LIVE at ACRES 2018 with Ed Curry

Hi friends, this is John. I'm passionate about developing regenerative agriculture systems that improve soil health, produce crops that are completely resistant to diseases and insects, and produce food of such an exceptional quality that we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. I've been fortunate to meet many people with incredible knowledge and information about soil and plant systems. However, much of this knowledge and information is scattered all over the place. There are many incredible stories and a lot of knowledge that have not been widely shared. I founded Advancing eco Agriculture in 2006 to bring this knowledge together in a more coherent fashion and incorporate it into products and growing systems that growers can easily put into practice. It's my personal mission to have these regenerative agriculture systems become the mainstream globally, the status quo against which all other growing systems are compared to to achieve this goal, I want to share the knowledge that we have learned in the last decade and make it available to everyone. These concepts and principles about regenerative systems can be applied anywhere, and when they're properly applied, they will increase farm profitability and resilience to climate stress. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments or topics of ideas that you would like for me to discuss, please connect on social media or email me. JohnGenerativeAgriculturePodcast.com Be sure to sign up for our email list@regenerative AgriculturePodcast.com Hope you enjoy and thank you for listening.

Hi everyone. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast Live. Today is a special day. It's our first podcast live and I want to thank everyone for being here and being part of the live audience. We started the podcast in April and we've been fortunate to have amazing guests on surfacing, actionable information that growers can use on their farms in the field immediately, and we're dedicated to sharing that information. I'm Jeff from aea. AEA and John Kemp collaborate and produce this podcast and so I'll tell you a little bit about what we're doing here today and then I'm going to introduce John and Ed, who are going to be taking the stage and recording a live podcast right here. So Podcast Live basically is something we do to record a podcast in front of and as part of the live audience so there'll be some great conversation on stage and then we're going to open it up for Q and A towards the end and you'll have an opportunity to come up on the mic and be part of the podcast. You know, any questions you say on the mic, we're going to add it to the podcast and we're going to release it tomorrow. So, you know, it's your stage to interact and to be part of the show. And we're going to go about an hour today, a little bit under, I think, probably 55 minutes. And thank you all again for coming. So without further ado, here today on stage is going to be John Kemp and Ed Curry. John Kemp is the founder of AEA and is a pioneer leader in regenerative agriculture. Ed Curry is an amazing grower. He provides, through Curry Farms and Curry seed in Chile, 90% of the seeds for green chilies worldwide. So this is really special to have Ed here. Also special is that they focus on open pollinated Mendelian genetics and been doing so for 40 years. So without further ado, here bring to the stage Ed Curry and John Kemp for the first ever regenerative agriculture podcast live.

Thanks, Jeff. Hi, friends, and welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. This is my. I've been hosting the podcast for several months now and I've had some amazing guests who say some of the most incredible things, which I'm very grateful for. But this is my first time doing an interview and interviewing a really great guest in front of a live audience. So I'm looking forward to the experience and looking forward to your interaction. I am really honored to have with us here today Ed Currie. Jeff provided a brief introduction of Ed and as he indicated, Ed is the only remaining open pollinated chili seed breeder in the world, has been breeding chili peppers with a Mendelian approach, meaning that he's using. He's phenotyping plants by eye, not by a machine. And he's specifically breeding for quality for a number of different quality quality characteristics and working to produce extremely high quality seeds. And I think in the agricultural space, developing high quality seeds is a topic that is very important and something that we haven't focused on enough collectively as a group and as a culture at this point. So I'm very excited to have Ed here with us. Ed, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here.

