Welcome to the Going to Seed podcast. I'm Shane Simonson and today we are talking with
restoration agriculture pioneer Mark Sheppard. So to get us started Mark, can you tell us a bit
about your background and the path that led you into crop breeding? Oh my goodness, how many days
you have for this? We'll see, born and raised in the industrial wasteland suburbs outside of Boston,
in the early 1970s when all the factories basically closed down and moved overseas to
third world countries where it was cheaper to run everything and you could pollute everything like
crazy. And the river at the bottom of the hill, our house had a river that looped around it,
a big huge loop and the road went straight across. Whether we went north or south, you had to cross
this river and the big game was to guess what color is the river today. Blue, green, red, orange,
just crazy colors and it stunk. And I was in Boy Scouts, conservation was talked about quite
a bit. It was the era of the Bambi movie and taking care of wildlife. So I got really into
nature and all things outdoors because I lived in such a horrible wasteland and it just seemed
like a beautiful thing. And after they went through all kinds of legal actions and protests and
sabotage and stuff like that, the companies that were dumping all the chemicals into the river as
their waste disposal system, they finally agreed to put in a wastewater treatment. And lo and behold,
the river cleaned up. I got to see the river clean up pretty soon. Like after a few years,
we could see the bottom washed away, stuff started to grow back on the outside edges of it.
So I got to see firsthand, one, just by leaving it alone. And then two, if we actually do something
to assist with the process of restoration, it can happen even faster. And I got the bug
and always wanted to be a bum living out in the woods. I couldn't afford to buy any woods. So I
bought a clear cut. That was the first property that I bought after saving up for a few years
and started replanting it, built a cabin and got it reappraised. It was appraised for like
$25,000 more than I bought it for. And I said, hmm, this is pretty cool because I can borrow up
to the level of the appraisal and buy another clear cut and do it again. I can start doing
earth repair work as a real estate business. And so that's what I've been doing for the past
30 some odd years. I got properties from Alaska to Maine and everywhere in between. And every single
one of them, the goal is to buy a degraded farm property or degraded natural resource.
Property replant the whole darn thing, but replant it with mostly food plant communities
so that they can now be harvested by human beings. And if the human beings aren't there
to harvest it, it's a wild system and all the animals and wildlife can feast on it. So we're
doing ecological restoration by planting economic and agricultural plant communities.
And that said nothing about me, I guess. I don't know. And in particular, your interest in plant
breeding and your take on it, I think is something that would be a really great place to start
introducing you to the audience. So can you say a bit more about that? Yeah, what's interesting,
I'd mentioned the hill that I lived on. On the south side of the hill was the birthplace of
Luther Burbank, plant breeder Luther Burbank. On the north side of the hill was the birthplace of
Johnny Appleseed. I kid you not, this place acted like this. So Johnny Appleseed would grab all
these Appleseeds and he went out and he planted them all over the place, mostly as a tree nursery.
Then he would sell them to other pioneer settlers coming in because if you planted a orchard
that showed that you had intent to settle there, and so they would be able to get their homestead
claims better because they planted fruit trees and he had a little bit of income. But what that was
is this mass selection of random apple genetics that had never happened before. He is the human
being that is responsible for more diversity within the apple gene pool of any other person
in North America, probably any other person in history. And then Luther Burbank, he was a
mass selection breeder extraordinaire. He is the individual that has more plant varieties credited
to his name and his breeding work than any other human being on the face of the planet from
thornless cacti to multi-petaled shasta daisies. Most of the plum industry is based on plums that
came from him. The entire fruit industry in Canada is all from, you know, spun off from Luther
Burbank's work. And for those who aren't familiar with mass selection, I'm suspecting that your
crowd is a little bit more than others. You plant a zillion seeds and you pick the ones that meet
your criteria and it's that easy. So how I got into it, I had those early influences, Johnny
Appleseed and Luther Burbank. And then when I'm on a property and I planted a bunch of things,
I had read all of the books, how you're supposed to dig a $40 hole for a $10 tree. Well, I didn't
have time for that. And then you're supposed to do cover crops for these many years and this much
compost and then this and balance that and get rid of this pest and that. I didn't have time for
that. Didn't, you know, have the interest in doing that. So a lot of stuff died. And what I noticed
is that the stuff that lived was the stuff that really should have lived because it had something
going for it. And then I just started to select the seed of the ones that actually did quite well.
And after I started to realize this, then it's like, oh, let's get systematic about it.
If I'm going to be breeding trees and I do most of my work with trees and shrubs,
I want something that's hyper precocious that I put the seed in the ground and that SOB turns around
and it flowers next year. In the wild, that's not necessarily a good trait because you're putting
all your energy into reproduction and you get overshaded by somebody else and you just fade away
and you disappear. But for me, that's what I want because I want to be able to turn around those
generations as fast as possible. On my hazelnut breeding, that population of on average about 80%
of the little hazelnut plants that you put in the ground, their second year, they're flowering and
producing nuts. Now that's not enough for it to be like commercially viable yields, but what that
allows me to do is to keep turning those generations faster and faster and faster.
