium wilt out here.  There was Fusarium wilt race 1; the breeders developed resistance out of some wild tomato.  That resistance held for many many years.  And then came race 2.  Same thing, got the resistance from a different wild species that held, and now we’re having race 3.  A lot of resistances have held from the start, so we’ve actually been pretty lucky compared to…boy there are some crops, like spinach, where…you know, downy mildew, I don’t know what race they’re on, like the 50th race or some kind of thing!  It’s like a treadmill. 

So that collection {in Davis} remains a really important resource.  Even just me, selecting out here under the pressure…you know, I might be selecting even for just some tolerance for a disease even though I don’t have the resistance per se…I know a lot of the pathologists don’t like to use the word “tolerance”.  They say “intermediate resistance”…

{We continue walking and he points out wilted tomato plants that have succumbed to disease or age.}

End of July was about the peak for this planting.  And we’re starting to cut back on the water…I haven’t had them spray out here for a long time because I like to eat these things.  I accept that they’re going to draw down and I’ve already made my evaluation, so…

{Points to another variety of tomato}  These are hybrids.  So these are crossed between a male and a female.  I’m selecting for various traits, you know, some things might have more of a compact plant like that, whereas other ones may have a larger plant…and this is how the fresh market tomatoes are still grown here in California, on the ground.  They’re actually picked green, with the exception of when you get down around Oceanside area…actually from Ventura area where our headquarters is, down to Oceanside.  They’re growing them up on stakes and they’re picking them vine-ripe.  Vine-ripe really means…they don’t pick them, like, red-ripe.  But they’re picking them starting to turn {red} and then they’ll let them ripen naturally as they ship them.  That’s the deal with tomatoes; tomatoes are like bananas, they release ethylene gas naturally and that’s how they start to ripen.

The main valley commercial growers, they’re picking flat-out green, but it’s mature green.  If I cut that one we might see that the gel is starting to turn inside {Pulls out a pocket knife to cut open a tomato and shows us the inside}.  Yeah, so you’re getting a little bit of the development of the gel.  The seeds are not fully mature, but they’re getting pretty close.  And by the time you get to just breaking color I can harvest this fruit and dry down the seeds, and they’ll germinate just fine.  Not too long after that stage, maybe a week, they’re fully mature, and germination is actually quite good.

More and more the tomato market seems to be moving toward the vine-ripe.  If you think about it…think about the supermarket even like 15 years ago.  Fifteen, twenty years ago you saw, you know, round tomatoes like this, roma or plum, and cherries.  That was about it.  That was your 3 choices.  You think about it now, you got grape tomatoes in addition to the cherries, you’ve got heirlooms seasonally, you’ve got tomatoes on the vine and in various sizes…so that category has grown.  And this is really a good thing.  What that means is that the whole industry, from us breeders right down to the retailers are realizing that the consumers want this variety; they want better flavor, which they’re getting. 

So I’m glad to see it changing like that.  The other trend {in growing tomatoes} is it’s moving a little bit toward what we call “protected culture” which means anything from, on the really low end, let’s say a nethouse, a structure that’s just netting to keep the bugs out…the high end of protected is what we call hydroponic where the plants are not grown in soil; they’re not even grown in a pot of soil, they’re grown in kind of a plastic bag of some kind of media, and the water and nutrients are run through that stuff.  So there’s a big range of protected culture, but a lot of the tomato production worldwide is moving toward that.  You can protect the crop of course a lot better; you can do it with less pesticides, which is good.  In fact, I toured some hydroponic houses in Holland last fall, and it was remarkable.  These guys were growing pretty much pesticide-free.  They were using biological control, using natural predators to control insects…


On what scale?

On a big scale.  In fact that system that I saw in Holland, those houses, it’d be really something cool for you guys to see.  If you look at these indeterminate vines, we’re kind of chopping them at 6 feet or so, but a tomato of that type, indeterminate, it will keep on growing to a certain point, I mean you can have it be 30 feet long and just keep picking and picking.  They use that; they have varieties that we select for long cropping, and they will simply, after they pick, drop that vine down and kind of wind it around the bench, and they get almost a full year’s cycle out of that one plant.  I think it’s like nine months, ten months; it’s a long cycle.  They really lead the way I think.  These guys were recycling energy, they were even selling energy to the local city; they are really pioneers a really great utilization of resources.

There’s still a lot of outdoor tomato production in the world and that’s not going to go away.


Are you growing things hydroponically?

Not here, no.  Our greenhouses, we’ve got bags of a mix, a soil-like mix.  It’s an artificial media.  We cut it with some soil and mix it together.  And we drip on top of the bags. 


So, can you briefly walk us through your research to the mid- to large-scale producer growing? 

Sort of from the beginning?

Yeah, I’m just curious because you do your research, you pick out which you select, and then…are you growing seed out here, or is somebody growing it out for the producers?

Oh, I gotcha.  Okay, so how it goes is…the first thing is the actual breeding, where I’m developing new parent lines.  Those, what we call “inbred lines”, they’ll have various resistances that I’ve put in there through a combination of molecular market work and pathology…and then I’ll make those hybrids, I’ll look at those hybrids out here, and I’m selecting for a number of things:  obviously I want to have yield, like any crop.  I want to have a good setting.  A good fruit size is one of the things.  Most of my markets want this really big fruit size.  Tomato is probably one of the most scrutinized crops for quality.  If you see a lot of cracking like this {holds out a tomato on the vine with a crack running its entire length} we tend to not like that.  This {points to the end of the tomato} is called the blossom end scar.  They want to have this just small, small.  Nice and smooth and firm, and great color inside and out…it’s really scrutinized for quality. 

