What's the Difference Between Open Pollinated and (F1) Hybrid Seeds?

Since the advent of F1 Hybrid seeds in the early 20th century much f the work to maintain the open pollinated varieties that had been what fed humanity for millennia has languished. This is, in my view, because greed and profiteering found a way to create monopolies to maximize profit with proprietary hybrids. The new wave of Small scale, farm based seed companies are thankfully putting in the hard work to change this paradigm by curating and stewarding the heirlooms of tomorrow with on farm plant breeding and elevating seed work to the craft that it is.
Don shares a fairly in depth analysis into a comparison between Open Pollinated (OP) and (F1)hybrids, including exploring the ethically questionable laboratory breeding techniques used in many modern hybrids that you may find in the bigger seed catalogs or at your local farmers markets. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hi there. I recently created a real or a short, whatever you call them, comparing hybrid pepper seed to open pollinated pepper seed because we're doing a trial here on our farm this year of sweet peppers evaluating resistance to sun scald, which has become a problem for many growers. And I realized in the comment thread that that short format of just two minutes discussing that really wasn't enough time to flesh out the nuances of comparing open pollinated vegetable seed to hybrid vegetable seed more broadly. And this is something I've covered in my Seed Academy on Farm Seed Saving course many times, but I realize I didn't have a YouTube version of it. So I wanted to take some time to dive into what are the differences between these. Here at Cisq Seeds, we exclusively grow open pollinated seeds. So everything that we offer and grow, you can save seed from. And I think in general there's a lot of confusion about this because the hybridization techniques used for different uh species categories of vegetables and flowers can vary slightly. But in general, we'll kind of do a little bit of a history lesson here, is the first hybrid variety ever introduced into the US. I'm gonna look at my notes here, 1916, the Funk Brothers Seed Company had a variety of sweet corn called tribred corn. And that was the first hybrid variety introduced. And the the one that really started to make waves was Henry Wallace in 1924 with his copper cross corn. And then by the 1960s, uh hybrid corn company, which later became Pioneer Hybrid, which is a subsidiary of Monsanto and a subsidiary of Bear, therefore, has resulted in the corn belt of that area of Kansas, Nebraska, and so on being by 1960 was predominantly hybrid corn for field corn, maize, and sweet corn, and nowadays biofuel and ethanol and all that craziness, corn, corn syrup, high fruit soap, corn syrup, and all that. But I think an important uh distinction with hybrids is calling them F1 hybrids, and that's what you'll typically see on a seed packet when you look on there. If a variety is hybrid, they want to let you know because there is a common conception that hybrid is better. Uh versus an open pollinated variety, you have a population you're working with. So all those plants in a population, let's say I'm growing corn seed or onion seed or carrot seed, you want to be saving seed from a minimum population in order to avoid inbreeding depression. And I'll just write that up here. It doesn't really go on either. Well, I'll I'll explain it later. Um so inbreeding depression is when you're saving seed from too few individuals of a population, and you are you're not capturing the full genetic breadth. And that's one thing that open pollinated varieties, if well maintained by the seed steward, that they will keep all that in there. And so we've heard the terms nowadays in pop science, uh, particularly as proliferated by Andrew Huberman and his famous podcast, of epigenetics, but also junk DNA. And basically that's you know, we only understand what a portion of the you know the the DNA of a and the genetic diversity within a species, what it codes for. And so why you want to maintain a larger population, like 200 onions minimum, for instance, or beets or carrots, or any of the cross-pollinated crops, is particularly important in the cross-pollinating crops because they've evolved over time to have all that mixing of genetics. And so, let's say there's 20,000 genes in a species on average in the plants. We only know what a certain amount of them do, but some aren't activated unless they encounter a stress that's back in their ancestral uh lineage of having to go through a certain uh disease or weather event or insect attack or a combination thereof or hail storm, you know, these kind of things. And then the ones that have that long-term stability and resilience, uh, the individuals in that population will survive and reproduce, and therefore we want to make sure we have all that in there. As gardeners and farmers, we're usually optimizing conditions, we're trellising plants, we're protecting them from pests, we're providing nutrition, um, maybe even starting them indoors and transplanting out. So sometimes we don't need all that genetic breath because it's not like we're you know peasant farmers from a thousand years ago, where it was all direct seed and just relying on the rain and then no irrigation and all that kind of stuff. I think an important consideration to back up a second is for the vast majority of the history of agriculture, let's just say 10,000 years to use a ballpark number, 99.9% of that time, all the seeds planted and grown were open-pollinated. And up until I would say, really, the 30s and 40s, it was really post-World War II when hybrid uh began to be more uh prevalent. But open-pollinated seeds and small-scale, simple, low-input agriculture is what fed all of humanity. And Dr. Miguel Altiria, uh UC Berkeley's an entomologist, has made the point that still to this day, 60% of the food consumed on the planet is still grown by