Thank you, John. It's an honor to be here. I'm humbled by this. I gotta tell y', all, I'm a dirt farmer just like most of you. And I will start with this. I love what I do. I was trained by the best, Mr. Phil Villa, Ben Vilon, Everett Wood. I've been under several really good pepper geneticists. The one thing we all had in common is it was our life, my growers, that I sell seed to take off Elk hunting and deer hunting. And I always tell them, you boys go hunt, I'm going to be looking for better chili. And that's what we spend. I've spent literally my life doing and I love. My mother and father moved from Oklahoma in 1952. They had just about starved out growing dry land, peanuts and cotton and wanted to find a better way, better place. And they found Silver Springs Valley and Arizona. And we're a closed basin irrigated farming system. We now use pivots and drip. Back when my dad first moved there, it was all for irrigated. But in 1957, my dad planted his first crop of chile. I was born in 1956, so our family's been in Chile virtually my whole life. In 1957 he didn't get a stand, so he really didn't have a chili crop. Determined. 1958, he planted again, made his first chili crop. It wasn't great, but he made it. Chile is one of the most diversified set of gene pools out there. A little over 30,000 genes. For a long time as they started mapping genomes, it we thought it was over 40, but now UC Davis has recently come out that we're looking at a gene pool of a little over 30,000. That being said, we do it just straight by the eye. I look at plant habit, I look at fruit shape, I look at fruit size. We even nail it down to little things on how the balloon sets, where the stamen is, where the pistil is. We look at the smallest things. And one of the things I love to tell John, I love to tell, this is Phil Villa who trained me. We lost Phil five years ago. And I love to tell this story as Phil. I was a very young man and he took me on the field and we're standing in about 60 acres of Chile. And he said, all right, you walk up there about 100 foot and he said, you tell me, you find me a hundred plants that are hot. And we were in a mile field. I couldn't go taste them, I couldn't lift the leaves and look at the chili. I had to do it strictly by eye. I stood there and I got 98 out of a hundred. When we left the field that day, Phil said, you get it? I'll never forget that. His point, look at the small things. And he had taught me long before I stood there and we did this test. He taught me about leaf shape, leaf size, pointed keel type leaf, many different things. But all these little things was he wanted me to learn as a young breeder look for the little things. And doesn't that fit in life as well? If we take care of the little things? My dad always said, take care of the little things, the big things will take care of themselves. Well, plant breeding is certainly true. And so my team, I've developed a team through the years that we have. Manuel Cervantes and David Carton will work with me there on the farm. Rosanna Zuniga, who is our business manager but also started right in the field with us. Everybody on my team has been with us many, many years, over 20. And the idea here is that we love what we do and so our lives, we grow, our entertainment. We don't have to go hunt, we don't have to leave the farm. We just have to leave the house and just go into the first field on the farm and we watch it all year. And John, to your point, something John has brought to me is how important nutrients are to seed development to develop. I'm always on the search for better embryo development. In my chase down for this, it's hard for me to sit down and talk in my chase of a better quality seed and better genetics. We've been in Mexico several years farming great experiences, but I learned a lot. Went down to the coast. We were about 500 miles south of home there because Arizona is right against the border. We were about 500 miles south, right on the ocean. John the first thing I ran into, and the reason I went into Mexico, I might add, is in my early years I could gain a generation of seed. I could harvest in October. I could take that seed, go down and plant it right away and get another generation and come back home. And that was the whole idea. John first thing we did was I went from a soil ph of six and a half to seven, seven and a half, sometimes eight at the highest, very rare, to a soil ph of nine and a half, 10 right next to the ocean there. And started seeing how there were several differences in Mexico. Number one, we were growing wintertime, short daylight hours changed how the fruit looked. It was really hard to phenotype. This is all. As I look back, it was God's way of bringing my education, educational process into one. And I started realizing that the phenotyping was much different than just at home where I seen it. Basically my biggest customers are in Around Hatch, New Mexico, Deming, Las Cruces. That's my biggest fear. In California, we have a pretty good presence and we have a good presence in Texas and Colorado, not to mention about 40% of our sales are in Chihuahua, Mexico, a little bit in South Africa, a little bit in Chile, a little bit in the country of Peru. But all that being said is one thing that Phil taught me was we got to have a little bit of variability. If we don't have variability, we can't. If we hone it down to where it just basically grows good in our valley, it's not going to do good in other parts. So we always look for a little bit of diversification, a little bit of diversity in plant habit. And every time I'm telling you all now that I've been doing this 40 years, the one thing I know Phil was right on, every time I get it honed in too close to one type, it doesn't work. It'll work right there at home, but it won't work somewhere else. But if we've got a little bit of diversity, and this is the fun part of open pollinating, one thing you're going to get today when you leave, I think, I hope you know that I love what I do and I got to live to be 200 years old to finish all this. John, Ed, you've.