Our challenge is now to meet that, because the bar is high, but we want to make sure that they have good flavor.  And this is a real push within Monsanto too.  On the first level, the farmers are our customer; we’re selling the seed.  They’re selling to a retailer, and at the retailer the consumer is the customer.  We like to think all the way down the chain.  We want everybody to win and we want the consumers to have the better quality.

So what happens is, say, I selected this one {indicates a particular tomato plant}…it goes to the next stage of trialing, which means I’ll make a little bit more seed.  I make the initial seed right in the greenhouses.  The cross is manually done.  Pollen is collected, it’s put on the flowers of the female.  The fruits set and we trial them here, 10 plants.  And when I select these we go to the next step of trialing, which is going to be more fields, growers’ fields, more replicated, more plants, and we start to get down to the winners of the winners, and then we’ll ramp up the trialing even more till we eventually have a block of the growers’ field.  If the grower feels really confident and likes it, by that time we have the parents increased…

Actually, these guys harvesting right over here? {Indicates adjacent fields where workers are busy} This is a group called Foundation Seed.   We give the parent lines, when they’re all finished and fixed for everything, we give them to the Foundation Seed Department, and they’ll grow a long row, maybe a hundred plants of each parent and they’ll harvest a big volume of seed, which goes to the next level called Foundation Seed where they ramp it up for commercial production.  So by the time we’re ready to go commercial on something, everybody likes it, the commercial crops are produced in different areas of the world.  China’s a big area.  We produce a lot of seed in Peru, in Chile.  Latvia was a nice place.  Bolivia.  So there’s a lot of places when you’re talking about kilos of seed…you know, I’m talking here about grams of seed.  

When I make that first cross it might be 3 female plants and I might get like 5 grams of seed.  About 1,500 seeds.  But it ramps up all the way through that level.  And there’s a lot of quality checking and stuff that’s done.  Let’s say that we have a seed that’s made in China; before it can even be packed up in a can or a packet, we have a group called QA, stands for Quality Assurance, and they check everything, so we won’t be sending any problems to the farmer.  Certified clean of all diseases that can remain on the seed, and things like that.   So it’s very extensive.  It ends up being a lot of parts that come together to make it work. 

That’s basically how it goes and then, like I said, if the grower likes it they’ll end up…like I mentioned, in Australia, we have 90% market share with one variety.  And it becomes the dominant variety for all of those reasons that I mentioned: it’s a good yielder, it’s got great quality, it’s got great eating quality, everybody likes it, it’s got the resistance they need…then it stays in the marketplace.


And so how does it work…I know that there’s classic plant breeder rights…does that go to you or does that go to the company?  How does that work when you’re dealing with something that’s going out on such a large scale and you’ve come up with a new variety?

Yeah, we as breeders for a company like this, we don’t own any…it’s all proprietorial to the company.   But the company, of course they have protections over things. 

Any company can protect their material with PVP, Plant Variety Protection, or patents, and the officials decide of something is patentable or should it remain public.  It’s a fair system; I think everybody sort of shares, everybody participates pretty much equally in that.  Obviously if you have something that’s really valuable, and particularly if you have something that is not hybrid, something that’s just open pollinated, and it can be just taken and grown again directly, you don’t want to give it away.  You spent 10 years perfecting it, you don’t want another company just to start producing it and undercut you on price or something like that. 


Has that been a lot easier now that you have those genetic markers to be able to…


They help.  Yeah, they help with patenting and things like that because you can really definitively prove things a lot easier.  In the old days it was very visual.  Especially with PVPs.  And the PVPs actually were more common in the old days when there was open-pollinated tomatoes. 

Actually, a guy that’s from Davis originally that ended up coming here to Petoseed, another interesting person in tomato, Jack Hanna, he basically revolutionized the processing tomato industry.  He developed the mechanical harvester.  Imagine, they used to be picked by hand!  Vine-ripe, people with buckets, it was really intense!  And so he not only came up with the idea for the harvester, but the tomato to go with that.  Designing the tomato genetically to make itself more amenable to a machine harvest.  Uniform maturity, being able to shake off the vine really easy, and everything else.  So that was very cool!  He was a professor there {at UC-Davis} and then he came to Petoseed for the end of his career.  He was a great guy.  It was fortunate for me to meet this older generation of breeders; some of them are still around, I still go to lunch with one of the guys in town that’s in his 80’s.  They imparted to me some important sort of things.  One of the things I remember really well from Jack was he would say, “Don’t give them what they want, give them what they need.”  What he meant by that was, people are asking for something in the present, but the job for you as a breeder is to look ahead in the future.  “Well that’s fine, you think you want that now, but you’re going to need this!” You know?  “You’re going to need this in 10 years.”


That’s why I was asking if you were doing hydroponics, because if you see things going that way, or the industry going that way but you’re growing things out here…

We are testing, and we have some breeders that are selecting.  One of our breeders in Holland, he’s doing a selection under a hydroponic system.  We all work together, and we track the adaptation.  Like I said, a tomato is very sensitive to its environment and obviously if you’re in a hydroponic greenhouse versus an open field it’s a very different situation.  You need different stuff that’s adapted for that.

Well, let me show you some of the…this is sort of the kind of nuts and bolts kind of varieties, you know, big red tomatoes.   I do work with a lot of specialty tomatoes, that’s the fun part of what I do, and they’re becoming very important, not only in Holland, but in NAFTA here as well.  People want that variety…heirloom tomatoes themselves started showing up in the grocery stores but it’s very seasonal, obviously, and they’re very difficult to grow; they’re really hard to ship.  They crack, they’re soft, so it becomes a very seasonal thing. 

