Non-GMO Corn Breeding for Regenerative Farms: Ed Baumgartner's 20-Year Journey

0:00 I am very excited about our guest today, Ed Bomgardner. I haven't actually met Ed in person yet, I'm sure our paths are going to cross in person here soon, but have visited with him on the phone and through emails. I'm looking really forward to this presentation as well to get to know Ed and his company a little bit more. We came across, and again this is the last in this series on regenerative seed growers, and this one's going to be pretty unique because Ed's not growing cover crop seed like all of the other guys did—he's growing hybrid corn. But that's really important because almost all of our customers are growing corn at some point in the rotation. So I wanted to bring a fresh perspective that there are people within the hybrid seed breeding industry who are doing some of the same concepts, following some of the same principles that we as regenerative farmers are doing as well.

1:00 I thought that Ed's got a great background, very unique perspectives, and the way that he's doing things and selecting the corn hybrids that he's putting out into the market are definitely unique within the industry. We think a better fit for our farm. I was telling that earlier we got a pallet of bass hybrid corn seed just today, got delivered today. We're putting out a fairly good sized non-GMO plot and a lot of the hybrids are going to be the bass hybrids. So we have time at the end, we can maybe talk just a little bit more about what they have available. But all of Ed's genetics are non-GMO and they're being done in a regenerative environment. So again that makes him pretty unique.

1:47 Ed will give a little bit of his background, but he's been in the farming and the corn seed breeding business since he was 16, 17 years old. Got a really early start on it, has been in it many, many years. They'll show some pictures. They've got a farm and a development facility in Puerto Rico as well as in Minnesota. So they're doing work all year round at one or the other of the facilities there. So very excited, Ed, to have you share. I know you've got a lot of great pictures and information. Ed Bomgardner with Bass Hybrids, located in Minnesota but half the year in Puerto Rico too, I think. Ed.

2:31 Yeah, thanks, Keith, very much. You know, during the cold months you like to be in Puerto Rico, so that's a good component for us. But that's a good strategy. Yeah, we're finally being successful at it after all these years. But the one thing I'd like to start out with is probably with all this continuous nursery work, I probably been around 108 or nine crops now that I've been responsible for since I started at age 16. So it's kind of fun to see things and what you think is true doesn't always hold through over time. I'm working on trying to share here that we can get going. Let's see PowerPoint and we'll get this up and running. Yep, that looks good, Ed. We can see that real well.

3:20 Okay, thank you. I'm really a newbie to this type of stuff, so you're doing fine. A little more old-fashioned, I guess. But so basically we, I'm new to regenerative agriculture. I was trained in Better Living Through Chemistry. But things were happening and they didn't understand, so that's taken us towards the biology part and then how we really do fit in regenerative agriculture. And you know, when you start a business you start out and it builds over time. So we're like on our fifth company iteration now, and they're still active.

3:58 So we have Third Millennium Gen still active as a contract research organization in Puerto Rico. Then we developed our genetics under 3MG R&D. But then when I bought my business partners off from down in that company, then that became Bass Genetics in 2019. 3MG North is our contract research organization in Minnesota. And then Bass Hybrids is our retail brand that we sell the hybrids that we develop. So all the companies work together but yet they're independent from each other. Anyway, that's the story. And DurYield is our trademark then for naturally developed native traits. I think that the terminology 'trait' has been hijacked by GMOs. The number one trait is still yield, but we never talk about that as a trait anymore. And that's number one. Then how we protect that yield, those are additional traits. Then as a matter if they're transgenic or naturally occurring. So this is the kind of picture that any given time we have, you know, every summer we got a nursery here.

5:01 Up in Olivia where we're trying to fine-tune the maturity of the products. And then in the winter we're advancing, we'll grow anywhere from one to three generations of different breeding projects every winter. And of course we're set up, I think this is out in Gettysburg or no, Washburn, North Dakota for yield trial planting, again another no-till situation. And so we do our yield testing in every type of condition we can find, which is different than when I was in the seed industry working for somebody else. That was always corn on beans, the highest healing soil you can find. We do our work with trying to farm like farmers do to develop crops that work. So that's strip-till, no-till, using starter fertilizer, pop-up fertilizer. We're set up to do it all, and you'll see some of that as I go through the slides.

5:51 So this is where it all started was Third Millennium Genetics in Puerto Rico, and I welcome people to come visit us in the winter time. It's postcard weather from December through March. So if you're getting tired of the cold, come see us. We'd love to give you a tour of what's going on. Santa Isabel is a town to the left, and as you can see if you look on a map of Puerto Rico, we're in the actual center point on Puerto Rico. And the farm is where the office facility is, where the arrow is at. And this is kind of a quick overview of the farm when we're in action. This is from I think two winters ago. And so you can see the facility and then different plantings of corn, and probably there was some cotton and sorghum in here at the same time.