Essential for finding these other traits. I don't think we have to invent traits. We don't have to
insert new genes from here or there. All the secrets for these plants to have survived on
this planet for millions of years that they've survived here on this planet, all the traits are
in there somewhere. We just have to roll the dice enough until they show up and then go find them
and be paying attention for that. Hyperpreocosity is the first thing I'm looking for.
In this part of Wisconsin, sometimes the temperature gets to negative 40. So it obviously
has to be cold hardy. It has to be able to tolerate weirdnesses in the spring because in the spring
time, it can get really warm late winter and then get right back down to zero Fahrenheit or even
colder. And a lot of fruit around here, especially stone fruit, the buds will start to swell and
they're all dead in the buds. The wild plum populations out here, I think only three or four
years in the 25 years that I've been here, have we ever had a crop of plums because of that
characteristic. I think maybe for the wild plums, that's an advantage because nobody's used to
eating plums until all the wildlife. All of a sudden this year, there's like a zillion
plums everywhere and the plums can propagate and the raccoons eat them and poop them out all over
the place. So hyperpreocosity, cold hardiness, then pest and disease resistant because I don't
want to spray any sprays. And if you get some kind of crazy, ridiculous, ugly disease and die,
good riddance. And if these pests riddle you, I don't want to eat all this wormy fruit or
whatever else it is. So those are my primary selection criteria and been at it here on this
site now for, like I said, 25 plus years. And the results actually show. It's not a wildly
get rich quick kind of scheme, but we're a profitable venture. We're paying the bills.
And that's okay. Okay is okay in my book. A related note, did you ever see that
Luther Burbank developed chestnuts that flowered, I think six months from seed?
They were functionally annual. I have two family lines that do exactly that. You put the seed in
the ground and it comes up and it flowers. And actually I have some of Luther Burbank's
genetics in my chestnuts population here. They're not the ones that reproduce real early.
They're the ones actually that have a hard time surviving because of cold hardiness.
Most of those have died because of cold hardiness. He was in California after all, you know.
Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense. So moving on, can you tell us a bit about
your local growing conditions in terms of like how much space you have, the soil,
you briefly mentioned the temperatures, how you manage water, fertility weeds and pests.
Just give us a broad brush of the environment that you're working with and the resources.
Well, first of all, average annual rainfall is approximately one meter of rain.
And most often it happens in severe thunderstorms. The record rainfall here in one afternoon was 13
inches. So, you know, almost half a meter of rain in an afternoon. Right down the road,
I was almost washed away in a 20 inch thunderstorm. So there's real extreme rainfall events. It's
rolling hills and heavy clay soil. So when it rains like that, the water just runs away,
highly erosive. This region in Southwest Wisconsin is where the soil conservation service got started
in the USA. The Coon Creek watershed project was the first watershed scale project to prevent
erosion in the USA on agricultural farmland. So tremendous amount of erosion because all runoff.
So first order of business is to set up a series of swales and berms and ponds or call them terraces
and, you know, water and sediment control basins if you want. I don't care what you call them,
but a way to channel the water across the slope, soak it in, spread it out and store it in pools
across the property in order to be used later either for, you know, a watering livestock or
irrigating crops if necessary. So water management was first order of business.
Just quickly, do you do much crop irrigation or do you mostly expect your crops to rely on
like stored soil moisture? The crops are predominantly, you know, rain-fed and soil moisture
fed. Two different, three now, three different seasons I've irrigated new tree seedlings when
they're put in the ground because it hadn't rained. On this property here from February
until third week of September of this year, we had 0.7 inches of rain. That's just a little
over a centimeter of rain. Everything was just cooked. It's a federal disaster drought area,
blah, blah, blah. And yet I had green grass all the way through and I never had to feed the cattle
any hay until they went off the freezer camp. So a little bit about the summers is they can be
gray drizzly and it never stops raining. I think it was like four or five years ago we had like 72
inches of rain in the year. So twice the normal rainfall that was for two years in a row. So in
most farms once the soil is saturated that water just runs away and it's gone and so they didn't
gain anything from that. Well here, you know, we stored up so much that a whole bunch of springs
woke up that were never around before and I'm pretty sure that it's all that banked moisture
in the soil that has helped us to get through this year. That and then of course the deep rooted trees
from chestnuts and hazelnuts and so on. Temperatures in the summertime for your
celsius people, somebody please do the conversion. Our record high here was 116 degrees. This summer
we were 110 degrees, that's Fahrenheit, screaming hot. That's 46 degrees celsius. I think that's
hotter than we've had here in Australia in the subtropics. It's pretty terrible, it was really
terrible. You know and then because we're so far north we get like 20 hours of day in the summertime
and so you're like you know 95 degrees Fahrenheit at like 8, 10 o'clock at night, just brutal heat.
Summer wasn't so hot, it was only 110. That was kind of almost pleasant. So 40 and 40 below is the
same as 40 below. Fahrenheit and celsius are the same there so you guys know how cold that is.
So it's quite an extreme range of temperatures so that's kind of like what the plants have to deal
with. I'm thoroughly impressed with the work that you do mass selecting to be productive under those
conditions. It's quite amazing. Well and I would like to defer from me. You think about it, this is
how this planet was designed, adapted, evolved, created. Who knows how the heck this planet got
here. This is how it operates. That's the nature operating system and it has been doing just fine,
thank you very much, for you know hundreds of thousands to millions to zillions of years.