Your farming operation has really shifted and changed even in the short time that I've known you. Can you tell us a little bit about your actual farming operation, your farming, your cultural management practices, how you seek to things that you, the types of things that you seek to do to produce really high quality soil and how that has changed in the last decade?

Very much so, John. And that's one reason I mentioned the Mexico time. I knew early on that good fertility meant healthier seed. And I'm selling to growers that are direct seeding. Very few people transplant chili, they do, but as a whole we're direct seeding because in the Southwest it's so brutal. We get hard spring winds, we get all kinds of difficult weather, freezes. Most people don't know Chile will take about a 27 or 8 degree morning. As long as to your point, John, that seedling is really healthy. If it's not healthy, it won't take it. If it's healthy, it'll take it. So John, I knew early on we needed healthy seed. So John has brought me to a much better place. And not just trying to brag on him because he brought me upstage here, but part of how we found each other was I'm always looking for a better way, a better way to increase vigor and germination, all the things so that my growers start with a better advantage. And I will tell you in Cotton and chile, I don't know about know this end of the world of what you guys farm, but in the Southwest desert, you know what you're going to make within the first month. And I know that sounds a little bit crazy, but if you don't get that seed off to a good start, guys, sometimes, and ladies, sometimes, I've seen it take up to 30, 35 days to get a seedling out of the ground. Anytime it takes that long, I can tell that grower he's not going to have a really, really good crop. He'll make chili, but he's not going to make the best chili. On the other hand, if we get it out of the ground in 10, 15 days, we're going to make a crop. At least we've got a good chance.

Ed, I think that's a very interesting point considering the fact that I've had conversations with grain crops producers in the Midwest the last number of years who are attempting to germinate seed grain corn right out of the bag. Taking it into the greenhouse in a greenhouse environment and in an optimal greenhouse environment is taking 14 to 20 days to germinate. I think that's a problem for a corn seed and that's. We have had such a substantial deterioration of seed quality within the industry at large. And I'd love to hear a bit more about what are some of the specific things that you're doing to try to increase seed quality to speed up that germination time.

Well, John, to that point, some of the stuff you brought to us in the beginning, the, the inferral, I can't think of the name of some of those products, but the inferral products that bounce it out of the ground. One of the sessions this morning, I believe specifically talked about seed treatment. I think it was Gary Zimmer and he talked about having healthy biology on your seed. And we have definitely found that biology on the seed early on makes gives us a much better start. The first real thing we seen with a products in the beginning was 10 days earlier fruiting. 10 days. That's huge guys. And anytime you've got earliness, you've got better plant health every time.

Ed, what are some of the personal moments in your own personal journey that brought you to seeking to make a change in your farming operation?

Well, it's mental condition, John. You guys get my humor. You know, I'm a farmer, you know, need head exam. Especially every year we have to go back to the bank, you know, kind of go in there jittery. Well, it's going to work next year. You know, he's got to where he says, ah, go on, you know, I know it'll work. But John, to your point, five and a half years ago, I had a pre cancerous situation in my esophagus. Sometimes I wondered if it was from tasting so many hot chilies because part of our work is in heat. And we genetically altered cancer capsaicin on a couple of our varieties that we call it the mean heat. It's the anhydrous and dihydros. If you do the scopal testing on it is very different. And it attacks. I feel almost certain that's part of what caused my trouble. But at the end of the day. And by the way, I'm not the only breeder that I've talked to that had health problems from tasting fruit and doing certain things. It's kind of interesting. I've had several, several come through the years and say I got in trouble.

Doing this specifically from working with genetically modified varieties.