6:37 This is our other farm that's a little further north up on our Pañer farm. This is where we had our research nursery in 2022, and you can see all the brown bags in there. We do hand pollinate somewhere around 150,000 to 200,000 bags a year in our program. And then we got our contract work off to the side. You'll see sunflowers and sorghum. There was a tractor planting over there, you know, a soybean project that was being planted in January when this was filmed. Up on the left you see where there's some harvesters already done. So we've got crops in all stages. And if you want to learn about pest control, try to work with anywhere from 20 different crops in any different growth stage at the same time. That gives you a little bit of a workout.

7:22 So we're using the technology that's available for research. This is a Seed Station planter, RTK computer-driven precision planter, and we use drip irrigation. We apply the drip tape and the fertilizer before we plant with the RTK. That allows us to do that now, and then we can just come in, plant right alongside the tape. And then you can see what it looks like when it's properly irrigated. Not every day works out like that, but this was a good day.

7:53 You know, we have high pest pressure in Puerto Rico, so we have five of these sprayers down there that run across our 500 acres. And with all the different crops, it's easier if you have different sprayers set up for different crops. And in corn to grow temperate corn, I budget 21 times to spray. That's my budget. We'll go up from that but never down, depending upon what the scouting shows us for fall armyworm, spider mites, thrips. You name it, the pest. So we have them all, except European corn borer. And don't bring any with you when you come down to visit. We don't need another pet to play with.

8:30 This is just a picture of our foundation corn processing, because we'll do seed increases beside the basic development work. And so we can grow two increases in the winter time of a new line to get a hybrid out quickly. We do that for contract work and for ourselves. And so there used to be a roof on this machinery until Hurricane Maria came by, and I haven't gotten around to affording to put a new one up yet.

8:56 And so then our northern location up here in Olivia, 3MG North. We founded this so we can do contract work in the south, you know, in Puerto Rico and in the north. And then we do all our testing for the materials we develop here in addition to the contract work. And just give you an idea, there's a lot of volume that goes through this facility as well. And how it's set up to go planted, when it's on those metal rods and the boxes, that's ready to go to the planter. And then you know, we also do work in cereals and canola, you know, whatever we can find for contract work. And we're set up to do all that.

9:37 And this is our road crew when we go out on the road for planting. You have a big truck that carries all the seed, a truck to haul all the equipment, and then a sprayer goes with us, because you know, almost everybody we work with is Roundup.

9:50 Up ready and we do not want Roundup on our plots so we carve out a little bit and we have to do all the pest control ourselves or weed control and of course we got the one picture on the right with one the combines on the trailer as well. It's how we're equipped to get around. We test in three states and 18 locations in those three states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and then I work with a business associate that works in Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois and he'll come up a little bit later in the discussion here.

10:18 This is an eight row planter and two people plant into eight rows. That's a splitter that was on the left to divide the seed up. Again, no till, and so we're set up to plant in real life conditions. Believe me, I've learned a couple hard lessons myself because no one comes there to tell you how to set a planter until you make a few mistakes and you just kind of learn over time. So we got two of these eight row planters that can go on the road and plant and it takes a staff of three to run each one. Then we have our Nursery planter, it stays around Olivia, and each that one you have to plant into each row individually.

11:00 And so this is the last year we did till AG in 2022. Now everything we're doing is no till on our Nursery work and planting into cover crops. This will be our second year of doing that. And this was my first four-way into planting in the annual rye grass. We killed it after we planted, we sprayed with the sprayer rig you saw, and then this is the results here at the end of the month, early June it looked like this. I was totally impressed. This is what drove me into regenerative agriculture. It's like we can do this. We got to figure out how to play this game.

11:36 So on this picture, it's the one our one of our planters, but in the middle you can see two funnels in front of my oldest daughter Rachel and my Susan are corn breeders on the right, and then my other daughter Rebecca the youngest one is on the left. They're planting seed where Rachel's dumping in the liquid for seed treatments and we can do this as biology or fertilizers. So you know you get a lot going on on the planter, and it's all computer controlled and RTK driven.

12:04 This is what one of our fields looks like here in Olivia when we get the different crops grown for the different contract work we do. So I think it's always good for us to be exposed to crops besides corn so we understand more about growing. I spent like the first 20 years of my career only in corn and then the last 20 now have been in a lot of crops. Like we've done over 22 in Puerto Rico, I think we're at 12 in Minnesota.

12:31 And this is just a sidebar, a little bit we developed some early beans to go overseas for overseas sales. And these are four zero beans, they didn't exist until we did this project. And you had to get the day length the same as the beans would be growing into make the selections for the early plants, so that was kind of a fun project.