Whatever reference material you're reading, it has always operated quite well and the mass selection
process is how nature does it. The tree puts out a zillion seeds, the ones that actually can survive,
thrive, and then reproduce, those are the ones that pass their genes on to the next generation.
Now suddenly that plant is adapted to that region and its offspring have the traits that allowed it
to thrive in that region. So that's not my work, I'm just imitating nature, that's all.
And probably accelerating things as well by bringing genetics together that otherwise would
take thousands of years to cross paths. And that is the human difference there is that we can now
be active participants in this ecological system. We can observe for traits and we can concentrate
the traits that we find favorable to us for the food, the pest and disease resistance,
productivity, and yes we can now transport you know seeds and cuttings from afar and have
new combinations that never existed before. How do you deal with weeds? Like when you're
establishing new trees do you do much in terms of weed control? What I'll do is I'll mow,
usually we'll plant the trees into old pasture that's been scalp mowed and then you just knife
the trees in and turn them loose, that's it. Maintenance is at best is getting mowed on either
side once or twice a year. There's just, I didn't tell you how many acres, it's 110 acres so 45,
50 hectares somewhere in that ballpark. That's on this property and there's other properties that I
have my fingers in. And if you think about it, if you think about an orchard in the classic sense
of the word, there's a lot of work, a lot of equipment that's necessary for that. Whereas
if you think of a natural system, we don't need any equipment, we don't need any special skills,
we can just let it be and let it grow. And so the labor to keep this system productive is
hardly anything compared to the labor in an orchard and the inputs are practically zero,
really practically zero. We use animals, cattle and hogs for grazing, so for any kind of weeds
and grass controls, that goes back to the weed control question. They're also obviously nutrient
cycling, accumulating nitrogen fertilizer in the right place at the right time. Some of the things
that cattle do, and I'll use apples as an example, in the fall of the year when the grass doesn't
grow as fast, it's still warm enough that we've got green grass, but it's not really growing fast.
And the apples and other fruits start to drop their leaves. Well, any leaves that had apple scab
lesions on them fall to the ground. Cows are hungry, they eat it all up. They're cleaning up
the orchard floor for me, they get rid of any kind of apple scab that are there. They also eat any
apples that are on the ground. How we harvest is we don't harvest apples and then bring them to a
packing shed where you grade them and sort them and then have to deal with the ones that you grade
out. We just grade in the field, only the good apples come in for us to use for whatever purposes
we're using them for, and then we let the rest fall to the ground where the pigs and the cattle
can eat them. So you can't let the apples fall to the ground because then all those pests will
come out pupate and live in the soil and come out and have worse pests next year. It's like, well,
no, they don't last more than a day or two. We go through a block, we pick a block, the ones that
have bugs, we throw them on the ground. And afterward done harvesting that block, the animals
go in, boom, there's not an apple on the ground. So they're short-circuiting the disease cycle
by eating diseased branches and leaves. And they're short-circuiting the pest cycle by eating all these
fruit that have larvae inside of it. One thing that you were really useful in inspiring me is
the advantage of growing your own tree seedlings and planting them out as small as possible.
Could you tell me a bit more about that particular strategy and technique compared to the usual way
that people think you buy this, you know, meter high tree to dig a huge hole and plant? Well,
by putting the smaller trees in the ground, and typically the trees that we plant, they're one
year in a nursery bed, one summer, one growing season in a nursery bed. And probably their 12
to 18 inches is the average height of these trees. Some of the trees, chestnuts especially, some of
them will get up to like, you know, a meter high, but you know, that's the exception. And so they're
less expensive to purchase if you're going to be purchasing them, if they're small. And we just
knife them into the ground and we don't amend the soil at all unless there's a massive mineral
imbalance. There are some places that, you know, certain elements are way out of whack and we, you
know, we have amended with minerals on occasion. Our big issue here is the calcium magnesium ratio
is such that the extra magnesium prevents the uptake of a lot of nutrients and it causes the
soil to really stick and it's a real hard sticky soil. I've got exactly the same issue here.
And so what we have done on occasions is amend with Idaho rock phosphate, which is calcium
phosphorus, not very soluble and it persists for a long time. It has to be basically broken down by
going through the gut of some kind of soil organism. So other than that, we don't do anything.
And we plant high density in the rows on when we're doing a planting of what we'll call canopy
trees, which are anything that's going to be like head high or taller. We'll put those at two meter
spacing. Anything that is a shrub species, we'll put in at one meter spacing. But here on the home
farm, because we generate so many seedlings, oftentimes I'll put them in at like 18 inch,
so half a meter between trees. Because end of the nursery season, we're selling all kinds of trees.
I've got all these leftovers. I'm going to put them in at my place. I put them in real close.
There's a couple of blocks here I've done that were 18 inch spaces between trees,
a double row, one meter wide. So that was a stem density of about 4,000 stems an acre.