I’ll show you some of the stuff I’m working with.  I’ve been breeding with these heirlooms, improving them but staying very true to the different colors, the flavors, and things.  {We walk to a new row of tomatoes and he takes us towards a series of small, yellow tomatoes.}  And there’s a lot of skeptics, and I expected that.  There’s a lot of stuff in the press on the topic and it’s a very emotional topic for people.  I’m not surprised about that because people know that there’s a heritage related to that, these seeds have been passed down…and all the seeds have been passed down.  

I started working with these because I recognized that they were so unique, the colors and flavors.  I’m just trying to improve upon a good thing basically, and so…let’s look at this one in particular {reaches under some leaves and pulls forward a tomato}.  There are different heirloom names for this type of tomato, which is a bicolor tomato.  I’ve seen Rainbow, Georgia Streak, and things like that.  But this is basically a bicolor tomato, you’ve got an orange with some red…I want to get one that has a really good red coloring at the blossom end {he is looking under leaves and through vines on a plant} because…we actually released this tomato to the home garden industry.

If you think about it historically, a lot of the garden tomatoes, you know, Big Boy and Early Girl and all those favorites, they’re all from our legacy company.  Almost all of them, Petoseed.  And I still grow them to compare flavor and things like that.  We still support heavily the home garden industry.  I think people maybe have a misconception that we’re all about high-end commercial, but we support all levels.

{Finds a tomato he likes and pulls it from the vine.  He gets his pocketknife out again.}  This one, we called it Tie-Dye because when I was cutting into these fruits that’s what it reminded me of…this one is not overripe, so…this one has really kind of a mild…do you like tomatoes?  Because we’re going to start eating a bunch now…


Yeah!  We’ve eaten a lot of tomatoes since we started this trip!

Okay good!  {Hands us pieces of Tie-Dye tomato} Just a mildly sweet flavor…in the case of this, this did derive from the heirloom Rainbow…in this case I thought I’m gonna remain just as true as I can to the original flavor, which I thought of as mildly sweet.  The reason it’s so mild is that…acidity is normally a big component of tomato flavor, what gives you the tanginess.  And then there’s sugars which give you sweetness.  So with this particular variety, it’s not that it was super sweet, but it is very low acid.  So you’re just tasting that midlevel of sugar, very nice, very pleasing flavor.  My kids like this one a lot.   And I think they like the colors too, the orange and the red. 

I’m working on some stuff of this type that will be able to be grown even by the hydroponic guys.  So for them I need a little more disease resistance.  They need things like tomato mosaic virus resistance for the greenhouse. {Cuts open another one} Everyone is different, right?  Every one has a different pattern. 

So the big contrast of this improved version over the original is that the original literally set like two or three fruits per plant.  Really poor.  And it was mainly because of the flower morphology on the original one.  The flowers were really what we call faciated, so instead of having a normal-looking modern tomato flower where you have this anther cone {finds a flower on the plant and starts prying it apart with his knife and fingers} and right inside there…the female portion, that’s going to be the fruit there, that’s the ovule…a tomato self-pollinates, so you’ve got the pollen from the inside falling up here on this part, which is called the stigma…this is the Botany 101 part of the tour here…they fall on the top there, they germinate, they go down that style, that tube, and they fertilize the seeds down in there.  The tomato begins to expand and grow and mature…so in that particular heirloom that cone wasn’t nice and smooth like that.  There were a lot of anthers and they were kind of garbled together, so it basically just didn’t self-pollinate very well physically, and the fruit wouldn’t set.   {Finds another with original traits}  Actually there are few fruits {shows us a very rough, deformed tomato}…that one’s going back to the heirloom!  So you can tell that I got it in here…a lot of them are really smooth…


That’s funny, I feel like in a lot of farmers’ markets where people are growing on a small scale, that’s almost preferred {the lumpy, deformed tomato}.

It is preferred because people have seen this and they have tasted it and they’re making the association, “hey, these are a lot better than the commercial stuff that I buy.”  But there’s no reason…I mean this off the same plant!   So you can also have a very smooth one.  It’s got the same characteristics, but it’s going to ship a lot better, it’s firmer, we’re going to be able to have it in the stores a lot longer.   Ultimately we like to have this stuff available 12 months rather than just one month out of the year because people like them, they’re willing to pay more money for them because they appreciate the quality there.  Even gourmet chefs like stuff like this.  Nice color, lends itself to interesting dishes that they might make.  And different flavors are good for them.

So let me…I’ll sort of take you on a tour through flavor here.  I’m sort of going to go up in sweetness. {We begin walking down the row of plants}  I’ll end up with something that’s really really really sweet.


Great!

And we’d love to hear more of your story and how you got involved with food and growing, and why. 

Sure, I mean, even though I grew up in suburban Detroit, I’ve been a vegetable gardener from a very young age.  I developed a love of that.  As far as I can remember back, one of my uncles was a gardener…and I remember eating peas from behind his garage when I was really little, maybe five or six.  And we grew up on the poor side.  My mother raised 4 kids and we had canned peas.  That was the cheapest thing.  So I though, I don’t like peas…they taste pasty, yuck.  And I ate those things; it was like magic to me.  I was like, “Wow!  How can that be?!”  Even as a little kid I’m thinking, “these are like candy!  What happened?  How could things be so bad in that can?”  And it just kind of stayed with me. 

Not too many years after that, I think I was eight or nine, I started a plot in my backyard and I just has this interest in it…to be able to see it growing…how does it grow?  Potatoes, you realize, “oh, they come from the ground!”  A lot of kids don’t know!  Occasionally I’ll give a guest lecture at one of my kids’ schools and they think… “Where do potatoes come from?”  “Oh, you pick them from a tree, right?”  They have no idea!

