Episode one of the second season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast

This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks – who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it.

In this episode, host Rachel Hultengren spoke with Andrew Still of Adaptive Seeds and the Seed Ambassadors Project about his work in seed-saving, open-pollinated variety maintenance and the process of what he refers to as ‘dehybridization’. Their conversation focuses on ‘Gypsy Queens’, a variety of pepper that Andrew developed and pledged to be open-source.

Andrew Still

Episode links

Find Gypsy Queens seed at the Adaptive Seeds website.

Learn more about the:

Seed Ambassadors Project: www.seedambassadors.org/.

Northern Organic Vegetable Improvement Collaborative (NOVIC): http://eorganic.info/novic/

Culinary Breeding Network: https://www.culinarybreedingnetwork.com/

Free the Seed! Listener Survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TY73HXS

Episode glossary

Hybrid: a variety produced by the intentional crossing two distinct, stable parental lines or varieties. Commercially available hybrid varieties are generally highly uniform (individuals in the population will all have the same characteristics) because the individuals are all highly genetically similar. (Hybrid varieties are also often referred to as F1-hybrids.)

F1: the first-generation progeny (offspring) of a parental cross. The ‘F’ stands for ‘filial’.

F2: the second generation progeny of a parental cross. Produced by saving self-pollinated seed from F1 plants.

F3: the third generation progeny of a parental cross. Produced by saving self-pollinated seed from F2 plants.

Open-pollinated variety: a population wherein the seed from individuals that have been crossed with other individuals of the same population will produce progeny that are characteristically similar to those parents and the population in general.

Off-type: an individual plant whose characteristics do not fit the variety description.

Rogue: remove from the field individual plants are diseased, or that either don’t fit with the variety description (if the individual is a member of a well-defined variety) or the project goals (if part of a plant breeding project) in order to keep them from contributing genetic material to the next generation (i.e. so that seeds aren’t saved off them).

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Free the Seed! Transcript for S2E1: Gypsy Queens

Rachel Hultengren: Welcome to episode one of the second season of Free the Seed!, the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast that tells the stories of new crop varieties and the plant breeders that develop them. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren.  If you're new to the podcast, consider checking out previous episodes from our first season. If you’d like to learn more about the Open Source Seed Initiative’s history and mission, I talk with Dr. Irwin Goldman and Dr. Claire Luby in episode 2 about intellectual property rights in crops.

In this episode, I spoke with Andrew Still of Adaptive Seeds and the Seed Ambassadors Project about his work in seed-saving, open-pollinated variety maintenance and the process of what he refers to as ‘dehybridization’. Our conversation focuses on ‘Gypsy Queens’, a variety of pepper that Andrew developed and pledged to be open-source.

Early in the interview, Andrew mentions the Culinary Breeding Network and NOVIC, the Northern Organic Vegetable Improvement Collaborative. We’ll have links to both their websites in our show-notes.

Rachel: Hi Andrew – welcome to the show!