12:51 This is what it looks like: shoot bagging, pollinating. We use Julian days in our bags to know what day is pollinated, and when it helps us do all the math, it's easy to figure out maturities by flowering date. This is in Puerto Rico. You can see the insect damage even though we're spraying 21 times on our Nursery. Some things are more susceptible than others, but it's the processing seed. We do somewhere around 150,000 of those a year just in our project, and then when we do it for others, especially in Puerto Rico, we probably do over half a million of these. And we're better with our staff. So I like to be out there and get in with them doing the work all the time.

13:40 So we also do silage testing. We're very livestock oriented with our products. We want nutrition, feed value. And we're one of the very few people that actually take the time to do all the chopping and N work out there as a contract research organization. And of course all our products are tested for silage if they meet the criteria first in the grain trials. So we sample everyone with a sampler, then it goes into our trailer where we have the staff doing the quality ratings, and we get the moisture from the N as well for determining yield. It's my young daughter Rebecca out in the nursery working with the harvest. Of course my dog is sleeping on the good ears, so as people get to know us, I know we like to have dogs around they're

14:27 Always in the office and we don't have enough time to go hunting but we sure go out in the field with dogs a lot. And of course in the sophisticated equipment for doing the harvest, we do four row and eight row plots, 20 foot long, 40 foot long. They eight rows by four foot long. Harvesting the center four gives us a very close feel for what the farmer is actually going to see in his field. And since those are big plots, they take up a lot of space in the field, we only do those on our most advanced materials. Here we're collecting moisture and test weight with that device in the combine. And so when we get down to the field, we can upload the data and know what won the plot within a few hours.

15:13 So now we're getting to retail side and start this business in neighboring town from us living in Danny, but about four miles away. The two offices are apart and this is all due to the retail. We keep that separate from our contract research business. And you know, climate controlled warehouses, the whole nine yards. It's all, and we do all our seed stored untreated. We do not treat until we sell a bag of corn. And then we have several options. But the future, and I'm targeting 2027, is to be all biological seed treatments if any seed treatment going forward.

15:51 So then you know, we call it unconventional corn because we can get tied into you know off-patent products or cheap corn is conventional corn. You know, there's a lot of technology in our native tolerant corn and the effort that goes into it. And so we're not going to be the cheapest price seed out there or lowest cost seed, but we're probably going to be one of the best value seed products you can buy because we're so focused on the genetics. And to figure out how these work.

16:23 And again, this is what led us to regenerative agriculture. We have a couple hybrids that have been going on in regenerative scene now where they have covered crops planted in between the rows and they're excelling in that. And so you know, as we have droughts, I like adverse weather for doing our research where because we get comparisons like this. And this was you know, going on four years ago, three and a half years ago now. But you know, the pictures, this is what we see out there. And so I know the stress breeding is working.

16:56 This is where it comes to bite us a little bit as they stay healthy under stress. And so then you're getting compared to the one that died. And they harvested early. They have to wait an extra two weeks to harvest ours because it's still healthy. The only good part is the yields are there because they stayed green. But we can get a lot of phone calls when they see this side by side.

17:19 Today, this is taken last year where we were dry and the rains came later. And you can see the nitrogen stress on the on this. The one on the right is our neighbor's corn, and he manages for 240 bushel corn. And didn't have enough moisture, I think, to pull the nitrogen through. And then our corn we only had 80 pounds on the on the other side. And that's just border corn around our nursery.

17:43 This is out of a field that had high rootworm pressure, no insecticides, no extra treatments on the product on the left. That's just breeding that gave it at least as good of roots as the national brand with the triple stack. And I mean, I quit using insecticide. We went on our own because I got tired of breathing and sitting on the planter. And when you have your kids in the business, you don't want them exposed to all the toxins I've been exposed to. So another reason why we're moving towards regenerative in the business.

18:14 So some of genetics, also known as KMR, they do contract research work like we do. We met in 2011, decided we wanted to work together developing genetics. And we thought we could conquer by dividing the maturity in half. So Kyle and his wife Brenda supplies of genetics to our brand from let's say 103 to full season. We work on from like 108 down to 75 or earlier if we can get it because we like to work in the far north. And probably make a move into Canada here in the near future.

18:48 So one of the crazy things, you know, like I said, we did a lot of work on GMOs. And one of the big companies came out with a drought tolerant gene that wasn't tolerant to heat. You have to have heat tolerance before you get to drought tolerance. And we get the high heat every day in Puerto Rico. And that high heat leads to things that we'll go over here a little bit later in the presentation. But we get high cold tolerance from high heat.