peasant farmers using very simple techniques, using uh on-farm, save seed that's open-pollinated, land races, this kind of thing. So, hybrids, you know, is a technology as we kind of like late Industrial Revolution uh began to really affect agriculture, which really started after World War I. Uh and before World War I, it was still fairly simple agricultural techniques, a lot of uh horse-drawn plows, oxen-drawn plows, that kind of thing. Uh one statistic that I've always found fascinating is in 1930, 70% of the grain consumed in the United States was still harvested with a scythe. And so obviously, people were in a lot better shape back then. Swinging a scythe is like uh kettlebells all day. And um it wasn't until World War I and all the industry that was built up in the countries involved in that war effort, they needed to figure out, like, well, what do we do? So tanks became tractors, uh, our nitrogen, uh salt petra uh mining and manufacturing for bomb making pivoted to fertilizer, and then the poison nerve gases and all the biocides pivoted to agriculture, and that became insecticides and all of that. And then the wealth after World War II and all that further step of industrialization led to widespread, it's basically the war on humans turned into the war on the earth. And you look at most of the agriculture here in the US is still this chemical industrial mechanized monocrop model. And so these represent uh you know two different models. So this one is uh emulating nature, and nature is complex. All these interactions uh lead to metastability, and nature is supple and flexible, and a stress happens, and it can evolve and adapt and change over time, and those are the kind of genetics we want, and that it ultimately led to the success of the human species. Whereas this is the industrial model, and I'll just put this over. This is you know, in industrial models are instead of complex, they're complicated. So, like one thing breaks over here and it affects the supply chain, and we're seeing that right now with this war between Israel and Iran and the US and all the other involved parties, and how the like global supply chain for fertilizer and other things could lead to a shockwave through our food systems. Whereas this one is a you know a nature-based model. And so pollination occurs through natural, I'll just say is natural. And depending on whether it's an insect-pollinated crop like uh, you know, onions or carrots, or a wind pollinated crop like beets or corn, all the pollination's just occurring naturally. And, you know, in inside of open pollinated is all the heirlooms. Every heirloom variety is a open pollinated variety, but not all open pollinated varieties are heirlooms, and there's a bit of a cutoff point of a variety that needs to have been in cultivation f since the 1950s. It's an arbitrary line, there is no dictionary definition of what makes an heirloom. Really, if you want to go back to what is an heirloom, it goes back to weaving guilds in medieval Europe. And if you were the apprentice of a weaver, you would become the heir of the loom. And that was also indicative of, you know, where did you get the wool, how is it spun, uh, what were the natural dyes used, what were the patterns, and and then what did that cloth become? So it it describes the system, you know. So that's I think this is another uh important uh distinction here is this is a systems-based approach to plant reproduction. And it's just how nature does it, but it works as a system. So it works with your pollinators, it works with wind patterns and all of that. Whereas this is a uh, you know, control. It's all about control. So, and we'll get into a deeper level of what that control means, but first of all, I feel like I should explain how are most modern F1 hybrids produced. And pardon me as I uh scoop some things around here. So basically it's it's a cross, it's a controlled, well here I'll just up here, controlled cross between two parents. Uh two parents. And so, you know, we use these terms like parents or male or female as just kind of placeholders. Obviously, there's more complexity that's happening in nature here. So what is done is this is usually done for uniformity. Uniformity is the goal. And it's and also for agronomic uh reasons, you know, like uh the broccoli should be this high, this size, or a variety of corn should mature in 78 days, or mechanized harvesting equipment can do it. It's not done for over here, the goal is uh quality, you know. Well, it's I'll just say the goal is culinary and cultural. And you know, we're preserving flavors, uh, unique appearances, seed stories, this kind of thing, or uh ancestral lineages for people who have indigenous roots to their traditional foods. Uh whereas this is all just like we need all the carrots to be this size so we can pack them in a box. It really doesn't have much to do with the eating quality, or it has to do with disease resistance, which is really on the agronomic side of things. It's not the goal isn't for the eater. And you're most people are just the uh recipients, or I might even say the victims of the food system. Um so back to this idea of a controlled cross between two parents. So basically they are two inbred lines. And so over here, these are the inbred. We'll call them the parents. And so let's say we'll just use corn as an example. So let's say the goal is to produce a variety that matures as a sweet corn in 80 days, grows six feet tall, makes two ears per plant, and doesn't fall over when the wind comes. So what they do is they'll plant a big field, they have their parent lines, and usually a lot of this is proprietary, it's a secret. And that's one thing that's really frustrating. Whereas this one's all about seed stories. It's it's transparent and open, and we want to carry that. And it has that, you know, the whole systems approach. So back to our parent lines. So parent line A, they have a big field and they go in and they're probably hand pollinating to self, you