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February 2009, Cover Stories
Southwest Florida's Top Seeds
This is Part 1 of a four part series that will take a good look at how vegetable seeds advance from an exhaustive research and development stage to a producer's field. Part 1 focuses on the important first steps of R & D and the eventual marketing of the selected seed. These seeds are the harbinger of plants destined to produce vegetables harvested for consumption around the world. FIELD AND GROVE recently sat down with two industry experts to discuss our area's contribution to this enormously important process.
That extensive varieties of fruits and vegetables are commercially grown in Florida is hardly news to anyone. Everything from avocados to watermelons are planted, cultivated and harvested as one growing season flows into another, adding billions of dollars to the state's economy. But most probably don't know that a select few research facilities, vital to generating new or better varieties of vegetables, are located right here in Southwest Florida.
Sakata Seed America, Inc. maintains a 125 acre 'warm crop' research station in Lee County. Seventy of those acres are currently being utilized as huge test plots where plants are both nurtured and evaluated. The facility opened in 1994 and employs fifteen people dedicated to developing, through research, healthier and more disease-resistant varieties of peppers, tomatoes and watermelons.
Relentless pathology testing, vigilance, and patience are paramount throughout each development phase. "It takes three and a half to five years before a new pepper variety becomes commercially viable," said Sakata's local pepper breeder, Dr. Mary Riley. "And in some cases it might take as long as ten years."
The process can be painstaking work, but also rewarding. "I like looking at the new varieties in the spring to see what I created during the previous fall," she said. "But the batting average is low. You might get one good product out of a hundred."
Riley, who received her PH.D. from New Mexico State, frequently travels back and forth to Mexico chronicling a variety's development from seed to the plant stage, and finally as a full-fledged vegetable. She says her job pays off when a newer, more disease-resistant pepper is brought to the market and made available to growers. "The cost to the grower is going up," Riley pointed out. "It’s the grower that takes the most risk."
The desire to breed vegetables that are disease-resistant never ends according to Rodney Robideaux, Technical Development Representative for Seminis. The company, a division of Monsanto, is the largest developer of vegetable seeds in the world. Seminis is building a new facility in Felda and has 200 plus acres in Southwest Florida where peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers are actively bred.
Once a new variety is developed, Robideaux, a graduate of the University of Florida with fifteen years of agricultural research experience, explained it is his job to, “bridge research and sales. I have to see if the produce is a good commercial fit."
Clearly market viability is an important qualifier. "A lot is being invested in the research of vegetable crops," Robideaux stated. "In my position I do a lot of promotion. And to actually see something you've worked on for two or three years come to market is rewarding. But if it’s not a benefit to the growers, they won't use it."
While it's important to have a good working relationship with the growers for any number of reasons, one is vital to product development. "Most of the growers are big", Robideaux explained, "so they allow seed companies to use their fields in trials."
Growers can then scrutinize product development right along with the seed company, and Robideaux certainly knows what catches a grower's eye. "Appearance is primary in vegetables," he said. "Yield and appearance go hand in hand."
But the creation of a vegetable with all the bells and whistles that a grower wants and needs can only be accomplished through the development of a hybrid variety and at great cost to the seed company. Its no wonder that breeding and seed production have become highly competitive and the keys to unlocking hybrid varieties are so tightly guarded.
Robideaux said that virtually all pepper and tomato vareties are hybrids and as such, become the intellectual property of the company that breeds them. "Seminis actually patents its hybrid seeds," he stated, "as well as the parental lines."
Both Riley and Robideaux agree that a concern shared within the industry is the ongoing loss of agricultural land to outside sources such as development. The temptation to sell can be great to a land owner, especially in a bad year, because while other types of farming are subsidized by the government, vegetable farming is not.
So it might behoove all of us, while strolling through the produce isle of the grocery store, to give some thought to the years of dedication, trials, and millions of dollars it takes to bring those vegetables to tables around the world. And let's not forget the very important part Southwest Florida and its 'Top Seeds' play in that process.
Cindy Cutright has spent the better part of the last 25 years engaged in marketing and advertising in Southwest Florida. And though her background is in print media, her embrace of the online publishing concept has been admirable to say the least.