19:21 Tolerance, 70% of the genes are related, and I just, this is one of the most mind-blowing things, and that led us down the path of trying to figure out what other relationships are there. So when you have flooded soils, if you have high drought tolerance, you tend to fear the flooding situations with your crop too because you have the drought tolerant corn. That was another surprise. I don't have any pictures to show that, but I do have some concerns. I'm a lot less concerned about rootworm this year than I have been. We found some biological products that really help us with rootworm control on conventional corn. That's one of the most difficult questions we have to get over with. We talk to a grower, native tolerance works, but nobody wants to talk about it and it's very hard to find, but we figured out how to do that. And then combining that with biological products has given us excellent control.

20:14 The weak point for us today is European corn borer because the fall armyworm, corn earworm, and other grasshoppers and those types of pests we have in Puerto Rico, that doesn't transfer over at more than maybe a 7% correlation to European corn borer. So we got a little bit more work to do there, but we've been working with finding more native genes that help that, in addition to looking for biology that'll help us. As far as the other leafhopper spider mites, we have really solid native control on those because they're very highly present in Puerto Rico when we do our no-spray work.

20:54 So you'll notice that when we call something 'dura yield,' it tends to be very dark, wide leaf, green, may, and not as upright as what you're used to seeing in the industry. Massive root systems, big brace root systems. And this picture in the center should look familiar if anyone saw University of Wisconsin put out a publication in 2018 saying this was nitrogen-fixing corn they found in Mexico. And after you saw that, I thought, well, let's go take a closer look at our corn. Well, there it is. Look at that. I'm not claiming we have it. I'm just saying that we see some of the same traits because of the stress breeding, and these are some of the surprises.

21:31 So this is a hybrid that we actually sell, was sold in Colorado into a dairy out there that was switching to organic on this farm. They called up, all nervous, 40 beetles per plant. We went out there to look at it. This plant was pulled, not dug, and you can hardly find on those roots where a beetle had fed. And so they were pleasantly surprised at how good their yields were with that much beetle pressure. So native resistant works. There was no biology applied, anything. This was just what the plant had for native tolerance.

22:07 And for a tidbit of information, University of Missouri has only found native rootworm resistance in early flints and Caribbean flint. And the source for our rootworm resistance is coming from Caribbean flint. But guess what, there's no rootworms in the Caribbean. There's only nematodes. So I guess we have nematode and rootworm tolerance from the Caribbean flints that are in our material in the background.

22:34 This is just a photo showing we dig out our plants to take data that we need for registering hybrids in Europe. We do have an international business where we're selling conventional corn where they do not allow GMOs. And you can just see the difference in root systems between the hybrids. And you could also see we had a little trench compaction on a couple of those where the roots followed the trench. I got a little nervous in planting too early last year.

22:59 So this is where it gets fun. I'm going to move a little bit more into the technical part. So the blue box is the typical, normal tillage, high yield, all the groceries type of field. The orange box is a little bit lower, lighter soil in our area in Renville County, very productive county. And then the gray box is where we have the reduced nitrogen. So we set up the yield goal for 200 bushel, and we fertilized that field at 25% less because that was kind of the buzz. So basically, between taking a soil test for nitrates and then we added synthetic fertilizer to get us up to 150 pounds of nitrogen available for the corn, and so you can see that when we had tropical into the mix a little bit, and you know we're multiple crop cycles into the development stage.

23:59 So people talk about fast breeding, you know like dihaploids and molecular marker breeding and CRISPR, all these topics. Yeah, that helps you develop the line faster, but you still...

24:11 Got to test everything and that just takes years. You get one season to do that, and so with our breeding in Puerto Rico we can make selections every generation under high stress and then at the same time do the yield testing so they come together side by side. And so the box that represents the LSD of the trial, the line in the center is equal to the mean of the trial, 100% is where the checks are at, and we're selecting for materials over 100%. When you get to the lines that would be the outliers, how far they go, and we're really looking for the outliers to the top to make selections to make the genetic gain that we need to develop future products.

25:05 The one on the right has native corn borer tolerance, and so that's why I said we're working on that and we've got projects with native corn borer tolerance so that we can bring the complete package between root worms, corn borers, and it'll be all naturally stacked products. So we'll have real traits.

25:21 Just to give you an idea, the graph on the left you can see that particular breeding family did well under all the stresses. The second one with a little more stress from being dry did a little bit better, but when reduced the nitrogen, that was the best performance. Now who would think you take away nitrogen that the performance would get better? This stuff was mind-boggling to me.

25:51 Well, we go to the next, we look at the data set a little bit, and the one I have highlighted in yellow here shows performance under normal rate corn, 103% of the check. You know what the normal yield was, and then we look, or we did a 25% reduction, and that's 123% of the check. We had one that was better, but when you look at over what the yield level was of the 25% less nitrogen, it was by far the best yielding one. So I thought, okay, let's follow this. We take this stock and we take it down to Puerto Rico and exploit it, create more variation or select more variation out of that ear.