know, so they're basically they put what looks like a brown paper liquor bag over the immature ear of corn. And and before the silks emerge, the silks are the female flower, uh, the pollen receiving part of the corn plant. It has what's called the imperfect flower. Some a flower that's perfect, like a lily or a zina or something, has both male and female flower parts on each flower. Imperfect flowers like corn or squash have male flowers and female flowers. Using uh genet uh gendered terminology is just the best we can do to really describe what are pollen producing, the male and pollen receiving parts. So when you're self-pollinating corn, you need to keep any pollen that might be from the neighboring plants from pollinating the silks. So you if you've grown corn before, there's a stage where the immature ear, you can't see the silks out there, so it can't receive pollen. So you slip the bag over there, tape it, and then you go out in the morning and you gather some pollen. You can just put the same kind of bag over the tassels, which are the pollen producing or male flower of the corn, and then swap the bags. And so now you you know that that plant is basically going to produce offspring that are the result of its genetics, just that one plant. So do that to like 500 plants that have the characteristics you're looking for, eliminate the rest, uh, because that's one way, like let's say some of the stalks fall over in the wind, you don't want those ones, and whatever your characteristics you're looking for, the traits, uh, those code to genes or alleles is the expression of that. Uh, so there they want this to be totally uniform, and then they're doing that to a totally separate population being grown somewhere else. Same thing, uniformity. And this this might take you know five years. You know, and some of these parent lines, this is all secret proprietary info. Usually they just have a numeric code to their parent lines. Interestingly enough, I learned that you now can buy seed for uh or certified organic hybrid sweetcorn seed, but the parent lines are still proprietary and the technology is being leased to the seed producers, so there could be weird stuff in there, GMOs, that kind of stuff. So back to this. Let's so once you get these stable, so A actually looks exactly like B, but you're inbreeding. So other traits like drought resistance or uh the you know, the quirky ability to make four years per plant, or things that would be in that junk DNA category, those are just eliminated because they aren't part of the like let's say top four traits that you're going for. So that narrowing and narrowing of the genetic breadth, you're losing this as you inbreed. Just think about like in mammals, if you inbreed too much, eventually they're sterile, they won't reproduce. So these inbred lines, the parent lines are very wimpy and oftentimes can only grow with the support of chemical fertilizers and also insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides, this kind of thing. So think that most of this industrial model is a post-World War II when we went whole hog with chemicals and nobody thought anything of it. So the hybrid model is part and parcel with the agrochemical industry. It's a mindset, and it's really important to think that, and even these modern new like hybrid organic varieties is because so many farmers have been enchanted into believing that hybrids are better. But unfortunately, once we went with this model, we abandoned this model, the system-based one, which all of agriculture was for thousands and thousands of years. And so the the effort to maintain the open pollinated varieties, there was no money in it. There was no way to get that proprietary you know uh extra money, basically, profit. So by hiding this behind a not transparent uh business model, like they never tell you what the parent lines are, whereas in an open pollinated variety, you might say, oh, this variety is a cross between this old heirloom and this heirloom, and this is what we got. So you can kind of like check the math. You can't check the math on this, and then we'll get into a much weirder thing. So once these two parent lines are stable, you create a controlled cross here. I'm just gonna use a little X for that, and then this becomes your F1. And that what that stands for is first filial generation, and then that's the seed you sell. So see how here we've created a very complicated system because we need to maintain seed for parent line A and parent line B that are inbred and really wimpy. So maybe they'll grow a like five-year supply or ten-year supply, and every time they need to produce new fresh seed of the F1, they can go back to those bags, but when they run out of this, they have to redo some of that work, and by then the pest or disease or whatever the consumer preference has changed, so they have to go back in and tweak it. Another interesting thing about this whole model is this is sold by the seed count, and this one is sold by uh weight. So when you go into a seed catalog and you try and compare how much the seed costs between a hybrid and an open pollinated variety for uh varieties like melons or something where both are still commonly uh sold and grown, it you have to do some extra math. It you have to figure out like, well, how many seeds are in an ounce or a gram or a pound. And again, this is part of this non-transparent model. And I get it, they'll they could say, oh, it's because farmers need to know uh how many seeds per row foot, and they can do their calculations. But if that's the case, why not put weight and seed count right there uh next to one another so everybody can make an informed choice? So part of this is this non-transparent smoke and mirr thing to uh dissuade you from buying open pollinated seed or saving your own. So back to this this first filial generation, what you get, so these two inbred parents, what these have, I'm gonna write it down here because I'm running out of room, they are