Well, in this case, it's just open pollinated. It was the capsaicin, I think. I can't prove that, but I sure think it was because David, who works with me, started having trouble as well. And so we decided, you know what, you got to understand, we're tasting these things till we can't taste it anything. And capsaicin will deaden nerve endings. It does, you know, and a lot of people talk about hot chili and ah, da da, da da. You know, I guarantee you my tongue has experienced more hot chili than we would ever want to explain. But so nevertheless, by the way, capsaicin is. That is a very big industry coming on that they look can be used for local anesthesia. Y' all already know about the mace products and some of those, but capsaicin there is. This field is just beginning. And I'm telling you, 20 years from now, this field is going to be used for a lot of good things. But back to the point. So I ate my esophagus up. Doctor says, you know, we really need to go in there and see what the deal is. So they did what they call a fundal application on me. And they. I had a pre cancerous situation, they took my stomach, they made me a new sphincter valve, and my health just declined just steeply. And for the next three years, I just. At one point I got to where I could hardly get out of the house. I was so weak and so allergic to everything. I found a holistic doctor in Scottsdale, Dr. Rob Ellsworth. Rob started directing me first. We did food allergy tests, we did heavy metal tests. We went down the line. Guys, I'm telling you the truth. I could not spray my front yard with Roundup. Just a little bit, and I would get sick. So as we searched this thing out, lucky for you. What's that?

Lucky for you.

Yeah, yeah. And we started figuring it out that, hey, I have a personal investment in understanding health. I talked to Dr. Alvin here a little bit and. That's right, you told me not to call you Dr. Alvin. So, Alvin, I'll just say you were right on when we discussed this. But the point is, I had to figure out my own body. I was deathly ill. And I got over the surgery. I got over all that. But a specialist, a friend of mine, a doctor that I work with in the Chile, Dr. Nag Quadali, interestingly enough, from New Hampshire, Nog was working on de stemming for Chile because we need to de stem Chile. And that's a whole other genetic pool of looking at that will take me a long time to go through. But I'll just mention it briefly, but Nod's wife is a specialist and she told me she works with gastric bypass surges, surgeon surgeries and stuff like that. She said, ed, your ability to digest B vitamins is impaired. Extremely. That was the first key, John. Whoa, hold it. Something happened here. Just as sure as I'm sitting here, by God's grace, this thing sent me on a new trail. Started looking at different forms of vitamin B to digest, started looking at my own farm. What am I doing? We had already started to go organic. And it took me today, on my farm, we have 500 acres established as certified organic. The reason was my own health. And I realized, John, for the first time, I hit. You know, I'm going to make a little confession here, okay. I poo pooed. All this stuff about roundups bad and all that. Yeah, yeah. Till it made me sick. And then I said, well, hold it. There is something to this. And there is. And ironically, you know what it is? For me, it's the carrier. It's the carrier and the rounding, it's.

Actually more toxic than the glyphosate itself.

Exactly.

So you mentioned just now that you've been in the transition to organic for a period of time. What inspired. Well, you shared some of the things that inspired you. But I know that in prior conversations, one of the things that you've mentioned is one of your major reservations about going in the direction of becoming an organically certified farm was Challenges with disease control. So tell us a little bit about diseases in Chili's and what's been happening.

This is the challenging part, diseases. And I was scared to death of it. For you folks that are in this end of the world, I'm sure you understand what Phycothera capsisia is. If you've grown any squash or any soft vegetables like that in the desert, most people find that. We've talked to doctors all over the world through this and they're shocked. Well, you're in the desert. How could you have Phytophthora? How could you have bacteria spot Xanthomonas vesicatoria? How could you have these things? They're all water related. Folks. When we get a rain, we get a real rain. We may not get a rain for a long time. A little bit to John's point in your talk there, we come up with the year before last in 2016 and 2016, 2017, both a week apart. Ironically, in July of both years we got three and a quarter inches with hail in about 45 minutes. We farm on a slope. The water moves and so do Phytophthora spores and phytop spores, they sporanges. What's the word?

Sporulite.