So I knew I wanted to do something with this.  I wasn’t sure, of course, then, I didn’t know I wanted to be a plant breeder. 

I did my bachelor’s degree at Michigan State.  It was kind of general horticulture.  I was out of school for a few years, and when I came back to it I did get real focused because when I went to graduate school I had to really think about, “what do I really like about all this?”  And I really like genetics.   That kind of, to me, explains everything about how all living things are.   So I went to Cornell; I have a master’s and a Ph.D. from Cornell, and my Ph.D. is in plant breeding.   Even though I was doing a different crop…I was doing the Brassicas, I started with broccoli, did a Ph.D. on canola…and I ended up doing vegetables.

But vegetables are very cool.  It’s going back to what I loved initially.  It’s just a very, very cool job.  I think a lot of people are surprised to hear that there even is such a thing, that somebody is a plant breeder, or specifically a tomato breeder.  I love it because obviously I’m doing something that I was really interested in as a kid, watching the bees pollinate the cucumbers and stuff.   And having done it for 17 years, these things are kind of like my plant children if you will {laughs}, I mean, I’ve watched generation after generation after generation, and I sort of guide it in various ways for different areas of the world. 

It’s a very cool thing, very satisfying to me on both ends of the spectrum; I stood in June in a big field in Australia and it was all my variety, gave me really a nice feeling too.  But I also get a nice feeling…for example, this tomato I’m going to show you here, I developed the first seedless tomato.  A hundred percent seedless tomato, and they’re really, really, really good also, you’re gonna taste this great…what you think of as like the best kind of tomato flavor…{takes us to the next plants and starts looking for another tomato to feed us}

I read a really gratifying thing in the blogs on this.  We just introduced this I think last year, and there was a woman that had written in that couldn’t eat tomatoes for the last 30 years.  She has diverticulitis where you can’t eat even a poppy seed because it might get caught {in your intestines}, and she was ecstatic to be able to eat tomatoes again.  She would grow them and give them away, she loved growing them and she was able to eat them again!  That might have even touched me more than the Australia experience.  I impacted somebody’s life on a personal level there.  And also I took a lot of time on the breeding…I really wanted to make this the best possible tasting tomato.  So I took all those little pieces, like I mentioned, about our past here, I got all the genetic pieces of great flavor and put it into this thing. 

{We continue talking a bit about the seedless tomato and diverticulitis/diverticulosis.}

Somebody told me that 50 years or older means heirloom…this has got a lot of heirloom in it.


That’s a really vague definition, isn’t it?

It is very vague.  I like the 50-year thing because it’s a very concrete thing but basically something older that’s been handed down. 

Isn’t that amazing?  {We are tasting a ripe tomato}  So now you can taste the acids too, but this is kind of high-sugar, high-acid.   The typical old-time flavor, “oh my grandpa had tomatoes like that!”  Check out the juice on that thing.   See, we just do not see that anymore in modern varieties.  And I really had to delve into the past to grab stuff like that. 


There’s ways to taste chocolate and wine, is there a “way” to taste a tomato?

{laughs}  Well sure, and I’m kind of taking you through this thing in terms if not just the change in profile but increasing sugars.  Probably the last thing we’ll taste is this orange grape tomato I have that’s just candy.  It’s amazingly, amazingly sweet.  I hope they’re not overripe.  It has kind of the low acids like the first one I showed you, but double the sugar.  

So I’m real excited about this and I’m developing commercial ones; we hope to be able to give it to all levels from home garden on up to commercial.  We have to maintain this great flavor.   ‘Cause if people don’t have diverticulosis, they’re going to think, “Well, what do I care about a seedless tomato?”  So I want to have the flavor be the hook to combine with the novelty.  Obviously those people that have the problem, they’re going to say, “forget it, I can eat tomatoes again, that’s great!”

Yeah, that’s a unique invention that we have.  Obviously I have that patented; that was a very unique process.   Some of the competitors tried to do it in a different way and they weren’t successful. 

I will tell another interesting historical part of it.  I have to give credit to this guy; another guy that’s passed on.  His name was Dr. William Frazier, we called him Tex Frazier and he was from Oregon State University up in Corvallis.  I got a chance to meet him before he died, and I knew he was working on these parthenocarpic tomatoes.  My predecessors told me, “go visit Tex!  We think he’s got a garden at his house.”  He’s like retired, but he’s got a garden.  And sure enough, this guy had like a hilltop garden in Corvallis.  And having been a professor he was very meticulous, he had everything labeled and stuff like that.  And the juiciness…I cut one of these things and my shoes got all wet.  I was like “woah!  What is that?!”  It was a really great thing to tap into the stiff he had, because he had a lot of the pieces of the great flavor that are here as well.  Didn’t have much disease resistance left ‘cause he was just selecting for the seedlessness and the flavor.  It really made a great impression on him that I was going to be able to commercialize this.  He couldn’t quite understand how I was going to do it.  Even when he passed on, his daughter called me and said, “hey, he’s got a bunch of seeds in the basement, you want to come and get this?”  And I said, “I can’t do that, I don’t feel right about that.”  But this guy was so passionate evidently that they buried him with some tomato plants and tools and stuff.

It was so great to have met him in his house and this handoff of some important seeds that I was able to put into production.   I hope I can name one after him.   Big Tex or something like that!  I want to honor him because he has a hand in this as well, having worked kind of just for fun on it.  He really was just passionate after he had retired.  So a lot of this stuff is connections, you know, with people.  And that’s important in plant breeding.  I talk about Jack Hanna, Charlie Rick, these are all influential people in the tomato world. 