going for homozygosity. Um homozygous. And so homo is like with like, whereas this one is heterozygous, and that's what a population, and you have you know a lot of uh diversity within there, and that's a good thing. You don't want complete uniformity, like as a gardener, why would you want all your broccoli to mature in one week? You don't want that to happen. You want like a head and then another head and then another head because you're feeding yourself, and that's why these are the meta-stable long-term uh approaches that have fed humanity throughout time. So back to this, when you get when you cross two homozygous varieties, these two homozygous inbred parents, this here, this cross, then you get what's called heterosis. And this is more commonly known as hybrid vigor. And this was the question or comment on this uh little reel I made that prompted me, I was like, oh, I should do a more granular dive down into what's going on in terms of reproductive biology and plants. And although I'm not a biology professor, I've been doing this long enough where I've uh I'm a citizen scientist. Say. So this hybrid vigor, these are synonymous terms because basically these ones are wimpy, but that that reintroduction of uh more diversity into the genetic makeup leads to um a lot of good things. You you're you're you're re-enriching the overall population. Hybrid vigor is happening all the time in a population. If as a seed steward, you're maintaining minimum population numbers, which ideally, you know, one of my teachers, John Navasio, would repeatedly say, you know, you aim for 200 plants, 200 individuals with the cross-pollinated crops, and those would be the ones that require cross-pollination to reproduce seed. A self-pollinated crop would be things like lettuce, peas, beans, there's others, peppers is mostly self-pollinated. And like you can save seed from one lettuce plant, and you're not going to uh see any inbreeding depression uh of which is what's happening here. You're getting inbreeding depression. So this flush of hybrid vigor, if you're maintaining a good population and doing good work to rogue, pull out the plants that aren't what you want. Like let's say I'm saving seed from lettuce, I'm still doing a population, and maybe I've got 400 plants. If I see a plant that when it's in flower or about to go to seed has died due to some disease, I pull that up and I put it in the compost. Even though it made seed, I don't want that susceptibility to disease in that population. And this is where you know true seed stewardship is a craft. And in this model, as I'll explain more soon, it's increasingly handing over the stewardship of the genetics to the molecular biologists and the scientists in the marketing department, which is a bad idea. So hybrid vigor exists in here. And one other thing Dr. John Navazio would repeatedly say, and this was a major light bulb moment for me now 27 years ago when I first got to meet him, and we did a five-day uh fundamentals of plant improvement course. And it was a little backdrop if you're unfamiliar with his name. He passed away recently. He got a PhD in plant breeding from the University of Wisconsin, and then later worked for the conventional seed trade for Alf Christians and Seed up in the Skaggett Valley of Washington. One of their uh marketing names is Chris Seed, but they would fill container loads of beet seed, spinach seed. It was, you know, a big industrial model. Uh so he learned a lot of how all this works, and that's where I learned a lot of this and have since, you know, continued to be curious about it. But he would say over and over, it's entirely possible for an open pollinated variety to be every good as every bit as good, if not better, than a hybrid, and definitely better because you can save your own seeds. You can save seed of this, you know. I think there's a common misconception that you can't save seed from hybrids. It's not true. And usually the F2, and sorry, I'm gonna have to erase some of this in order to continue to um explain this. So if you save seed from the F1, then that is the F2. See, second filial generation. These are still pretty good. And I've heard stories that in Mexico, when people, you know, farmers are buying hybrid seed, which is more expensive than growing your own, uh, from folks like Pioneer Hybrid and that kind of thing. They'll save seed to the F2, and then they'll go back and buy new F1 seed. Because by the F3 and so on, you can see how this works. You get what's called genetic disintegration. Disintegration. And please pardon if I misspelled something. Um so that genetic disintegration is going reverting back to some of the ancestral uh, you know, basically double recessive traits, typically, which need to be on both parent lines. So, like in humans, uh red hair or blue eyes or green eyes is a double recessive. So each of the grandparental lines of both the mom and the dad need to carry that gene uh in order for it to express. But it can skip a generation. You can have two brunette parents have children that have red hair, as long as one of the grandparents on each line had that trait. So imagine as you extrapolate that out over thousands and thousands of genes, weird stuff begins to pop out here. And an example of this from one of my uh teachers and mentors, Dr. Alan Capular, who co-founded Seeds of Change and you know, Luminary Peace Seeds was his kind of watershed project uh in Corvallis, Oregon area. And Cisque Seeds is kind of directly in the lineage of all that because they actually started here in Williams, Oregon. So I've it's taken me a long time to learn like what did they do? Anyhow, uh See the Change had some tomato varieties that were all the progeny from a popular hybrid tomato called Early Girl. And it was just a round red slicer, but it was early, um uniform, and productive. So lots of market growers did grow it and still grow it to this day. We now have a variety that some uh two plant breeding colleagues of mine, uh Steve Peters