Hobby Out of Control

Editor's note: Jim Patrico, Progressive Farmer senior editor, received first place in the Personality Profile category and was also awarded Story of the Year for "Hobby Out of Control" at the 15th Annual Ag Media Summit in Buffalo, N.Y., Tuesday. Here is his award-winning story, which originally appeared in the August 2012 issue of The Progressive Farmer.

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To hear Ed Baumgartner tell it, when he first started his work on non-GMO (genetically modified organism) corn hybrid improvement, it was merely something he puttered with, like golf or gardening. Even now, when he describes it as "a hobby out of control," you might get the impression that it is no big deal. But the truth is, improving corn hybrids is serious business for Baumgartner. In fact, it's a life mission.

Baumgartner's ultimate goal is to help feed the world with non-GMO corn hybrids that yield on par with GMOs. He wants non-GMOs to have substantial resistance to heat, drought and pests, much as GMOs do. And, he wants them to cost a lot less.

From a practical perspective, Baumgartner sees non-GMO seeds as a business niche. From an idealistic perspective, he sees them as an inexpensive alternative for small farmers and third-world farmers.

Either way, it's a tall order. Some would say it's a mission impossible.

TRANSGENIC SUPPORTER

Baumgartner is not anti-GMO. Far from it. Indeed, his livelihood depends on genetic modification. He is co-founder and president of 3rd Millennium Genetics (3MG), based in Santa Isabel, Puerto Rico. The company's reason for existence is to help seed companies rapidly develop new pure lines, typically GMO lines. 3MG does this by taking advantage of Puerto Rico's nearly ideal climate to produce three or four generations of plants in one year. Today, 3MG raises 19 crops for more than 100 clients from 11 countries. It plants experimental seeds and harvests the results, which helps 3MG's clients improve their plant genetics more quickly than they could in their own countries' climates.

That's Baumgartner's main business.

His "hobby" (now side business) involves using that same Puerto Rican growing season to rapidly develop non-GMO hybrids. But for his hobby, he adds a twist: some of the worst-looking corn plots you will ever see. Drought-stunted, heat-battered and insect-infested, they would make most plant breeders cry. They make Baumgartner giddy.

SEVERAL STRESSES

The root of Baumgartner's revolutionary theory is that he strives for multiple stresses on his corn when selecting for resistance. Conventional seed breeders tend to concentrate on one stress variable at a time.

Trial by several fires is an integral part of Baumgartner's unorthodox methodology. He intentionally withholds normal irrigation and insecticide treatments in the same field. Given Puerto Rico's hot, windy climate and enormous insect populations, that makes for extreme stress for corn plants.

Baumgartner learns to love the survivors of such conditions for the defensive secrets they hold. "Our premise is that those high-stress conditions are where you make your biggest gains." If a line can survive what Baumgartner throws at it, it has some valuable properties deep within.

Do traditional seed breeders think his methods are crazy? "Absolutely!" he laughs.

To understand why being considered crazy doesn't bother Baumgartner, you might want some background.

First, his Minnesota family has been in the seed business for three generations; his great-uncle founded Trojan Seeds, and his father planted test plots for another seed company. (His daughter Raechel works for 3MG and is the fourth generation.) After his studies at the University of Minnesota, Baumgartner worked for several seed companies, including Mycogen, which sent him to its Puerto Rico research station in the 1990s.

Years later, he and a couple of friends from Israel started 3MG in Puerto Rico to sell seed-development services to big-name genetics companies.

The next thing to know about Baumgartner -- maybe obvious by now -- is that he is not afraid to be unconventional. At 52 years old, he sports a full beard. His earnest brown eyes search others for evidence of understanding or, better yet, acceptance of the unexpected things he might tell them about plant breeding. His grey-streaked black hair curls at the collar, only a shadow of what it was when his daughters urged him to grow his hair long enough to harvest it for Locks for Love. Then, Baumgartner let it flow down his back—a middle-aged hippy in the seed business.