That’s kind of what we do.  Like predecessors did a long time ago, the whole thing with the heirloom tomatoes, they were kept and they were passed on.  It’s important I think to keep doing that.  That’s what we’re all about too, preserving these things, preserving the good things from the past.  It’s very important, not just for home gardens but to take it to commercial.

So let’s look at a few of the other heirloom traits, and then I’ll have you taste this grape tomato.  My kids, it’s their absolute favorite; I hardly even pick them because they’re gone so fast!  I spend all this time to pick them, I put them in a bowl and they’re just “whoosh!”…eat them like they’re candy. 


You can’t bring them out here, put a badge on them and have them do it?

I do sometimes bring them out on the weekends. 


What happens to most of the fruit?  Does it just get churned up and back into the soil?

Yeah, it would be nice if we could just donate to a food bank or something like that, but it becomes very tough to pull that off.  And this ground does need organic matter, so I think that’s good that we disk in the watermelons and stuff like that, because we’re putting some organic matter back.  If you don’t do that and you’re just disking and soil is flying…you really need to maintain some organic matter, so I actually think it’s good that we do that. 


Do you have issues with…I mean, you’re obviously returning a lot of ripe fruit to the ground…issues with things sprouting?

A lot of the cherries will tend to do that; we call them volunteers when they come up the next year.


It seems like it’d be very complex since you’re doing specific research here.

It’s not that bad, it doesn’t come up as much as you would think.  Actually the squash do.  I followed squash one year {in a rotation} and there were squash plants everywhere.  We don’t spray them; we have crews that come out here with hoes and they just take them out meticulously.  They just go out and start chopping with a hoe.  The old fashioned way.  But for some reason the cherries will really do that {chuckles}.  I don’t know why they want to come back more than the others.  They’re a little step closer to wild tomatoes; they really are, literally, cherry tomatoes.  Maybe that’s why, I don’t know, just well adapted to survive almost on their own.

{We are still walking towards his yellow grape tomatoes.}


So did you ever have a point where you were working on farms or have you always been kind of the science and breeding side of things? 

Yeah, no, I never worked on the farm.  I actually had a landscape installation business before I went back to graduate school.


Did you slip tomatoes into people’s aesthetic environments?

{laughs} It was just installing landscapes; I actually had lived down in Florida in the 80’s and was trying to figure out what to do with this general horticulture degree.  And I was really taken by all the tropical flora, the palm trees and things like that.  I got tired of that, of course, I needed an intellectual challenge and I went back to school.  That was my diversion out. 

{We arrive at another tomato plant of his choice}

This is just another very good-tasting cherry that has a high level of lycopene; you hear a lot about lycopene, it’s good for you.   Nice and sweet, good flavor.  And the lycopene, this is an example of another feature we have at the station here, we have a biochemist with a whole crew and we have an analytical lab.  And so one of the things that I’ll do, I’ll have my assistant harvest these various things, we send the fruits into the lab, they grind them up, and they analyze all these things for me so I have an actual number.  What is the brix, the sugar?  What is the titrateable acidity, the tanginess?  What’s the lycopene in the red ones?  We have hard figures kind of validating what my tongue, my palette tells me.  It’s nice to have hard numbers on stuff.  Something like lycopene, there are a lot of claims in the stores, some of them aren’t valid.  Might really not be.  But they’re using it for marketing.  We want to have it really be the case. 


One thing that has come up in a couple of conversations is the thought that vegetables in the stores today compered to like 50 years ago are generally less nutritious.  Do you think that that’s valid?

No, definitely not.  In fact, a lot of the stuff I’m showing you, that orange grape tomato, the sweet one that we’re gonna taste at the end, it has a lot of really great nutritional aspects as well.  We’ve got a whole ‘nother group that works on that, looking at enhanced nutrition.  One thing is mining what we have already, because we haven’t looked, even looking for sources of new nutrition.  Absolutely not.  We’re really going the other way, we’re going out of our way to try to deliver enhanced nutrition whether it’s…well, like we have a new broccoli out with higher levels of the cancer-fighting glucosinolates I think it is.  

So no, our company in particular is really focused on that, to deliver not just the enhanced taste but nutrition as well.  That’s really not valid I don’t think anymore.  There might have been a point where it was but definitely not now.  We’re really keyed in on the consumer.  We’re keyed in on the end of the line.  We think that’s ultimately the successful way.  We want everybody to win in the chain, but we want to deliver a great product. 

Since I’m passionate about it…I’m growing whole rows of those things I’m showing you because I’m taking them home and eating them.  I want to deliver that to the consumers too so they have not only just a great tasting experience or colorful salads or something but…good for you too.


On a personal level what are the biggest issues you’ve had to deal with in working with food and breeding?

I don’t know, I guess I don’t get affected on that level because my job, like I said, it kind of remains the same.  If anything, it’s been better as I go forward because…this kind of stuff that I’m showing you here, it used to be considered like a fringe thing.  Now it’s a valid category with the retailer so they’re paying attention to it. 

I can remember my original boss way in the past telling me, “don’t spend too much time on that Saturday Morning Project!” as he would call it.  I’m like, yeah, yeah yeah, you’ll see.  This stuff is gonna be sought after, so I stuck with it.  So I think it’s just been getting more interesting actually. 