Yeah, there you go. They, some of these words too big for this old farm boys, they, they just. It's the. I like to describe it like a wheat fire. Anybody seen a wheat field burn goes across and the wind will direct where that fire goes. Well, that's how phytochrospores move. And, and you get the right temperature, the right water, the live moisture and the right wind and it will go. You can follow it across the chili field just like. Like you can a fire in a wheat field. And what it does, it destroys the fruit and then eventually it gets to the roots and kills the plant. Our first experience of that was 1985 and I had a beautiful crop that was doing really well. We were harvesting, I had watered John. In those days we were ferrigating. We always water ahead so that the fruits good and fresh and hard. We were watering ahead and we got. It's the 23rd of August 1985 and we get the storms off the coast. We're not really that far from the ocean as the crow flies about 300 miles those storms start coming and it's not uncommon for us. We get a big rain and then it set in. And it set in just like it does in yalls country. And it started raining and drizzling and just slow no sunshine, which is rare for the desert, but it happens every year, one time or another. And that Phytophthora went crazy. And I went from harvesting what in those days was 17 ton to the acre, which was a super yield in those days, and we'll talk about yield later. But we went from 17 ton until I skipped the next 15 acres. Skipped it. It was all gone. What little was there was so hard for the Camry to sort through, to work with that we just had to give it up. John, I was a young man with several children. I thought life was old. How in the world are we going to make it through this? We just lost 15 acres. Well, in our business 15 acres is a lot because inputs are high. Today we get about 6,000 an acre. Acre. In those days it wasn't quite that high. But my point is it's intense agriculture. John, I was just wilted. So to your point, we have battled phytophthora for years. 2010, 2011, consecutively lost half of 300 acres. Both years represented a little over a million dollars of input. And when I say lost, I don't mean we went in and harvested some. I'm telling you, out of 300 acres, 150 acres were gone. There was nothing to harvest, even in our seed blocks. We were able to find a little bit to continue our genetic work, but only with lots and lots and lots of searching. You know how devastating Phytosphorus can be. So when I found John, I found a little hole. I'd been on the biology track a little bit better health, better soil health, etc. Etc. But when we found John, we started having hope. I am organic today because of him. I'll tell anybody that he helped us last year. In 2017, the only field we completely lost to Phytophthora was. What do you think guys? My conventional field, my organic field, did it have some Phytophthora? Yes, especially the draws where the water runs. But overall it was pretty dang good. My conventional field, 2017, out of 30 acres, we probably harvested the equivalent of about four or five. Does that give you an idea the difference? That was using Ridomyl, all the high powered stuff. Now this past year I didn't have any conventional, my neighbors did, the boys, some of the boys are out here in the audience. But I have found that soil health and John's program, we've got a better chance. Also on the bacteria spot thing, Let me cover that just a minute. Again, that's where I've really had the most Argument from scientists all over university. People say, well you shouldn't have bacteria spot. You're a dry climate again. Yeah, we're in a dry climate. Do you know what happens to us in the spring, guys? It's not uncommon. About the 10th of May, then along about the 18th of the 20s, about every 10 days we get those cold fronts come down and we get really voracious wind. Literally one May we had 110 mile an hour wind. You got chile that big, you got sand moving. It opens places for infection. Bacteria spot. Vesicatoria is all over our desert, all over it. There's all kinds of host plants native to Arizona. So when that wind blows, those spores are in the sand and it inoculates us. Does it get sick right then? No, don't get sick right then. Give it a little bit of time. Give us some spring or some summer rains and here it comes. And I have said for a long time, John, the one thing about Phytosura, I know where I got it with bacteria spots, you don't know until it's really ravaged you. It just keeps coming. And finally you can't set any fruit and you've got this really sick plant that you can't do anything with. And since we've been organic, have we whipped it completely? No, I'm not going to tell any big stories here. We still battle it. But is it better? Yeah, we see quite a bit better.

That is good. You mentioned a moment ago how yields have changed today from where they were 30 years ago. I think this is a trend that we see with a lot of crops is that as crops tend to become more developed and farmers manage them more intensely, we begin tapping into a much greater part of the genetic potential that many of these seeds already have. How have yields shifted and changed in the time that you've been doing breeding work?