and Conti, uh developed as an open pollinated variety. And we have that in our offerings called uh Cal Early Girl. And so basically they stabilized a hybrid. And it's not possible to dehybridize something because once this cross is made or in a population, once that mixing is made, you can't undo it, but you can continue this grow out process, you know, F5, F6, and you know, until you get, and you have to be doing good classical traditional plant breeding of roguing and selecting for what you do want. So in their process to stabilize the early girl hybrid, some of the off-types they had was a beefsteak variety, much bigger, a Roma variety, and a cherry tomato, because all those are in the ancestral DNA of tomatoes, because all tomatoes evolved from probably some you know wild, tiny cherry tomato-looking thing that was really viny and promiscuous. So, like I have a friend who bred a number of sweet corn varieties, among other things, Jonathan Spiro, and I remember one of his projects was taking a hybrid sweet corn that had the sugary enhanced genes in it, and an old traditional open-pollinated variety, country gentleman, crossing them, and then growing it out into uh a stable open pollinated line. So we have a few sweet corn varieties, namely Topat, Tuxana, and Xanadu, which are uh in that order a yellow sweet corn, a white sweet corn, and then a bicolor sweethorn that he bred out to the F8. So, you know, by then, and growing large populations, going out self-pollinating, same work here. To grow a hybrid, you still have to do classical plant breeding of observation and all of this kind of stuff. And so he would, you know, self them and then only save seed of the ones that produce two ears per plant with the qualities and characteristics that he was looking for. Uh, very labor intensive. And you can imagine, after all that work of growing a big field of corn, if you're selling the seed at the same price as some, you know, maybe not very well curated sweet corn, how do you differentiate yourself with quality if you're still only able to charge five dollars for an ounce of seed in a packet or whatever the price per pound may work out to, versus the hybrids, they always charge a premium. And what really prompted me to delve into this more was this pepper trial, like I was mentioning. And the hybrid peppers that I was including in the trial, just to have a control, like, all right, what are most market growers growing? And like a common red Italian elongated sweet pepper is called Carmen. It's a hybrid. I source the seed from my friends and colleagues over at High Mowing Seeds in Vermont. I don't actually know who's producing the original seed, they never tell you in the seed catalog, but there's companies like Bijot and Vitalis and others that are behind the scenes. You as a consumer can't go buy seed from, but they're the ones actually doing all this work. A lot of them are uh in Holland. The Dutch have had kind of a stronghold on the seed trade for a long time. So this Carmen sweet pepper, it was five dollars for ten seeds. Whereas here at Siskiy Seeds, our sweet peppers, we put two-fifths of a gram of seed in a packet for five dollars. And you're gonna get about 50 seeds. So the hybrid seed costs five times as much. Is it five times as good? I don't know. We'll continue to see. I'm including a variety I call Miranda, where I did this process and I took Carmen and I stabilized it as an open pollinated variety, which really only took me to about the F5 before I saw just uniformity. Uh, but I have that seed that costs one-fifth what the Carmen does, and it's open pollinated, so you can save your own seed. And I called it Carmen Miranda just from the you know, the the lady with the fruit, she's popularly known for the fruit headdress thing. Um cultural reference, seed stories helps us remember. Anyhow, uh back to this whole thing. This is very like complicated, and now here's where it gets even more complicated. And please pardon me as I um I have to make some room over here. See how on the hybrid there's a lot more, it's more complicated, so it takes more time to explain. It's not just like a seed, they've turned seeds into technology, and you know, everybody's familiar with GMOs. I'm gonna leave that part up there. Um, but what they don't know is when they go to a farmer's market in their local town, that they're probably getting what I would call a GMO. And what I'm talking about here, and I'll write it on here and then I'll explain it a little bit more. So, what it's called is cisgenics or CMS, which stands for better M. Cytoplasmic male. Sterility! Do we really want sterility in our food? No, we don't. We don't want it in our seeds either. So this is a technology that is basically a molecular biology technique. Uh there is it's kind of a little group of techniques that are used in most of the hybrid, if not all, onions and brassicas and some uh chicories. I'm not altogether sure, because there's again no transparency about this. They do not tell you this in the seed catalog. And if you were to call them up, they probably don't know the answer, and they don't want you to know the answer because once I describe this, hopefully you're gonna decide to ask your local farmers or your seed uh purchasing and growing uh preferences will change to open pollinated exclusively. So there's an organization that's an international organization uh called IFOM, and it stands for the International Federation of Organic Agriculture. And uh the USDA's organic standards aren't quite up to the iFOM standards, and there's a glaring discrepancy in the scientific understanding of what a genetically modified organism is or genetically engineered uh organism is and what the organic system allows. So you ask your average person who chooses to buy and consume organic, certified organic products, if they think that GMOs or genetically engineered uh molecular biology techniques is part of that system. And they would say, absolutely not, 100%. I mean, we