So if you plant chestnuts, according to the way that the universities in the USA say that you
should plant chestnuts, you have almost 65 or 70 plants per acre. Now out of those 65 or 70 plants,
let's say you lose 20% of them. Now you're down to 40 plants per acre. What kind of production
you're going to get out of 40 plants per acre? And they start to produce pretty young. Really,
you'll start to get some nuts at year three. By year five or seven, you got reasonable yields
from this, but you've had this huge space, 10 meters of space in between trees that could have
been producing a handful of nuts each. And instead of buying grafted cultivars, it may cost you 30,
40 US dollars. Now you can buy seedlings. Oh, you don't have seedlings. The variability is crazy.
Well, that's exactly why we want them. We want to have these wildly variable seedlings that will
cross with one another. And then now all of a sudden, once the trees start to compete with
one another, their branches are running into each other. I now say, well, I like this one.
It has all the characteristics that I want, but the one right next to it doesn't really. So I now
cut it down, inoculate it with shiitake mushrooms. I got a yield by thinning out my trees instead of
an expense of taking care of these trees and not producing as much. There was one block of chestnut
trees. It was one of the first times I ever got flamed by a PhD up on stage. I claimed that I was
making $4,000 per acre growing chestnuts my very first season. And that person just ripped me all
kinds of new orifices. I never said that I made $4,000 worth of chestnuts. I said I made $4,000
per acre growing chestnuts. And I was making the $4,000 an acre with produce, mushrooms, pigs,
cattle, and chestnuts. And I did actually get quite a few chestnuts because that was the block
where I put them in 18 inches apart, one meter between double rows. I had 4,000 stems per acre.
I probably got 30, 40 pounds of chestnuts, maybe 50 pounds of chestnuts on an acre in year one.
I never would have found chestnuts that were that precocious if I had planted 60 chestnuts per acre
and waited for them. Because what if I picked the 60 wrong chestnut? Are you familiar with the dice
game Yahtzee? Yes. Yes. You have five dice. And if you roll five of a kind, you get a Yahtzee. Now,
planting 50 chestnuts per acre, 60 chestnuts per acre, is like playing Yahtzee with three dice.
Here's three dice. Go ahead, roll those three dice. Can you ever get five of a kind with three dice?
Nope. You're set up to lose. Well, then maybe you can improve your yield by adding this to your soil
or spraying that or buying this new piece of equipment that will do this and that. That's the
game that we're being told wholesale is the way that we're supposed to do things. And that's
purely a concept that is not in synchrony with nature and how this planet works.
This planet works by putting out a zillion seeds and then letting natural processes and humans are
a part of nature. We're going to select for the ones that meet our criteria. Do you have any tree
species that you figured out how to do direct sowing? Oh, oh yeah. It's especially easy with
real hard shelled ones. We have a black walnut here in the US. It's almost impossible to crack.
So black walnut, butternut. Actually a friend and I, he worked for the USDA at the time and we
designed a single row tree seed drill. And that all you do is you change the size of the opening
on this. It's a big drum. You put a hopper on top, fill it full of seeds and then the drum will pick
up the seeds and drop it in a slot behind a knife. We did that, geez, like 20 years ago or so. And
I've got probably a third of this property is all direct seeded. Yeah. It's something that I can see
a huge amount of potential for. Like it's the ultimate extreme of reducing the investment per
tree and to maximize the amount of selection that happens in the process. Yeah. The only issue with
that, because what happened is after we came up with that machine, because he worked for the USDA,
we tried to get direct seeding acceptable as a technique to be used in the conservation reserve
program here in the States where they encourage farmers to plant trees. So we did all kinds of
different research blocks, various different locations. Some people were broadcasting with a
Whirly Gig broadcast seeder and that worked fine too. What was found out though to be critical
with direct seeding is that if you did not have stellar weed control, your rodent populations
would explode and you'd up lots of your seeds and seedlings. And so for the conservation reserve
program, it eventually got approved as a practice, but you had to agree to use herbicide to keep the
weeds down because you didn't get enough trees. And I was the control plot in that. And so I
was the control plot in that where we used no herbicides. We had one, two, three, four different
direct seed plots on this property and used no herbicide. It's the first time I ever saw deer
rooting in the ground as if they were pigs. They just went right down the row. They found that slot
and they just ate them all up. And after the three years of the research project was over,
we had to go out and they put some random 10 by 10 meter grid and you got to get on your hands,
count all the seedlings that you see, and it had to come up to the equivalent of 600 stems per acre
or it's not allowable. And on those particular plots here, aside from the walnut, black walnut
plot was just fine. We couldn't find 600 stems per acre. So I hung my head. I was totally depressed.
It's like, I wanted us to have some sort of non-chemical organic alternative to direct
seeding side. This isn't going to work. So I planted a whole bunch of my Korean pines on
one of my direct seeded sites. And lo and behold, to this day, there's probably 1,200, 1,300 of the
species that we were looking for, but the mice and the deer were clipping them off at ground level
and you just never saw them. And once it started to get established a little bit longer, they built
up more root reserves. They jumped. There's probably three times as many stems per acre
as required for a CR, but we just didn't have the 100% take that they wanted.
It's one of my favorite places on the farm because it's so randomized, species to species,
you just kind of wander through here going from various different nut tree to
nut tree and never find something that crazy diverse in nature.