26:37 So on the left is what you see there. And so these ear selections then were looked at last summer in 2023 in our nursery that no till, covered crop, low, no applied nitrogen fertilizer or any synthetic fertilizer. I put on a little 28%, maybe 25 pounds or so just because I was nervous. I'm not going to do that this year, I don't think I have to. Anyway, this showed no nitrogen stress before harvest. There's no firing of the leaves up, and so I think we have nitrogen tolerance or something in this line.

27:12 This is my wife sorting out ears that she and our corn breeder Susan harvested last summer as well. She's selecting. We try and rank them best to worst and then label them and package them up, and we like to see how much they change from what they look like in the nursery to a couple years down the road.

27:34 Picture on the left is native insect tolerance in Puerto Rico. This is fall army worms. I'm going after things this last winter hard. This nursery was sprayed, and you can see on the right, that's Debbie Wave and we're out there pollinating, and you can see damage. I'm working over there, turn around, wave at you. And then my daughter Becca is just panning around, you see the damage, and all of a sudden we're getting to this one coming up here that there is no damage on whatsoever. And there is no BT in this. We always check because people think you're crazy, but it's amazing how these native tolerances do work.

28:13 When they're in there in their soil, it's multiple genes. It's hard to move them to get that kind of protection. When I was doing conversion work for my former employer, it was basically one gene at a time, and it got complicated when we got up to SmartStacks with eight genes. These were probably moving 30 to 40 genes at a time to get the kind of control that you're looking at.

28:41 So you're probably going, why are you showing me this nursery? It's so ugly. Well, we plant into dry soil in Puerto Rico. We irrigate to germinate it. This field, to create the drought stress that I want, we irrigate it up so everything comes up, and then I stop watering and till it starts to pollinate, and then I turn on the irrigation to pollinate it, and then I turn off the water again and let it fill. That's all it gets for water. And so we're probably at 55% of what the crop needs to develop normally, maybe even a little less than that. And this material hadn't been cycled to for two breeding cycles. We were just working on yield because you noticed our trademark is DuraYield.

29:27 Dura and not enough yield. Now we're bringing yield to go with the Jer yield, and this is how we got it. I just want to cycle back again to make sure we're maintaining the dura. And these are the years we just harvested out of this here in March and April, and there's not a lot there, but this is what we're going to blow up and run through a nursery like this again. And this is going to be the base material now for the probably things coming out in 2030, would be my guess. I haven't done all the timelines yet, but should be around 2030 want to be available to commercial grower. The Descendants from this material this work. But here's here's one you all that effort what they look like, and you can see that in the center one, Vanessa's one we had good luck with, and that one's related to the one that was out in Colorado with the rootworm issues. This one does the same thing. And then you can see there's almost no ear size difference between the high end and low end. On the left you see we're working on no till wheat, strip till soybeans. Maria is a new hybrid that's going to be coming out here for planting in 2025. Nova is an 85 day hybrid that we sell quite a bit of now, and it's very nutritious for livestock. It has about a half percent to a percent oil more than number two yellow corn. And so that's a quick snapshot of 20 19 years worth to work. So I hope I didn't put anybody to sleep out there.

31:03 We appreciate you sharing, but also just really appreciate all the great work that you're doing in the space, because just looking from the outside in, it's obvious that there's a lot of work that goes into this. There's a lot of, you know, it's messy work. And I think a lot of us who are just buying the seed, you know, don't understand all of the steps and the processes that it takes to get there.

31:40 I got a few things. You can go ahead and stop sharing your screen here, and let's just have a little bit of a conversation here, and then we'll take some questions from the audience as well.

31:59 I want to go back to something that you talked about kind of in the beginning. You mentioned that you kind of feel like the word or the term trait has been hijacked, and I would tend to agree with you. Hijacked by the GMO, because when we think of, oh, this is a traded corn, oh well it has to be GMO. But not necessarily. You talked about yield as being the most important trait, but all the other things that go into that. So I just want to reiterate and make sure people understand that you're developing all these traits, but it's 100% through conventional breeding methods, and there's no GMO components.

32:37 Correct. I think that the good Lord put everything we need into genomes that in the crops that he provided us, and we it's just up to us to figure out how to make it work in the direction we want it to go. So we don't have to poison our environment with all these synthetic products anymore.

33:02 And to build on that point, you mentioned you've got a lot of family members involved in the operation—your wife, your daughters—and that was a big emphasis for you, to not have that high chemical environment for them to be working in as well, right?

33:17 Correct. I mean, I know what it's done to my body over the 40 years I've been exposed, and I just want to reduce that for future Generations.