So this is another heirloom {we taste another tomato down the line on a wilted plant}.  You’ve probably seen this one before with the longitudinal stripes; I’ve also got it in a roma type.  That’s a real heritable natural mutation, those stripes.  This is an example of something that came out really great but I’m not satisfied with the flavor of that one.  Even though the sales guys were like raring to go, I said, “Taste it.”  They’re like, “eh, maybe it needs some salad dressing.”  I said, “no!  Not acceptable! It has to be great.”  It’s great that it looks great.  Everything else is great; the yield, everything, but I want it to taste really great so I have to go back to the genetic drawing board to improve that flavor, but I have to put it back in there because it was lost along the way. 


About how long does it take usually to create a tomato that you’re looking for?

That’s a really good question because…I can answer that in terms of the history.  Before we had, especially, the molecular marker tool…and I was talking about a little piece of leaf.  Literally my assistant will go through, I direct her, and it’s a very small piece of leaf that they need in the lab, I mean it might only be just a couple millimeters or so.  That’s enough.  They can extract the DNA on that and they can tell me what’s happening with all the relevant genes in there, the disease resistant genes, there’s some quality type things that we have markers for like the high lycopene…it’s great, I mean we have a great resource with tomato.

That has given me a lot of speed.  I still have to select, I still have to do the classic job; as a plant breeder I’m selecting for how well does it set, is the fruit smooth, all these quality things that the market seems to want.  And then we see what happens in the lab, what’s happening with the genes.   But because I can do that without having to take, like with the disease resistances, you don’t have to wait, you don’t have to plant the seeds again, grow them out, apply the pathogen, see which lives; that takes a lot more time.

So the typical development time, it used to be a lot longer, on the order of like 5-10 years.  The 10 years would be if you were starting from a wild cross and going all the way.  Five years maybe if it was just typical development of a new hybrid.  So we cut that 5-10 down to like 2-5.  It’s cut in half basically.  It’s very fast now, and that’s exciting because that just means I can do more.  I’m still doing actual classical breeding, but I’m just doing it faster. 


That’s why my predecessor said, “you’ve got it made.”  He realized that.  And he was right.  We have this great tool, it’s an analytical tool, it’s like…I remember one of my early plant-breeding professors, this was kind of like pre-molecular biology when I was at Michigan State.  I remember him saying, “well you can’t go down a row…it’s not like you have X-ray eyes or glasses and you can see into what’s going on.”  And I kind of think about it now, it’s almost like we got X-ray eyes!  We can take the thing to the lab and find out what’s going on. 


In your time doing this have you been active in figuring out what some of these genes do, or is that all coming out of the universities, that genetic analysis?

Some knowledge comes out of the universities; a lot of it is discovered by us.  For example, on the seedless tomato I went into the literature and there was very very little known.  In fact there were misconceptions about it because of the limited amount of work.  The researchers that had worked with it said things like, “ah, well, you’re stuck with small size”, this and that and dada dada da…and it’s not true at all if you’re able to work on it all the time like me instead of just busy teaching classes and busy writing papers.  You can’t put a full concerted effort like a commercial breeder can do. 

We make new discoveries on things, which I did.  That gene is day-length sensitive; nothing in the literature said anything about that.  I discovered it by working with it, that the longer days were promoting the seedlessness.  It just wasn’t in there.  Nobody had figured it out.   I figured it out just by observation. 

It’s nice that we are able to keep on discovering things too, that’s the fun of it.  You never know everything; you have to keep an open mind.  That’s important, I think, as a scientist, to keep an open mind.   Because if we didn’t we’d still think the world was flat and if you went you went off the edge, you went off the edge of the turtle’s back! {laughs} We never know everything; we’re always discovering new things. 

So here’s the orange grape tomato I was telling you about. {We arrive at the tomatoes that he is pictured with}

Here you go. 


Thank you.

Real sweet.  They’re just sugary, I mean it’s…


Wow!

Isn’t that amazing?


Yeah!

So you have that low acidity like that other one, but you got brix…instead of being like 5 or 6 it’s like 11, 12.  Double the level of sugar.  And a lot of people that taste this have never tasted anything like that in a tomato.  I’ve heard comments like, “This isn’t a tomato!  This is not a tomato!”  And I say, “Yeah, that’s a tomato!” 

Because we understand the parts of the flavor now so well, the interplay between the sugars and the acids, that’s like the main interplay in your mouth…but there’s also what we call volatiles.  You know if you pick a leaf and smell it, it’s got that classic tomato smell…it’s a specific group of chemicals that give that…the volatiles even play a role as you’re eating something.  You know, if you close your nose, or when you’re sick and you can’t taste anything…that’s a part of your taste, is what you’re perceiving through your nose as well.  We have a lot of receptors there.  So we’re interested in that side too, what are the good volatiles?  There are bad volatiles too; there are volatiles that make for a nasty overall taste sensation there.

It’s kind of like we’re studying the things in detail to try to deliver the ultimate products.  Like I said, on this one…this one’s really got it all!  I’m excited this one’s going commercial because, number one, my kids love it…and that’s what I’m thinking about with the marketing, I’m envisioning like snack packs of these things.  And also the fact that this tomato…we just got so lucky with this thing!  There’s high antioxidants in here, there’s other nutritional benefits…

As we started testing this thing…the idea came…I saw grape tomatoes becoming popular and I had this orange in a cherry, which I always really liked for flavor, but I never envisioned that the background from that orange cherry also had the high antioxidants.  We started discovering that testing in the lab.  In fact that one was very cool because the biochemist came to me and…he had looked at a wide range of tomatoes for antioxidants and you end up with what’s called a scatter plot…the predecessor, the orange cherry, was what we called an outlier, it was like way off the chart.  The first thing we think of is, “that’s a mistake.”  He told me, “ I gotta re-run this one because we must have screwed up.”  He ran it again; it’s way up there!  And he said, “Ah, that’s a real outlier!  This thing really has high antioxidants!  What’s the history of that thing?”  Unfortunately I didn’t know.  Some stuff you just inherit from your predecessors.  It would be nice to know on all my stuff all the parentage all the way back.