One point I would make up that direct sowing tree seeds in particular, I think the
success rate that you get year to year is going to be really, really variable due to changing climate
and pest pressure. It's almost like how nesting is supposed to work that you can only get away
with doing it once in a blue moon. That's right. That makes total sense.
Makes total sense. Now, can you tell me a bit more about your main crop breeding projects,
like the species that you work with, the goals, how you sourced your original material,
cultivation, pollination, selection strategies? I'll throw it completely open to you.
Well, the primary species that I work with, the heavy hitters are chestnuts and hazelnuts.
That was my focus from early on on purpose because I was looking for a perennial substitute
for corn and beans. The chestnut being the high carbohydrate and the hazelnut being the high
protein with extra oil. Other species I'm working with, we have actually USDA growing zone eight
Persian walnuts that are actually growing on this farm here. USDA growing zone four most of the time,
but every 10 or 15 years we get a test winter down to minus 40. That's USDA growing zone three.
These trees have been surviving minus 40 for decades now. Once again, what I was selecting
for was hyperpreococity, cold hardiness, pest and disease resistance. Well, with hazelnuts,
because they've responded so quickly, chestnuts not quite as quickly as hazelnuts. With the hazelnuts,
we're doing diameter selection now. If you look at a hazelnut shrub, it's a shrub, it's not a tree.
European hazel is a large shrub that Europeans and Americans in Oregon, they train to be a tree
and it's not really a tree. They're adding extra work. We let it grow as a shrub. If you look at
a hazelnut shrub and you see no hazelnut clusters on it, that's a zero on our one to five scale.
If you look at a hazelnut and there's a hazelnut at every single cluster, at every single node
and the plant is almost laying on the ground, that's a five. We grade all of the different
plants by yield productivity on a scale of one to five. They get marked, go through second year,
do the one to five again. Then we go through the third year, marking a one to five. Then what
happens is you look at the flags. If you had a flag as you were a heavy bearer, a four or a five
this year, well, next year, if we go there and there's no nuts on you, we pull that flag
because that means you've got this alternate bearing characteristic going on and we don't
want that. Then if you actually get three flags in a row, you're a four or a five heavy yielder
and at least show a glimmer of annual bearing every single year. Then what happens, the fourth
year is we go through and we do a diameter, a caliper on all the different nuts and we keep
selecting through the years for a larger and larger average diameter per nut that are on those bushes.
The hazels are the ones that we've done the most breeding work on because they've responded so
quickly, they really have. In the past 15 years of doing this with the hazelnuts, we've increased
the kernel diameter by four millimeters. If you realize that kernel is a sphere, you increase by
four millimeters, it's a cubic relationship to the volume. The volume has dramatically increased
per kernel on that plant. Those are the most intense ones that I work with. Asian pears are
my favorite. It's probably had the lowest, I don't know what you call it, the lowest amount of good
plants that come out of the seedlings. First of all, Asian pears won't grow in this part of the
US because it's too cold. I immediately went to the grocery store and I got Asian pears that were
grown in California, cut them open, save the seed, let them grow a year and grafted those little twigs
on top of already existing European pear rootstock and then you turn them loose. I think out of
probably at least a couple thousand seedling Asian pears, there's two that are edible. One of them is
fantastic. It's an amazing, just an amazing Asian pear. It's a little bit smaller than what you
would see at a supermarket and you touch it to your teeth and it seems hard as a rock,
but you bite through that skin because we have incisors. It's the most juiciest, sweetest Asian
pear you ever did taste. It's unbelievable and it survives minus 40. It's an amazing plant.
I'm curious, how did you source your original material that you got started with for your
chestnuts and your hazelnuts? How I sourced the original material, that was way back before the
days of internet. What you do is you get a nursery catalog from one place and then you
talk to the person there and find out who else has whatever, wherever else it is. I would get
seedlings from the conservation grade seedlings and some of their varieties from everywhere I
possibly could from Southwest USA, California, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota down through
Missouri and then I was Virginia, Tennessee, Ohio, Massachusetts. A couple from Canada.
I got as wide a range of genetics that I could back in the day. Now with the internet, I can
get stuff almost anywhere. I just have it shipped in and I almost have a little bit of a perverse
sense of pride. You read these descriptions, oh, super cold hearted this is like, and you're in
Missouri and you're telling me something is cold hearted, excuse me. I have a certain sense of
pride in buying nursery stock from people and killing it. Have you noticed the effect that
once you get genetics through the first generation that it often seems to go through
some kind of reprogramming to make it more adapted to the local conditions?
You're touching on something that resonates, but I don't exactly know what you mean. What do you
mean? Because it used to be somewhat difficult to get stuff to survive and thrive and do well,
but now it's like stuff just grows. Almost like I can't kill it. Is that part of what you mean?
Yeah. When you buy a grafted tree from somewhere else, getting it to maturity and then producing
seeds is often very hit and miss, can be a bit of a struggle. But once you have that first generation
of seeds and you germinate them locally, even if there haven't been dramatic genetic changes,
there seems to be something that happens in that early germination process that allows the plant
to go through some kind of reprogramming. Now, I think how you're phrasing it is what
interferes with the scientist in me and that's okay. But I have noticed a similar phenomenon
and that the original material that I get just doesn't seem to mature and get ready to produce
as quickly as seedling stock from stuff that's been bred on site. Why that is, let's just leave
that out. Let's just say I have experienced that as well. And so why that is, I don't know. One of
the reasons why I think that's possible here is that my plants are, you can't call them anything
other than hybridized because you've got this kind of hazelnut and that kind of hazelnut,
five, six, I've got European chestnuts, Chinese chestnuts, American chestnuts,
hybrids from 50 different nurseries all over the place plus my own stuff. They are mutts of mutts.