had when they tried to redo the USDA standards years ago, they tried to slip in three things that were really egregious to a lot of us into the standards. And it used to just be run on a case-by-case study uh like certified CCOF or Oregon TIL through, you know, the local state-based systems decided the rules. So the USDA stepped in in the 90s to be like, let's equalize it for the whole country. So organic in Virginia means the same thing as it does in California, as it does in Montana, which was a smart move. They tried to slip three things in at that time, and it spurred the largest letter writing uh campaign to complain about this in the history of the USDA. They wanted GMOs to be allowed in organics, they wanted sewage sludge to be allowed to be spread as a fertilizer, and they wanted irradiation to be acceptable as a technique for food safety or whatever. So, what IFOM says is that quote, genetic engineering is a set of techniques for molecular biology, such as recombinant DNA, by which the genetic material of plants, animals, microorganisms, cells, and other biological units are altered in ways or with results that could not be obtained by methods of natural mating and reproduction or natural recombination. Techniques of genetic engineering include but are not limited to recombinant DNA, cell fusion, that's what this is, micro and macro injection encapsulation. So by international organic certification standards, cell fusion is considered genetically modified, but not necessarily in the United States or in many other countries that disregard the IFOM standards. Maybe we should all just start calling it a GMO, and we'll have some parity in the organic standards. So this one here, another commonly used term is cell fusion. And I know that sounds crazy. Like why? Why would you need to do that? So remember, this is all about control. It's a model, it's a mindset. And control usually leads to a lessening of biodiversity, it leads to a reduction in the overall productivity of systems and stuff. So what they do in cell fusion, I'll use an example that was described by my friend Andrew Still, who they have a great seed company up in Sweet Home, Oregon, called Adaptive, that's much like what we do here at Siskiyseeds. And so he wrote a good article about this, and I'm paraphrasing from this, is there they figured out that certain chicories had natural cytoplasmic male sterility. And so if you're trying to do this controlled cross between inbred lines, they'll call, like even let's say in beets. I remember a number of years back Singenta, which is a giant uh Swiss uh you know big ag chemical company, uh like atrazine is one of the big herbicides that they produce, and then they were bought by Chem China, but they introduced illegally a genetically modified sugar beet, which is here in terms of acreage in the US, is the fifth most planted crop because 60% of the cheap sugar that you have on your table that's white sugars and candy bars and stuff, is actually coming from sugar beets, not sugarcane. So their approach for GMOs and this whole mindset wasn't like let's create a more stable food supply. It was more like, what is the largest amount of acreage planted in the U.S.? And they've just gone down that list: corn, soybeans, alfalfa, uh canola, sugar beets. They've tried to do wheat and failed because of, you know, give us this day our daily bread. You can't mess with our bread. Um, so back to describing self-fusion. If you want greater control when describing the sugar beet, Singenta was producing some of the parent lines for this GMO sugar beet in uh our wider river valley, and there were no signs about it. We just figured it out over time and tried to push back on that as uh food security food system activists years ago. And so they'd have these little quarter acre plots with these rows, and what I learned from talking to people in the industry is they would do alternating rows, male, female, male, female, male, female. Well, if you understand the reproductive biology of sugar beets, which is uh beet beta vulgaris is the Latin name, genus and species, they have perfect flowers that produce both male and female pollen on the same plant. I mean, uh male pollen and female flowers that receive the pollen. Pardon my uh slip up there. So they would stack the geomotrates on just the male line. They weren't harvesting seed from that, they would only harvest seed from the female. So wouldn't it be cool if you could engineer that the females, your like let's say parent line B, doesn't produce any pollen. And so this is done in brassicas and onions as well. And then you're only harvesting seed from your female lines because the female produced the progeny, where the male is just producing pollen. Got it? So wouldn't it be a helpful tool if you're in this mindset, if you can say, oh, my male line doesn't it produces the pollen, but the female line produces no viable pollen. So what they did in this one example to produce a uh cytoplasmic male sterility in a chicory, it was a Belgian end dive specifically, is they in a laboratory, you have to have all the conditions right to do this, they had a cell of a chicory. And so this is the nucleus, and here's the cell wall, and they used uh irradiation to irradiate the cell wall away from this, and then they had a sunflower over here, a sunflower cell, and that's the nucleus. They irradiated the nucleus out of that one, and then using because they really just wanted the mitochondria from the sunflower that has some natural cytoplasm male sterility in it, they wanted to fuse, so they had to use some kind of technique, a virus or god knows what, radiation again, to get the nucleus of the chicory inside the cell wall of the sunflower, and then they have a cell with these new qualities that then they could use tissue culture in a laboratory to grow into a plant that then can sexually reproduce to something they have seeds from. A lot of effort, huh? And I remember years ago going to a trial from Bijou, which