33:28 I think that's very admirable. And I think that many of our listeners, many of our customers would be right there with you on that, wanting to do that. But at times at a loss of how to do that, because we've gotten conditioned to the point where we feel like that's a tool that we would have difficulty giving up. But then we see pictures from your nurseries that have all sorts of insect pressure, but yet there are some that can survive. So that kind of gives us hope.

34:01 Yeah. And you know, to put it in perspective, when we do these development nurseries, we throw away 99% of what we do. I mean, it's kind of depressing when I first started in the business doing that. It's like, really, we're throwing away all this work? But you know, they get treated like our kids too. We do name our hybrids instead of putting a number on. I think they deserve a little more respect.

39:09 You know planting a 60-inch gap and putting cover crops in between, they rotate into that 60-inch space the next year so they keep corn on corn kind of, and then have the cover and then they can graze their cattle on it. And when I see those systems work now, it's our third year with several customers that way and they're figuring out how to make it work where their income is probably before growing it more traditionally.

39:35 Yeah, so that brings up a great point. Are you in a situation like that where you're going wide row spacing and say 60 inch? Are you specifically developing or targeting varieties for that where you can maybe reduce your population overall a little bit and have a bigger flex ear, more upright leaf structure so you get more sunlight down to the cover crop canopy? Are you taking any of that into consideration in any of your selection process?

40:11 So we've come at it a little bit differently, Keith. As far as the trend in the industry, if you're a factory owner you don't put two factories on the same location to double your output. There's usually a restriction inside that factory that you can double your output if you just make a 20% change. And so that's the way we look at corn breeding—where we went to high stress breeding because I used to watch plants that would suffer from no heat stress and no moisture, and the irrigation that we had the ground was sloppy wet, they could not move the water up through the plant fast enough. After you get a few years of selection, a few generations of selection, then you don't see that anymore. And so removing that, making the highways bigger inside the plant, and thus I want to make the plant work harder so that you as a grower, especially like in Nebraska where you get years with adequate rain, years without rain, you can plant a let's say a more neutral population instead of aggressive, and then you can take advantage of the years with ear flex that'll keep your yields up with higher populations, and then when it gets drier, they're strong enough to put an ear on, you know, at the lower population without having to go to really low, make a commitment to a low population.

41:39 Yeah, and that's kind of the way we look at it. And then when we develop these products, they tend not to be as upright as modern hybrids. We're a little more floppy on the ends so they're maybe a bigger solar panel. So that would be the downside a little bit to the 60-inch rows—we don't let as much sunlight in. But you know, for me, our goal is still to produce corn first, and then as we learn more about this, we'll keep tweaking the selection.

42:12 Yeah, yeah, and I think that in a 60-inch row, even if you're trying to do this in a 30-inch row and you have a real floppy leaf type plant, it just probably isn't going to work very well, but in a 60-inch row there's still gap, there's still sunlight coming through. And having the emphasis on a flexible ear makes a big difference there too.

42:36 Yeah, and these things flex. I mean, there's amazing how much information that's been forgotten about since the 80s and 90s when I go back and look at technical papers about what constitutes a real stress tolerant hybrid. The ability to put multiple ears on is one of them. And so, you know, because corn natively puts on multiple ears like 10, 12 ears, and we selected it down to one now in our modern corn breeding. But when we do the stress work, we start to see two and three ears start to show up again on these plants because when they get a chance to produce, they're going to really produce and put them on. Now the knock was when I first started plant breeding in 1984—we selected against two-ear hybrids because they would have a tendency to go barren first, or the moisture of the harvested crop would go up because of that ear coming in you know five to seven days later than the initial ear. So your moisture would be up on your harvested product. With these products, we still maybe have about a two-day delay with flowering on the ears with this type of breeding work, and the moisture will be up a little bit, but the yield is significant when you work on these lower populations like that. And they will dry down—it's just not as quick as a die and dry hybrid.

44:01 Yeah, yeah, I like that die and dry. You're wanting your crop to go to full.

44:08 Maturity and not die and then dry down. You know that last little bit is when you're really packing in the minerals into those seeds. Yeah, yeah, a lot of the quality comes in there. I want to talk just a little bit about seed treatments. Willie is asking a question here if you're using any neonicotoids as seed treatments either in your nursery or on the seed as you're selling it to people like us. The seed we got today or to others, what's your seed treatment strategy there?

44:41 So when we develop in our nursery, we never use a seed treatment. And then when we develop in the hybrids we're doing all these different locations, we do not use a seed treatment until the last two years of testing. And my original thought was that would get us on equal footing with the competitors out there. The last two years of data has made me really think differently about that. Where we're seeing, because we don't use any seed treatment in the development process, I think we're reducing our total yield by putting the seed treatment on. That's my current thought process. And you know I've got a lot of trials out here to actually prove that right or wrong.