Yeah. And I think that probably also has something to do with it.
See, I was going to say what? I'm not sure and I don't care. I want performance. As long as they're
performing, that's great. One of the favorite questions for me to field on farm tours, there'll
be this tree that's dead or just falling apart. It's horrible. Even the people are like, oh my,
what's wrong with that tree? I say, who cares? Who cares? I'm very much leaning towards being a,
what's the word, like a biological agnostic. It's like there are so many things going on inside an
organism and it's really fascinating when a scientist announces some new discovery.
But so what? It works. It has worked for billions of years. Let's just find ways of making it work
for us. Yeah. Just recently, this is not related to plant breeding, but I do a lot of work in Africa
and we found this research that if you have three termite mounds per hectare of ag field,
your crop yield increases by 30%. So the conclusion of this scientific research is,
therefore we need to find out what is it that these termites are doing so we can come up with
a spray that we can now add to our fields to get 30% and what moron thought of that?
How about have termite mounds in your ag fields and deal with it? Have we missed talking about
anything that you would like to cover? Because you focus, I think, probably more talking about
the production and the design side of things, but we're really interested in the breeding side of
the equation. I want to go back to your biological, botanical, agnostic thing. There is so much that
we can know. So much that we can know. And of all the different research and things that I read,
I can't give you a percent because somebody will get on my case about it, but so much of it is
absolutely unnecessary. It doesn't really matter one bit. What matters to you and what matters to
me is that these plants are thriving. They're growing. They're reproducing. They're healthy.
They're nutritious. One of the things that has been discovered is that the trees that send off
pest attacks more often have more phytonutrients in it that help us to prevent cancer and other
various different diseases. They're better for our immune system. That's all that I care about is
that these things are doing okay. And that factor is probably something that a human being, without
any training, can tell by taste. If you gave them the choice of the better and the worst product,
most human beings would be able to, or at least you could train people quite easily to recognize
it. Actually, a lot of those compounds are the bittering compounds. And that's actually where
a lot of the research came from on that connection between the phytochemicals in food is that the
more pest resistant and disease resistant the plant, the more bitter and nasty it tasted to people.
And that's probably why it is not tasty to pests either. It's got all these different things in it.
But those are the compounds that we need for our own disease resistance. Joe Robinson,
eating on the wild side is a place that cites a lot of research related to that.
So Mark, if you could work wonders with any species, what would you create?
Oh, you ready for this? I've got gray hair in my beard. You guys see it. I kind of wouldn't mind
fiddling with coffee and cocoa. And if you can imagine having like Minnesota grown coffee or,
you know, Canadian cocoa, and there are variants that are found in high elevations, super cold,
super hot. All we've got to do is go out and find them. So that would take care of a couple of my
things that I like to do is take care of my travel bug, go around the world finding examples of
serious high elevation coffee and cocoa, and then the whole plant breeding thing and start breeding
selecting for coffee and cocoa that's adaptable to cold climates. And you think about how easy it is
to negatively select against, you know, the plants that can't tolerate cold, you just plant them out
there. And if they freeze off over the winter, they aren't the ones. Yep, they're just making
room for planting more. That's right. There's a little bit coffee and cocoa, that'd be my,
that would be fun. There's a precedence here. I recently learned that quirkets, the oaks,
and to wear until recently a tropical genus. And it was only during one of the ice age ice sheet
retreats, that a group of them started hybridizing and developing cold tolerance and following the
ice sheets north. Cool. Yeah, another thing to that, you know, it's not on the breeding side of
things. But if you look at papaya, it produces 85 zillion seeds per fruit. It starts, they start to
fruit in three or four months, we could start growing papayas as an annual plant in many parts
of the temperate world, just put them in the field to grow for months, it's like corn, you know,
except we're getting papayas instead of corn. With your work with hazelnuts and chestnuts,
do you ever think it might be comparable to the history of Tia Sinte being turned into corn,
that there could be a transformation of those species to make them, like they're still semi wild,
in their form, and humans adapt technologically to using them as a food source. But the guy,
the guy who actually was the one who discovered the link of corn maize and Tia Sinte, was Dr. Hugh
Iltis at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He's probably deceased now, but I met with him and
conversed with him on several different occasions. He just absolutely thrilled with the stuff that
I'm doing. And some of the things that he pointed out to me, this was, you know, a decade ago,
anyways, the corn genome is tiny compared to the genome of various different woody plants,
and especially chestnut, he did all whatever research he wanted to do on it. So if you got
this huge genome, the possibilities for recombination are just astronomically more than what Tia Sinte
ever had going for it. And that's why we need to do the mass selection, as many seedlings as we
possibly can, as fast as we can, like the ones that, you know, that I've got these two family
lines that they come up out of the seed and they flower right away. That's with the chestnuts,
you know, and the two-year hazelnuts. What if we have, we don't even know the expressions,
who would have thought looking at Tia Sinte that it would turn into the corn that we see,
you know, growing over half the USA. We have no idea what's in there. We just need to roll
the dice more often and see what comes out. And it's fun.