Thanks for going there because that's the fun part of our story. The first thing that put us on the map is if we were going to spread the green chili industry, which is basically Hispanic Mexican food, if we were going to spread it to the north and east. Y' all are meat and potatoes people. Y' all don't like spice. So what was one key thing? It couldn't be hot and chili was. Got a smile here. Chili is very the old 6, 4 variety. That was by Roy Nakayama at New Mexico State University. Great variety. But the old tradition was to keep your seed and growers kept their seed year after year after year. Well, if you had one hot chili pretty soon you had several hot chilies, and pretty soon you had a lot of hot chili. And it was very common that you would be eating a can of chili and two or three of them would be mild. And then boom, one of them was really hot. And that's what we couldn't have. What put Phil and I on the map and the whole breeding thing. To begin with, we were the first ones to stabilize heat. That was the first thing. And later, if you guys want to come and discuss it with me, it's a fun story, but it's true. That's what put us on the map, was we were able to go to the canneries. We had a better yield and better heat control. So originally when we started, the average yield in green Chile was 7 to 8 tons across the board. The first year we released one of our varieties, which then was called Arizona 20. Arizona 20 jumped that average yield to 14 ton like that first year.

Wow.

That got everybody's attention. Almost double. Today we're sitting at an average. This is fun to tell, right? I got a grower, Gary Shiflet, does a great job. Zach Penn, several boys there do a really great job. In New Mexico, it's not uncommon now for us to touch 35 to 40 ton, but average for the industry right now is 18 to 20. And I talked to one of the guys at the cannery den at Trevari there yesterday, and we're going to start out with another variety that is ours that the boys reach the 32 to 36 ton on with one pick. And oftentimes they multi pick and reach much higher levels. So, John, we. And now let me take off on a spin on that. And we'll bounce back and forth on it. So when we increased yield, one of the things I seen as a breeder, the limiting factor. The limiting factor was the zone islands and the flows.

Nutrient transport. Nutrients. The nutrient transport pipeline.

The school bus is what I call it. You don't have a school bus to get it there. You can't get the kids to school right? And that transport system, perfect intro to that, John, because that transport system is everything. So in breeding, we started, I went back and I won't publicly say what I use because all my competitors will try to put it in their hybrids. But we went to one plant that I knew in an annum crop and one year crop would grow a stem about inch and a half, sometimes as large as inch and three quarters around. I knew that it had a better vascular system. I knew it had a bigger pipeline. So, John we crossed that with one of our chilies. We crossed it and then started selecting. And to this day we're still working with many of those crosses. And that's where we got the better yield. Also, John, that is where I first way back before we understood anything like what you understand by accident, the guy I was working with, it was doing our sampling. We proved that boron in itself, if we could raise boron levels, we could raise calcium level levels. If we raise calcium levels, we solved or maybe not solved, but certainly minimize blossom end rot all with just the application of boron. And all the western handbooks, all the studies said that too much boron would be deadly, right? Everybody knows that. I'm telling you, I have one time I had a pivot stop, John. And we were running boron and the pump didn't shut off. We pumped a whole tank of boron in one spot and we watched it and we took samples from the outside in the scientist mind of mine just won't let up on that. But we had fun. We took samples the rest of the year from that. We didn't kill any chile. We stunted it a little bit. We had a little growth regulator out of it. It lowered it a little bit. But guess what? The calcium levels were better all the way across, even with extreme boron rates. So, John, that was the beginning of. In fact, another accident that happened was a grower down just below, west of Hermosillo, Sinaloa or Sonora. Same thing happened. He got way too much boron on a drip system on jalapeno. And that block of jalapeno was better than any of the rest. So we all started and then we started comparing with the lettuce growers they used to grow and ship a lot of lettuce. Started comparing to the lettuce boys in Salinas, California. We got to noticing the same thing. This was in the 80s, John. We got to noticing that where the boron levels were higher in lettuce, the calcium levels were higher and guess what? Better, healthier lettuce.

Something that's getting to be very well understood. One of the. I find your story about breeding for vascular tissue, breeding for stem can be really revealing and intriguing because one of the stories is that Bruce Tineo, who's now no longer with us, was a seed breeder and geneticist before developing, before founding Tyneo Technology. And he developed some of the foundational wheat and soybean endosperm and germplasm that is still being used today as foundational seed stock. Because he focused on developing varieties in genetics that developed really large and aggressive root systems that still to this day have not been exceeded in the work that he did 30, 40 years ago, which I find to be really intriguing. So within all of this, Ed, I'd love to ask you the question, what is something that you believe to be true about agriculture that many other people might perhaps not believe to be true?