is one of the big Dutch vegetable seed companies. And if you buy seed from Johnny's or High Mowing or Harris or, you know, a whole variety of the big ones, you're getting seed from Behoe, particularly in things like the brassicas or onions. And so they had a big 600-foot-long bed of onions, all these different varieties with flags marking them out, and they were just evaluating pollen production for the male. They because you do need pollen, you uh, and that was all they were doing, is just you know, ag science there for evaluating male pollen production or pollen production and onions, and then they would use that with their CMS females that didn't produce any pollen, and they had greater control over the you know resulting progeny. This is a bad idea because plants produce pollen, and so now they're in there tampering with all these things. So if I go in and let's say I there's a broccoli, a hybrid broccoli that I think is really great, and I'd like to stabilize it in an open pollinated variety. We'll use marathon hybrid, F1 hybrid, as an example. It's very commonly grown by market growers, CSA farmers, that kind of stuff. And if you buy organic broccoli, you've probably eaten this. In any farmer's market, you go, most of the growers, if you buy broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, collards, onions, you are getting this. This is what you're getting. And the farmer won't even know it because the seed catalog doesn't tell you. But if it's in a hybrid, that's the technology they're using now, which is this it is a transgenic technique. You're you're crossing the genetic lines. So, but if I take that marathon broccoli and I grow out a big bed of it, let's say I've got 500 plants, and I go in and it all looks good because it's a hybrid, and that's what you pay for, is you pay for uniformity. And I let them all intermate. Well, a bunch of those aren't making as much viable pollen because this technology is embedded in it. And so then I get the F2 and I grow that out, and it's still pretty good, and the F3, F4, and each of these has to happen in a different year. Uh, and maybe by the time I get to an F5, I have a variety that has all the qualities that the marathon has, and um, but it's open pollinated. Unfortunately, my seed yield is going to be much lower because the pollen viability has been affected by this. So, like they they've kind of let the bull out into the china shop of nature already with this, and these varieties are out there in nature and bees fly far, and it's just really unfortunate. And I I wish more people knew about this and can make more informed decisions because kind of wrapping this up here is that you basically the the reality that we experience is largely the result of the choices we make in life. So if we choose open pollinated, nature based population, you You know, heirloom systems-based thinking will see more of that. You know, so if you go to the farmer's market instead of buying food or a big box store like Costco, which is the number one uh place uh where people buy food in the country, and or I what are they the number one seller of organic produce? But a lot of the organic produce is coming from this mindset. Then we'll have more of that. And I know for me, I don't want to see more box stores. I want to see more mom-pa, I want to see these persisting, and like the farmer's market is a major radical act to shop at the farmer's market and go directly to the producer. Hopefully, your market is like that. There's 9,000 farmers markets in the country, and I think it's one of the more radical, if you're not going to grow your own food, support those that are growing food for their community. Then ask them, like, hey, is this broccoli from hybrid? And if the person doesn't know, then maybe go to somewhere where they know, because some farms just they hire some young kids to run the stand because the farmers are too busy farming. Um, and but be curious, ask, because this is a mindset too. And if we support this mindset, we're gonna see more of it. And one of the first GMO vegetables that's commonly consumed, because most of the GMOs, the traditional ones, like the Roundup Ready ones, are just for like industrial ag for like biofuels and feedlots and all that stuff. Like I think 65% of the corn and soy grown in the Midwest is just for feedlots, which in my view is not food really. Uh so very infrequently are GMOs making it into your direct uh food supply. But there was that uh was it Norwood uh purple tomatoes, like completely purple all the way through. That's a GMO. And like Baker Creek had it on the cover of their catalog before they realized they never did GMO testing and were, you know, they're the heirloom seed company were putting this out as an open pollinator when in turn it was GMO, and it was really interesting because the most of the purple tomatoes are purple on the outside, but they're not purple on the inside. So they had to cross the species uh lines here and and you know use laboratory techniques to get that to happen because in nature um, you know, like that's why most plants are green, because chloroplasts are green and they're more efficient at converting sunlight into sugars and energy in that light spectrum, which is why red leaf lettuces never grow quite as well as green leaf ones. So I would just want to encourage you to find, you know, grow your own seed, like we'll probably do the fall seed academy again. This is year 2026, probably in uh mid-October or something. Come learn how to save your own seeds. It's it's awesome. You're participating in nature, and you you'll have so much extra seed you can share it with your neighbors and your friends and your family, or at community seed swaps, or find out who is doing this work, who's doing a true seed stewardship. And there's a huge proliferation. We here at Cisq Seeds, I started this in 2009, so this is year 17, but I've noticed in the last like five, ten years a lot more folks, and that's partly because