FAMOUS IDOL

Baumgartner's hero is Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, who was also a bit unconventional in his plant-breeding theories. Like Borlaug, Baumgartner's own goal isn't to develop a super seed that will break yield records. Rather, he wants to develop multiple good-yielding hybrids that have at least moderate resistance to a variety of hazards. "We are trying to make better defensive traits and, over time, get better yield potential into them," he says.

This is a different approach than GMO breeders take. Typically, they start with a high-yielding hybrid and modify specific genes to make a new line that is resistant to one or more specific stresses.

Baumgartner concedes the effectiveness of that approach, but he wants to give farmers other options.

"We are not going head-to-head with GMOs," he says.

He has had some recent success. This year, Baumgartner teamed with Spectrum Seed Solutions, of Crawford, Ind., to offer non-GMO hybrids. Spectrum licenses 3MG's "DuraYield" trademark for resistant inbred lines and combines those lines with yield genetics that work well in parts of the Corn Belt.

"What's exciting about this," says Spectrum genetics manager Scott Johnson, "is that we are bringing something entirely new to farmers who don't want to pay $300 a bag for a quality product."

Johnson says his target market is "a halo around the Corn Belt" consisting of farmers whose soils aren't the best but still can produce high-yielding corn given the right—inexpensive—genetics. These farmers are potential customers for non-GMO products like DuraYield hybrids. Other potential customers include specialty (food grade, waxy and starches) grain growers who don't have a lot of GMO options. Growers who want to export to the European Union—where restrictions on GMOs still exist—also are potential customers. So are organic growers. In the long-term, so are third-world farmers.

PAY WHAT YOU NEED

A sales pitch Johnson uses with potential customers goes something like this: When you buy GMOs, you are paying a lot of money for a few defensive traits. If you don't need those traits in a particular growing season (because there isn't a lot of rootworm pressure, for instance), you can save money by using non-GMOs.

Johnson also points out that GMOs don't have a lock on the highest-yielding genetics. In fact, most major seed companies have non-GMO breeding divisions that produce high-yielding genetics into which the companies later insert GMO traits. Those high-yielding non-GMO lines also are available for licensing by companies like Spectrum and 3MG.

Baumgartner is looking for exotic corn genes anywhere he can find them. "I want to go find things in Colombia, Africa, wherever."

He also plans to recycle old genetics that have fallen from favor but still have potential.

"What I want to increase is kernels per plant," Baumgartner says. "Whether that's on two ears, three ears or just one big ear, I don't care. My preference would be to find something that puts on multiple large ears. I guess I'm greedy." He laughs his big laugh.

It might take nonconventional thinking to push corn yields to the next level, because, in Baumgartner's view, yield progress has slowed for conventional breeding methods and for GMO technologies.

SOUND ARGUMENT

"Herman Warsaw grew 300-plus bushels in 1975." Almost 40 years later, winners in the National Corn Growers Yield Contest consistently hover at the 360- to 370-bushel range. (David Hula won with 429 bushels last year.) That's not much progress, and some of it can be attributed to precision-farming technology, not seed breeding.

Since the 1960s, Baumgartner points out, the national corn yield average has increased only about 1.7 bushels per acre per year and now stands at around 160 bushels. "At that rate, we will make less than 200 bushels per acre [national average] by 2030. To get to 300 bushels, we need to make 7-bushel-per-acre per-year increases."

How will that be possible?

One answer, Baumgartner says, is to "work around the edges." He wants to raise the national average by increasing yields in less-productive soils. If that happens, the national average will rise faster than by raising best of the best on limited acres.

Time is on his side when it comes to plant breeding, Baumgartner says. "Our continuous nursery situation here [in Puerto Rico] comes in handy because we can grow seven generations of seed in two years." Over the next 18 years, that figures out to at least 63 generations of corn.

That's a lot of material for Baumgartner's hobby.

(AG/CZ)

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