John that's a good question from the standpoint that the thing I see in agriculture is the closer we get. I spoke at a funeral on Saturday, this past Saturday. He was my neighbor. I rented his farmland and I told John this story a while ago. His son and I grew up together in super family. And his son, when I was talking to the family about stories to share and stuff, his son said, you know, dad held up when I was very young in high school, he said he held up a handful of dirt and he said, son, in this dirt lies all life. And I'm telling you from where I said and what I experienced with my own health, my own esophagus damage, okay, what I experienced is, is that with all the chemical farming, with all the things of what we thought we were doing right when we started using commercial fertilizers, it's not healthy for the soul. And if we tear the soil down, first off, we're going to have less fruit quality. I have watched with John's help and my neighbor Chad Cohen helping me do it and his voice by dedicatedly putting on my own son, Tyler Curry back there and Kiefer back there. We've little by little, I can't tell you I could go into a whole talk about cell density in fruit. David Cartmell found one of my guys found out of our single plant selections a row that didn't go down when it froze. John Everything else, the tissue was broke down. This row it wasn't. That was genetics on that particular case. And we've kept that line and we've worked on it. In fact, we're really proud of that line. But it's all about the best way I can tell it is in cell density and cell structure in a fruit. For you ladies, if you go to a store and you buy an expensive Pima cotton sheet, it's a thousand thread per square inch, right? That's a quality sheet. If you go to Walmart and you buy the cheapest thing you can made in China, it'll be 300 square threads per square inch, right? So vegetables are no different. The cell structure in a vegetable and the shelf life in the industry, they call it legs. It has legs if it has good shelf life. Well, number one, we found that genetically different in that particular line and still hold it. But number two, John, is when we do it right, when we get the soil health right, that soil, that when the soil's right, the fruit density is way better. And we find that just because we look at so many chilies, I cut chilies day after day after day and we look at them and we study them and we carry little magnifying glasses and we do all kinds of things to see just the little things. And guys, I'm telling you, that's what's the fun part is it's one thing to look at a set of genes and look at alleles and look at the DNA on a computer screen, but if you study the little things, it will talk to you. I need to carry this out and raising my own teenage son, I need to study the little things sometimes a little better. I apologize to him once in a while. Just like braiding. I haven't studied you quite enough. But I believe that with what you're doing, John, and the whole organic movement. But really, let's forget the organic movement. Let's use regenerative as you use. I really like that word here at this conference. Because when we go to better health in the soil, to the plant, to us, we are going to help our customers be healthier. That's the one thing. Do you all know that one chili, one chili has over double the amount of vitamin C that one orange does over double, then that's not counting vitamin A, D, E. When you go down those lines, Chili is an amazing plant. Pepper is so diverse in so many ways, and I'm glad God made it that way. You know why? Because there's no gene shooting going on in Chile. They've tried time after time after time. 150, 200,000 shots and maybe one take and then it won't take off. But that's okay.

That's perfect.

We'll do it better than okay.

Yeah. So, Ed, what is. What are you working on right now that you're really excited about? How. What do you still desire to experience on your farm?

Probably the thing I'm most excited about is our new or higher yields. If we're going to compete. Our growers struggle with Mexico right across the border in the state of New Mexico. Everybody thinks of New Mexico as being the kingpin of Chile. And it is in the states and they've done a great job of marketing that. And I'm proud to be a part of it. But in New Mexico right this day, there's 7,000 acres of Tilly for canning purposes in Mexico. In Chihuahua, the state bordering Luna county and New Mexico, there is 92,000 acres. And then if you go a little bit further down into Zacatecas, which is the largest pepper growing state in the world, world is 250,000 acres, quarter million. So when we look at what we've held on to in the States, it's very little. So if I'm going to hold on to my growers and keep this industry in the state, we have got to give them higher yields, we have got to give them an advantage. And so the yields are number one. Disease control is number two. And that's why I love working with you, is to help. I can take some of what you've given me, the micro 5000, I think that's a better product than anything out there for foliar phytocera. So, John, higher yields, disease resistant flavor. Oh my goodness, I can't sit down about this.

Use your microphone.