And people like you have done the really difficult early stage of bringing genetics together and
mixing it. Now that you're sharing that germplasm with other people around the world, like that's
the easy next step. And part of what we're also doing too is the first step is to get the
the forest agriculture nursery, forestag.com, is where a network of nursery growers that do
mass selection breeding. And we all have all these different seed sites from southern sites, you know,
middle latitude sites, northern sites, we'll gather all the seed, grow them at a couple of
different nurseries in different locations just to get those plants out of the ground.
So when you're buying, you know, tree or shrub seedlings from forestag, you're getting seeds,
seedlings that were bred this way. This is how we keep doing it. Now that, you know,
if we're sending out hundreds of thousands of plants per year, how many more new genetic
experiments are happening in everybody's backyards and fields and farms? It's, I think, really,
really encouraging part. And it's an important part of assisted migration. With crazy,
fine climate, we have no idea which way things are going. Are we going to go to an ice age? We're
going to go to a steam bath? Are we going to go to a desert? We need as many genetic variations out
there as possible to survive whatever next year throws at us in the next year, in the next year.
So it's that part of what I like about it is how many people can be involved and how many people
can be involved doing really, really critically important work. Can you tell us more about
Forestag? It's an edible woody crops nursery by plants, forestag.com.
Sweet, thank you. Yeah, we have a network of growers and we have one genius with growing plants.
He can take a seed and turn it into this monstrously beautiful seedling in one year.
So Tom is my primary nursery manager guy and he takes care of the various different places.
We have places where we're doing grow out of our seedling pool. So there's the seedling pool and
this is the composite population of all the hazelnuts that have gone through this program.
All of our species, we do it this way, but I'm using hazelnuts as an example because it's the
most developed. Then out of that pool, we'll take cuttings from certain ones and they're now cultivars.
Well, then we also take seedlings from our elites and then the elite seedlings, we pair
elite A with elite B based on their characteristics. And so those are out in separate breeding plots.
And then there are some that we have taken, we've got seven different controlled cross breeding
plots where we have parent A and parent B that they cross and we know it's an F1 hybrid. We know
who each parent was and we can track the transfer of traits. What is interesting is our original
controlled cross seedling line came out in 2012 and it no longer performs as well as the general
population. Once upon a time, it outperformed the general population because it came from the best
plants. Well, as another 10 years go by, the breeding in the seedling population has continued
whereas the controlled cross plot stays the same and we have exceeded the performance of the
controlled crosses, that original controlled cross. And our other ones, we're still, what we do,
as soon as we start getting seed from them, the controlled crosses, we plant them out. Parent A
gets planted here, parent B gets there, then we evaluate to see which ones perform the best.
And then we take those and for example, our controlled crosses now, the 2012 ones, we only
sell seedlings from parent A because the seedlings from parent B lost the fast, the hyperprecocity
trait. We don't know what happened to it. It's gone. It's not in that. So we don't use parent B
as a seedling source. We just sell those for people to eat the nuts. Another big question,
what is your vision for the future of food in your community? It depends on where my community is
because I'm really becoming an ecological, planetary community guy. And so this planet is
my community. So the future of food, how I would like to see it, is more decentralized,
networked individuals controlling their own destiny and their own breeding of their own plants and
foods and exchanging that material with people instead of controlled by legislation, by big
business and by the academic elite that say, this is the only way that you can do it. And here's the
statistics and data to show that because all they want is royalties from plants to keep funding the
research that they're doing. I don't want to see a food system that's controlled by somebody owning
the genetics to your plants and somebody that's preventing your right to produce your own food
and create your own habitat. I'd like to see a world of decentralized, imitating nature,
restoration agriculture type farms, every hill and valley everywhere.
Brilliant. So you mentioned restoration agriculture. That's one of the books that you wrote?
Correct. That's the first book that I wrote. And if I thought it would win three literary awards
and become an Amazon bestseller, I would have done a better job at it. It was first released in 2013,
or 2013, I believe it is. The basic premise is that we imitate natural plant community types.
And I'll just pick one because I already mentioned chestnuts and hazelnuts. Well, the oak plant
community type, oaks are almost always found with a whole series of other plants with it. Now,
oaks are fagaceae, so aren't chestnuts and so are beets. So they will live with the same companion
plants. We'll call them companion plants. So with oaks, you'll find prunus, which are cherries,
which are either tall tree cherries, medium sized trees, bushes, or prostrate growing cherries.
They grow well with malice and cretagus, which are all rosaceae, they're in the rose family. And then
hazelnut is the dominant shrub in that system, currants and gooseberries, grapes, then grasses
and flowers that grow all around. And who hangs out with the grasses are the herbivores that would
graze on all that grass. And of course, there's so much biomass being produced that there's the
decomposition cycle, all the different fungi that are growing with that. So if we think about going
from tallest to shortest, we can grow chestnuts, cherries, apples, hazelnuts, plums, apricots,
currants, gooseberries, grapes, mushrooms, grass, cattle, hogs, ducks, all in the same place. And
they're all eating different parts of the environment. We can have the animals take care
of the system for us, and then we eat the fruits and the nuts and the berries off the trees.