people like myself, the work of the Organic Seed Alliance, my friend Bill McDorman with his seed schools, uh Rowan White and the Seed Saver, and you know, we're watching this uh groundswell because people don't want this system. When they find out what it is, they do not want to participate in it. But we need to get this to be as good or better at this, and where what will help encourage that is if consumers are willing to put their money where their mouth is and support local bioregionally adapted agriculture and seed producers who are doing this work, the true artisanal craft work of curating a Noah's arc of agrobiodiversity, so that we have these heirlooms that all have this the seed store in the rich, vibrant culture of that diversity rather than this reductionist mindset of the hybrid proprietary secret control model, which this is a package deal with chemicals. And a lot of these varieties only produce well when you are just jamming the fertilizer to them. And organic growers have to do this too. They're using usually byproducts of the factory farm uh nightmare, uh, whether that's chicken manure or fish emulsion and you know, you know, all that. And not to fault them, it's like it's hard to earn a living as a farmer, but this model is breeding and selecting for high-input uh fertilizer systems and high control, row covers, greenhouses, all this stuff. Whereas this is breeding for climate adapted, climate change adapted, low input, uh, you know, healthy, vigorous root systems that can go out and forage for the nutrients. They don't need it right there. So I just want to encourage everybody to be curious about this. I've been talking with my friend Melissa Norris that it would be really cool to have an interactive map of all the small-scale bioregional farm-based seed companies. And just because there's a seed company in your community doesn't mean they grew the seed. A lot of them are just brokers. And as one of my mentors, Larry Middleton, said years ago, he's like most seed companies are just paper companies. This is before the internet was a thing. They print packets and they print catalogs and they just need some floor sweepings to put in it because most gardeners that get seed at the hardware store will blame themselves for the poor results of crappy seed. Farmers who are spending big bucks on hybrids, they know if a seed, if it was the seed's fault or their fault. And you know, some companies like Johnny's, to their credit, will actually compensate farmers if there is a crop loss that's the result of poor quality seed, because high quality seed is not cheap. And another thing Larry Middleton would repeat, and he'd worked for Enza Zodin, which is the parent company, another Dutch company, of Vitalis, which is their organic division. So he'd worked all over the world in seed production and really got to see it. And he said in Europe, farmers were willing to pay for quality seed, and that would be you know one of their first decisions in planning out the season, where in America farmers would spend their money on tractors and fertilizer, and seed was more like an afterthought. And I thought that was an interesting distinction about a culture that still has culture at most of Western Europe and Eastern Europe in particular, versus the modern American reductionist, industrial, complicated, brittle model that uh doesn't think that this is important, all this stuff. The idea that you can save your own seed. So be curious, and this interactive map would be really cool if you could just hover your cursor over, like who are my my seed people in my community? And that word is starting to come out, but I think because it's so trendy right now, and there's a little word to the wise, be curious and ask questions. There are people jumping into it, and you can probably tell by now if you've made it to this point in the video, it's complicated, it's complex, there's a lot to know. Every plant species has different reproductive biology requirements and exceptions, and there's things like transposons and jumping genes and da-da-da-da-da, epigenetics and responses to uh variables in the environment, that it really takes decades to learn how to do this. So I honestly would be a little bit leery of somebody that just in their enthusiasm jumped right into it and tried to grow as many things out to seed or just like sourced from the internet wholesale and with and offering it up. Like we're here at Siskiyou Seeds, I'm at 2,000 feet at 42 degrees north latitude in Oregon on the west side of the Cascades with this interesting summer desert, winter rainforest kind of climate. I only offer seeds through our catalog and our website that I can successfully grow here. If something doesn't grow here, like loofahs, I love loofahs. I want to be able to offer loofah seed. But even in a greenhouse, I can't get it to uh produce viable seed uh reliably. So we don't sell it. You gotta go find that from somebody else. So I think that like the integrity, and that's another this has integrity and stability, and I'll do another follow-up lecture if this kind of stuff piques your interest in the differences between vertical resistance plant breeding and horizontal resistance plant breeding. And this is a vertical resistance model, it's stacking a whole uh variety on like one gene, you know, that is resistance to powdery mildew race eight or whatever. Whereas this is like a meta-stable model that's looking at multiple traits that come together to confer disease resistance. So you can still get all those things that you get in the hybrids in the open pollinary, but you need seed stewards that are doing the real work to curate adapted genetics. So hopefully you learned something from this and you can make more informed decisions about the seed you plant in your garden, your farm, or the food you eat and who you get it from. And we can help grow a more abundant, more diverse, more beautiful, more kind, and compassionate and transparent world. Alright. Happy spring.