It's bad to get over excited, you know? There now. All right, flavor. I just gotta tell y', all just standing up flavor. We've got a chili, the one that turns red. We call it Grandote and Grandote has a dark red cherry flavor. And then we've got the yellows. And this one's real exciting. But the yellow skies, not all tests, but One test showed 100 times the nutritional value of spinach. 100 times. That means that you would have to eat a hundred ounces of spinach to one ounce of this yellow chili. We're going to change the world. We're going to help people be healthier. You know, that's exciting to me. You asked me what I'm. I'll sit back down. But guys, I'm telling you, it's exciting.

That's awesome.

Thank you, Ed.

So, Ed, what is you've had four decades of experience as a grower. What is advice that you would have for other growers? And actually, I want to shift that question not so much for growers, but I think there is a strong desire by many in the vegetable production space to develop stronger, stable genetics. What advice would you have for a young person who wants to learn more about breeding and developing their own varieties?

Come to the farm, you might be inundated. I love teaching young people. Phil Villa, who passed it to me, I have a high school degree. Guys, we didn't go to public universities. I lecture at universities now, but I Don't have a sheepskin, if you will.

What resources would you recommend?

You know, I like what I've heard here. I like what you do. John goes back to Luther Burbank. He's inspired me so much. I'm going to go study Luther a little bit more. Some of the early information on plant health. You know, we took a wrong turn and we forgot about soil health. So what about. What did we forget about in breeding and what things. And I'm not saying. I don't want to leave here saying that all science is bad and that some of what some of my good friends that work at New Mexico State and work at UC Davis and work at the University of Arizona, Dr. Rod Wing, Stephanie Walker. I could just list several. But not all that molecular stuff is doing is bad. But coming back to that healthier rootstock. I liked what you said. Healthier rootstock. And so sources of that, I liked your idea of going back and looking at history. History will teach us. What did they learn? What did they know? Theater prieta question that I asked you just a while ago, obviously that was some hundred years ago or a thousand years ago. Somebody knew something about soil health. Right. So you know where to find some of that, John? I'm probably at a stump of how to answer that. Exactly.

Okay. All right. I'd love to open the floor to any questions from the audience. In a lot of the consulting work that I've done around the world, there aren't very many people left who have the base of knowledge and awareness that Ed does on open pollinated seed breeding. It's not a common knowledge area. And I think it's something that's very important and very valuable for us to tap into. So I love to open it up for you in the audience for any questions that. That you might have for Ed.

Hi, Ed. You know, it's interesting when you're telling that story about when you were a young man and you were given that sort of Yoda like trial to pick out the hundred chilies, what immediately came to my mind was Luther Burbank. Like, this just sounds like the story of Luther Burbank. So having this kind of perspective, here's my question for you. Are you seeing a difference in the expression of genetics when you have improved biology, assuming you're seeing some improved biology in your fields and classically in school in genetics, we're taught that abiotic stress creates more of an expression in genetics. And there's the more you stress something, the more you see genetic expression. But it's Been my experience that the opposite is true. The more you see balance in the soil, the more you see expression in the genetics, you see better genetic change. Are you seeing that and are you seeing a difference in what you see in the genetics now? Now that your soil microbiology is changing, It's a bit young to say exactly what all I see there. Thank you for the question. It's a good question. But definitely, I strongly believe that genetic expression, what turns genes on and off, what makes certain things happen? There's a lot of. I think we've got a lot to learn there. But the one thing I see for sure is the healthier we are, the better genetic expression we get. Now, to that question, Can I throw something else in here? And that is that capsaicin? In Chile, people ask me all the time, well, can you change how hot a chili is by fertility, by water. Water or whatever? And the question is absolute, or the answer is absolutely chili. The capsaicin is a protective mechanism in the pepper. That's all it is. And so when a pepper stresses, the capsaicin goes up because it, in common terms, it thinks it better preserve itself. So the pepper's hotter, hotter nights, any kind of stress, virus, whatever. So to your point, the healthier of the soil, health we have, and the balance. I like what you said, balance. If we're in a balance, my friend and my good friend and good grower, Gary Shiflett, he's not organic, but his farm is big.