45:23 That's really interesting to think about, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, because again, 'Better Living Through Chemistry' is what we were taught, or I was taught. But the thing that implanted this in my brain is when I first started in the industry at a small family company and the plant breeder and the other guys started, came from actually my heritage family company of Trojan Seed. And my boss Tom didn't want any seed treatment in his lab because he had enough Captan in his life, and he had allergy problems from it. So we just didn't do it. Well, you know, when you're in a small family company, you wear six or seven hats—forklift driving, roof repair, to agronomy work, to plant breeding, whatever it is. And when I would go on agronomy calls where we had stand establishment issues for corn, I never once went on a call where we developed the inbreds without seed treatment and hybrids without seed treatment. It was always when we insourced genetics from somebody else. Those are the ones we had issues on those cold, wet springs. And so that just kind of stuck with me, and I just continued it. And it fits with my no poison policy with the family around, you know, as much as possible. And so that's why I'm making a statement. Our seed is always kept untreated, and then we treat it to the customer specifications. You know, we're pushing a rope uphill a lot with everything we're doing. And so if we have a customer that wants the chemistry on with a neonicotinoid, we'll put it on, but I'm reluctantly doing that.

46:57 I want to get to the point if I can develop enough data this year to say no, we're going all biological seed treatments, that's it. Or naked, you can get it either way, but we're not going to put chemistry on anymore because I just want the toxic waste out of our warehouse too.

47:13 Yeah, so if you're looking for a place to buy naked seed or untreated seed, here's an option for you. Anyway, talk a little bit about the biological seed treatments that you have used, you're looking at using, potentially could use. You don't have to get into great detail, but is it like a compost extract type product? Are you putting microbes on? What are some of the things you're looking at when you evaluate a biological seed treatment?

47:42 So we've looked at all kinds of them, either between our contract research work, and then as we find things that are interesting to us, then we apply them on the genetics we develop because we're trying to keep a line there between our work and our customers' work. But if we find something interesting that benefits our brand, we're going to do that. Right now we're working strictly with bacteria. Mycorrhiza is too complicated to figure out how you're going to put that on the seed at this moment. I mean, the guys are better off maybe using as a planter box if they want to put that on. And where we can actually get six months of lifespan for biologicals applied to the seed, and that, of course, is the easiest method to use it. We're open. This my friend from KMR, Kyle, he's working with extracts now, you know, from a Johnson Sue bioreactor to see what that does. So we're in our infancy. Like, you know, we're just—it's like undiscovered country for us. We got to figure out what works and what doesn't work. And yeah, like I said, not putting anything on it, maybe I'll put biological, yeah, like a Phe on or something, but that'll be about it.

48:57 Knowing in thinking about the microbial associations and you're right that is a complicated thing to understand as well as to test and to study, do you evaluate your hybrids at all that you're growing? The selections, are you looking at all about how well do they colonize microbes? Because I know that's kind of been one of the things kicked around a lot is a lot of these new modern varieties they've kind of bred those associations out unintentionally, but because of the environment they farmed in they've just naturally deselected for that. Are you looking at those associations at all?

49:38 It's interesting to say that because I've been listening to John Kempf on your podcast. I listen to him regularly on his show as well, and we both are kind of coming towards it. I mean I'm not in his league or anything, I'm just saying that he came at better seed and plant health through soils and I'm looking at it from a genetic standpoint. Why are our plants so healthy? What are they doing? And so to step back from that, when I first started corn breeding there was a lot of stalk lodging, root lodging. And so to help select through that we put a lot of nitrogen on because nitrogen would induce stalk lodging for you, because it produces bigger ears the stalk can handle. Select against the ones that fall down, recycle, move on. Well, because of that we've trained corn hybrids to be lazy. They want all the groceries handed to them and sitting there.

50:31 When we did our stress breeding, I cut the water, I cut our fertilizer because that's how I put on most of it is through the drip tape in Puerto Rico, and that got me going. And so then we developed these hybrids, it's like why are they staying alive in the fall? They're not dying and they're not drying down. What's going on? Well, they have massive root systems, and with these big root systems it looks like they're making friends with the microorganisms in the soil. And I haven't done any real studies. Those are going to start this year. What are the corn roots attracting? The papers that I've read say there's certain bacteria that wrap itself around the root and holds 200 times as much weight in water. Well, those organisms are going to excrete something that the plant wants to eat, and the plant in turn is creating sugar that the bacteria wants to consume.

51:30 One of the crazy things that we learned accidentally again by cutting silage in Puerto Rico is that we have much higher sugar content in our corn when it's attacked by a pest. The sugar readings are naturally high, just the high brix I should say, and then when they're under attack it goes off the charts. And with that high sugar content it's probably going to attract a lot of bacteria and fungi to those roots too. The world of communication with the microbes is mind-blowing to me how that works. When you start studying horizontal transfer of genes between organisms it's like, I get really nervous about what we're doing in the world.