And of course, eat the fungus. I think I eat mushrooms probably every day of the year. There's
so much wood around here that's decomposing. It's amazing that we can take carbon and turn it into
protein. That's an absolute miracle. So you don't have to eat the animals if you don't want to.
There's all kinds of plants in the system, but the animals are essential for management and
nutrient cycling. And thank you. And I think you wrote two other books as well. Could you give us
a brief overview of those? One of them is Water for Any Farm, and basically describes how to
manage rainfall and runoff on your farm. This is my whole farm. I'm living on New Forest Farm.
I started with attempting to follow the protocols set up by P. A. Yeomans in his book, Water for
Every Farm, the Keyline Design Protocol. And it didn't take me long to realize that it wasn't
really workable the way it was written out. And I found out the reason why is that Australia is a
very hydrologically simple continent with no more than a third order stream. And so the math and the
geometry that describes Australia works everywhere in Australia, but it doesn't work in the Mississippi
River Basin, which is the most complex. I think it's a 10 or 11th order stream, and it just doesn't
work here. It's too crazy. So then my third book is the Water for Any Farm Engineering Field Manual.
So if you are going to manage water on your property with swales and berms,
terrace channels, water and sediment control basin, ponds, that sort of stuff, if you're going to do
that, you better do it right. Because if you capture a whole bunch of rain in a big rainfall event,
and there's blowouts, you can cause problems downstream. So the engineering field manual
explains how you can set up a rainfall runoff management system on your property, following
everything that is written about in that book is compatible with USDA agricultural runoffs and water
management guidelines. And if you run it by local municipalities and states that may have different
water boards and litigation, they can follow that and see that it tracks with USDA and you can find
a way to meet in the middle and design a system that's safe and effective at the same time.
Wonderful. So final opportunity for an end plug. How can people learn more about what you're doing
or get in touch with you if you're open to that? I'm guessing you're pretty busy. So maybe that's
not the easiest thing to do. The way to do that to get in touch with me or to learn more and go to
restorationag.com. And that is Restoration Agriculture Development, where we help people
design and install water managed agroforestry systems. Part of that is Restoration Agriculture
dot com, which is an online course that was recorded a number of years ago that discusses
the basic ecology of how and why restoration agriculture systems work and how to interact
with them in order for them to function properly. And then probably the best way to learn something
quick, depending on how fast you get this podcast out, is to go to Acres USA. I think it's dot com.
That's my publisher. And this December at the annual conference in Covington, Kentucky,
I'll be doing all day training restoration agriculture type systems. And then I'll be doing
later on in the conference, like a one hour, hour and a half presentation on water opportunities
with the water management system. So Acres USA dot com. Brilliant. I'll put all of those links
in the description. That'll be great. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us
and tell us more about the amazing work that you're doing. You're welcome. And thank you.
Thank you, Mark. I think you guys are amazing. And hey, everybody, this is really easy. Get
involved. Plant trees. Plant way too many trees. Way too many. Way more than you think is prudent.
And then the ones that don't do well, let them die. Don't sweat it. We want the ones that
thrive. Before you go, I wanted to say thank you for years ago when I was starting on my farm,
Mark, I sent you an email and you encouraged me to look for local species to work with.
And you were crucial in giving the final push to get working with our local bunion nuts. So
I think, yeah, I'm in the middle of bunion nut territory. So I've been collecting remnant
genetic diversity and introducing a South American species to hybridize the species.
So that's my big life's project to keep. Is the South American species also a bunion?
It's the piranha pine, but it's in the same genus. So it's one of the Gondwan and sisters.
So basically I'm doing a mass genetic hybridization and then, you know, hopefully
before I die, I can send that seed all over the world to help found new domestic populations.
You just gave me goosebumps all over. It's awesome. That is so awesome.
I love hearing that shit. That is so awesome. And one of the things we need to address that needs
talking about is soil. Trees don't need soil for crying out loud. They're growing on the sides of
cliffs. They make the soil. You don't even have to be constrained with good soil. Geez.
No, it's all good. It's good. I just wanted to take that moment to say thank you because yeah,
that's like I'm in my forties now and I have 40 acres of land in Australia in the right location.
And who else would have the time and the interest and the patience and the opportunity to do that
kind of project to try and domesticate what's very much a wild species at this stage. And yeah,
hopefully if I can get it through that first hybridization event, that hybrid swarm can be
the foundation for a whole new crop. I don't think that it's complete, complete domesticity
that we're looking for. I'm looking for a wild product. It's a wild product.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally agree there. I totally agree there. Thank you so much again for
your time. And who knows maybe in a few years time if this podcast is still going, we can check back
in with you. That'd be great. And thanks for sending the book. Was it you Joseph that sent that or?
Yes. All right. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. You're welcome. You've been an inspiration
over the years. So glad to talk with you in person. Glad to meet you guys as well. Okay. Well,
we'll catch up another time. All right. Okay. See you guys. See you. Bye. Bye.