And that’s one of the things I hope is good about what we’re doing now, is we know things so well that in a hundred years they will know everything from our time.  It’ll all be really well documented.  A lot of things from our past are sort of word of mouth or people might have just made their own name for something.


I was going to ask how much of your development has been just luck.  Like that, going for something and then it also happens to…

Well, that one was really targeted.  Obviously I went after it with specific knowledge of flavor and the color and everything like that, but yeah, to find, in this case, the nutritional benefit that was fortunate.  Now we’re really actively looking though, in a real targeted way.  Instead of relying on luck, we’re making a concerted effort to mine what we have and find out…like I said, we have a whole group of them.  And that’s really cool, because again, the focus in the end and right up front for us now is the consumer, to deliver not just better tomatoes but everything.  Veggies.  We want to see people eating more veggies.  Because people don’t eat enough; you’ve heard of the 5-a-day thing, and I’m sure most people don’t eat five a day.  It’d be great to have everybody eating more vegetables because everybody would be a whole lot healthier. 


What would be some ideal changes you’d like to see in the ag and food system?

Well, one of the changes that we are starting to see, and I’ll tie this again back into the story of the molecular markers…the bulk of that for what we do here in tomatoes is for disease resistance.  So if you think about that, just from the farming, from the ag perspective, the more naturally resistant I can make a tomato, the less the farmer has to spray.  I’ll give you an example.  Actually, let’s go look at it.  {We walk again to another row}

One of the things that’s been happening the last couple years on the east coast in particular is a disease called Late Blight.    That’s what caused the famous Irish Potato Famine in the 1800’s.  Tomatoes get infected by the same pathogen, it’s called Phytophthora infestans.  And I’ve actually had this tomato for quite awhile. 

Last year in particular there was a big outbreak of late blight on the east coast, so a lot of tomatoes were lost.  That becomes like a serious spray program!  Pretty powerful fungicides to control it.  So if we can provide something that’s resistant genetically, the grower doesn’t have to pay for the spray and the consumers get something that’s unsprayed.  So it works into the organic movement as well.

We have a lot of visitors the first couple of weeks of August here.  People come from all over.  Some guys came from back east and we were talking about that.  I said, “Well what about this?” I had heard about some variety that was out there and they were like, “Eh, that little piece of cardboard?!” Evidentially it was like some small thing and doesn’t taste good.  So I’m like, “okay, we have to put this one in, because this thing has a nice flavor…”  I made it awhile back, like in ’97.  I made it quite a while ago.  One of the first things I worked on when I started was the late blight resistance.

And I did go into the Charlie Rick collection.  I started with a wild tomato for that, so I did it the old fashioned way, I made the cross to the wild accession, started breeding, came up with a cherry at first but had to keep making it larger for this type…


And is that done in a closed environment where you can introduce the blight to it?

Well what we did in the beginning – we didn’t have the molecular markers yet when I started yet – so yes, we used to actually plant flats of each segregating generation, spray the inoculant on them, and the susceptible ones die, the resistant ones live, and you save those…and you wait until all of them live, so now you know you have the gene fixed. 

But now we have the molecular marker, and it’s close to where the gene is, so basically when you see that you have that marker there, that area of the DNA from the wild parent, I can work quicker. 

The advantage is multi-fold of a naturally resistant variety. It’s great to not have to spray if you don’t have to.  I mean, the organic people should love what we’re doing because the more resistant we can make it, the less they have to spray.  I know when I was up in Cornell I had a student job reviewing organic farms up there.  And I was kind of shocked at some of the things that they were allowing to spray, which they considered organic, were actually quite toxic.  Like nicotine sulfate, if I recall, that’s approved.  Very very toxic stuff.  So it’s one thing to be organic…you can have an organic compound that can be toxic, you have to be really smart about it. 

It’s like a natural evolution of the food, with the change in the environment and everything.  We’re sort of stewards of that as the plant breeder.  We’re guiding things through that will work and be the least invasive environmentally.  Some of the things that I’m thinking about for way out there are…you know, we’re going through a lot of climate change and things…it got me thinking way out. 

You know, it got me thinking about drought tolerance, salt tolerance…so I’m looking at those wild accessions, because you know, Charlie {Rick} did collect those all over the place, and I really need to research this one, but I really need to work with that group over there in Davis and see if he collected anything from a really dry plain that survived…maybe it’ll have some natural drought tolerance genes there.


Getting back to the question…now I’m thinking of something that you asked me, what would I like to see…I would like to see more land trusts and things like that, preserving the land.  I don’t want to see ever-shrinking farmland, ‘cause there’s probably only so far we can go with this mega-production on a small piece.  I would like to see more land trusts and things where good prime agricultural land is maintained for that, or even just wild wetlands and things like that.  But for farming, not developing really good farmland…putting buildings on top of prime agricultural land, that doesn’t make sense to me!  That’s what I would like to see.  That’s probably another political question, but I think for the good of the planet and the populations in the future, we better think about stuff like that, maintaining good farmland. 

And then being good stewards of that land you have. 


You know, I almost hate to bring it up, but there’s so much negative media around large-scale ag right now…

Absolutely.


…and also around this company.

Yes.