52:21 You bring up a couple of very interesting things here. So Willie Pretorius with W Labs, I'm actually going to have a brunch with him tomorrow in Omaha. I'll visit with him about it because he's developing some testing methods for microbial associations. I'll get the two of you guys connected so you can kind of talk down that path. I think it would be a mutually beneficial conversation. You also brought up a question that I was going to ask about brix. You showed that picture of your stress insect stress nursery and all these plants that are kind of obliterated and then these that look great. Did you do a brix test on the leaf tissue of those to know if there were significant differences there?

53:09 No, I could kick myself for it. It's just one of those things in the heat of the battle, we're busy trying to pollinate and it's like, well, I should have just taken the 10 minutes to test a few plants. Standard operating procedure, I was going to bring brix meters along in our pollinating apron so just take a quick look and make a note if we see something intriguing.

53:33 Because that would have been really interesting to know, obviously the soil conditions across that plot probably weren't that much different so whatever difference was happening was happening genetically and how that plant was associating with.

53:49 Biology and utilizing the nutrients and the minerals that it had available in the soil. Yeah, and with that, that's why I'm really interested in working with you guys and understanding cover crops better because I want to develop symbiotic crops with each other, with specific covers to enhance the corn growth and yield instead of applying synthetic fertilizer. Let the mother nature produce it for us.

54:23 Are you talking about a cover crop grown before the corn or maybe even with the corn? I don't know. I want to try it all and see what works. That's where we're at. We don't know what we don't know until we start playing around with it a little bit and push things in the direction we want to go.

54:39 I'm almost afraid to apply biologicals that we know are beneficial to our developing nurseries because I don't want to influence which way they go. I want to keep them working to develop the relationship with what's already occurring in the soil. If we can jumpstart what's in the soil by using the right cover crops, to me that's better than applying synthetic biologicals or chemicals. If we can just develop that relationship in each soil, which is going to be unique in what it supports.

55:11 I know the microbes alter themselves to the crop a little bit. I've read up on this and it's just kind of interesting to see if we can get symbiosis between the different crops because I know a couple of scientists have come out and said that if you have 12 different species in your cover crop, it's like you're growing 12 different crops all in one year and that's how your biology develops. That's just mind-blowing to me. And here we are in a monocrop system, let's go plant some corn, let's go plant some soybeans.

55:43 Yeah, we're definitely big believers and promoters of that diversity and trying to get the plant diversity to get the biological diversity. But that's hard to do if all you're doing is a corn soybean rotation because you can't get that level of diversity in your cover crop if you're always planting in October or November. So that's where we'd like to see a cereal grain, even if it's once every four or five years in your rotation, because that's harvested in the middle of the summer. Now you can get the 12, 15 way species blend in and have a good growing period and really set the biological table for the next four or five years.

56:25 Yeah, that's intriguing. I never thought about it like in a five-year time span until talking to you. You know, how long those benefits actually last and take? We got to do it every year? How do we do this?

56:37 Sounds like we need to get some cover crops down to Puerto Rico and I need to come down in December to inspect those. Is what it sounds like to me? Yeah, I'd say it's going to take a few inspections probably to figure it out. So that sounds great. I look forward to that.

56:53 Well, I think that brings us to the end of our time here. Appreciate everybody watching. I know there'll be a lot of people watching this online too. I guess maybe just in closing, Ed, if people are interested in learning more about the products that you have and the process that you do, just go ahead and mention your website so people can go to get all the information that they need.

57:18 Yeah, Bass Hybrids dot com and they can call the phone numbers there. They can email us or call the office. Someone answers a phone, not quite 24/7, but we answer. You know, you're an independent business, you don't want to miss a call.

57:36 Yeah, I would encourage you, if you wanted to learn more, to check that out. Good people over there. One of your guys, Andrew, was actually at one of our Regenerative Nexus Summits and that's kind of how we got connected and started the conversation here. We're looking forward to the test plot that we're putting in with a number of your hybrid lines. We'll maybe have some videos and follow up with that later in the season as we see that progressing.

58:03 But thanks so much, Ed, for your time. We appreciate that. Thanks for all your work within an industry that typically ignores or tolerates regenerative practices. You are embracing them and using them to develop better products, and so we're very appreciative of that. So thank you very much, and thanks everybody. This is the end of this series. We will be starting another series later this summer around grazing and livestock utilization, so stay tuned for more information on that. Thanks everybody, have a great day.

58:36 Thank you. Take care. Appreciate it, Keith. Thank you. Thanks, Ed.