And I think a lot of it comes from…you know, something like breeding, your average person doesn’t understand what a hybrid is.  It sounds like a very scary thing, even though it’s a very traditional thing…

Oh there’s a complete misconception.  In fact, the seedless tomato, which I mentioned was traditional breeding from my work the last 17 years…when people found out that it was from Monsanto, they instantly assumed that it was GMO.  It’s like, here’s something new, it must be GMO, and I’m reading the blogs and I’m thinking, “My gosh!  People have no clue.”  Some people were saying, “Yeah, Monsanto’s making everything sterile so they can control the food supply…” And it’s amazing.  So yeah, misinformation travels fast.  You can try what you can to set the record straight, I mean every time I read one of those I want to jump in a correct them, but at some point I can’t stay up all night doing this!

But it makes me sad that people understand so little and that they assume the worst, for sure.  I mean it’s far from the case.  Certainly, like with what we’re doing, it’s actually…to bring up something again, the disease resistance…we’re playing into the success for organic producers with stuff like that, so…yeah, I wish people understood better.  I know the company in particular here suffers a black eye from years and years past, but they’ve really become a different company.  Really a seed and trait company now more than a chemical company, which it used to be. 

But you’re right, consumer education is the key.  Education of the public is key.  And they really don’t understand even the basics.   We’re pretty confident that over the long haul you know, I keep doing what I’m doing here…eventually these products will speak for themselves.  I think it’ll take awhile, but over the long haul the work will kind of speak for itself if you’re doing something good. 


It sounds like you get both ends of that spectrum too.  You get peoples’ appreciation when they can eat a seedless tomato, but you also get their skepticism. 

Yeah, and then the skeptics think it’s a GMO.  And that just will happen.  And I understand that reaction.  People feel like, along like lines of I think what you’re alluding to…at some level, people feel sort of helpless about, “how is my food being produced anymore?  What say do I have over what’s in it or how it was made?”  I understand that people feel powerless and they hear about more and more E.coli and things like that…that’s mainly just scale.  Like with the E.coli thing that people thought was tomatoes last year…that was actually hot peppers!  The tomato got blamed.  It really hurt the tomato growers.  When they actually traced it, it was a contamination near the border, of a salsa maker.  And it came from some bad peppers or something, but…

That’s the thing, misinformation travels fast.  So we just have to stay with it and I think over time our products and what we’re aiming at will ultimately be seen.  There’s always going to be the critics.  They’re really strong, you’re right, there’s a ton of negative media. 

The things with the heirloom hybrids, you know, I’m amazed.  I sit back and read and I see the majority are siding on the heirlooms, as purists, because there’s an emotional attachment, and they probably feel that a breeder like me is out to ruin them, but they don’t understand that I’m not.  I’m working with them because I love them too!  And I just want to make something that can be more available, that the grower can grow easier, the shipper can ship…so they always assume the worst, but we’re really not all about that.


Where do you think all that negative media came from?  It seems unfortunate to me because so much of it is very pop culture; so few people have farm backgrounds so of course it’s what they read…but then anything that’s pro-large scale, or companies, anything that’s not small farm comes across as propaganda. 

Exactly.  Yeah, I don’t know.  I don’t know where it comes from; I mean I don’t think you saw this kind of thing years ago at all.  I don’t think my parents did.


The media conflict you mean?

That kind of media…slamming, if you will.  There wasn’t that.  I mean, large companies weren’t the evil bad guys always.  So I don’t know where that comes from; maybe it’s just like an insecurity, like people feel like they’re losing control over something that’s very important, the food you eat.  It’s a very personal thing.  It’s a very emotional thing.  Because it is emotional, if you don’t have the knowledge to go with your emotion, you’re going to run the wrong way with it and start casting a lot of things that are not true.  And of course with the media now, with the Internet, it just spreads and multiplies fast.  So there’s not much we can do about that!  Except, like I said, stay true to our message, stay true to what we do, and let it be shown, let your good works be shown over the years.

I really think that’s the only way that we’re going to dissuade people.  Eventually they’ll see that…at least what I’m doing here, it’s an age-old art and science, plant breeding.  It goes back, since people started gathering food and selecting things.  It’s not any kind of world domination of food supply issue, it’s just the love of the art of plant breeding and delivering new and better foods.


I’m sure you get to a point where you have to just roll your eyes and take a deep breath.

Yeah, I don’t react to it because I know what I’m doing, basically, hasn’t changed.  I’m still doing the same thing.  Using some new scientific tools, yes, but that’s just a good thing, allowing me to work faster.

But people…what they don’t know…I mean, just “molecular markers”, just that word, it’ll conjure up negativity in people that don’t know what it is.  They don’t realize, I’m just like, looking with those X-ray eyes, you know.  Hasn’t changed anything about the plant or the food, it’s just a tool.  And that’s why we need to educate people.  It’ s a hard thing to educate them on. 

And in fact, when people were assuming that the seedless tomato was GMO, George Ball actually asked me to write a succinct paragraph to explain that it was traditional breeding.  It was very hard for me to write because he wanted me to write it so that anybody could understand it.  And for me to convert these scientific terms to a really layman understanding…it was very difficult.  I kept running it by my wife, because she’s also a journalist, and she didn’t understand how I did this.  I kept giving it, “Do you understand it yet?” “No, what’s this word?” “Introgression!” “People don’t know what introgression means!” {laughs}

People will assume, on something new, the worst.  It’s too bad, but I think it is because it’s such a personal thing, you know, the food you eat.  Especially something like vegetables, it’s raw, right?  It’s not something like corn and soy, which really gets processed into so many products it’s kind of removed from the original. 

{We begin walking back to his sweet grape tomatoes to take a photograph, chatting about when it will be available}