Pioneering Perennial Crops: The Oikos Tree Crops Journey into Oak Breeding and Sustainable Food Systems

with Ken Asmus

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Ken Asmus, the man behind Oikos Tree Crops, someone who has contributed extensively towards the future of perennial crops through his dedication and 40+ years working on a small farm in Michigan. The purpose of the episode was to talk about oaks and oak breeding, but it's so hard to chat with Ken about one plant because he's got so much going on and is such a wealth of information. We end up talking about sunchokes, beach plums, chufa river cane, tuberous peas, and a number of other plants, and we explore the idea of plant breeding from a wider scope, intergenerationally. How do we ensure our work doesn't get lost as we continue to develop resources? What does it mean to create an infrastructure where future generations will be able to continue the work he started, and how do we honor the work done by generations prior?

Andy:

Ken, thanks for coming on. I've been aware of what you've been doing for, researching for, and breeding for at least over a decade now. You are probably one of the most diverse people in, whatever you want to call the food forest space or whatever.

The amount of things that you've gotten into that I've seen no one else talk about is just wild. So please introduce yourself and some of the work you've done.

Ken:

Sure, well, I actually got my start from my family's tree farms. We had Christmas tree farms. If you've ever pruned a Christmas tree and done it thousands of times in the day, you begin to look at the ground, and you see all these interesting plants around the Christmas trees, and I thought, boy, these are kind of interesting plants. I need to figure out which plants those are. In that process, I kind of discovered that there are a lot of edible food plants within any given environment.

And I began to kind of go on camping trips and so forth and taste test all these things. And that kind of kept with me when I started the nursery after college and I began to experiment even more with different types of fruits and nuts. And then when I bought my farm in the early 80s, it gave me kind of a laboratory that I could bring things there and test and grow and just to see how things grow under cultivation, and so it was a fun thing to do. Really I wasn't trying to, you know, hardcore nail out something.

And the nursery. Actually, having a nursery is just a very wide-open thing. Well, I'll try to grow this and make it available to other people, and sometimes that was successful, and sometimes it wasn't, but it was fun to do. You know, you learn about nature, and you learn about life and everything else.

Andy:

So yeah, absolutely, and you've. You've put some decades under your belt, which I think gives you a different perspective than somebody who's got a bunch of, you know, plants they're working on that are 8-10 years old like you've seen these things kind of really develop and even work with some of the seedlings from those plants that you initially planted and kind of see how that evolves right?

Ken:

That's correct. So, in some ways, the inspiration from that came from what's called geographical races with pine trees. You know, like a Scotch pine tree may have several geographical races that are, in certain mountain ranges they grow like this, in other mountain areas they may grow like this. And then the Christmas tree industry would say, oh well, we want this shape of the tree because it's nicer for Christmas trees. And I always had this thought, geez, I wonder if you could make other quote-unquote geographical races and then kind of spread them out and grow them in some way.

And so that was kind of the impetus of that. And I was able to do that with oaks, you know, right off the bat and it's only because I was really interested in oak trees. I thought they were kind of a cool tree. There's so much diversity in oaks you can't. It's hard to tell them apart sometimes. So that's what was kind of interesting too.

Andy:

Yeah yeah, oaks are. I think there are more varieties of oaks in North America than any other species on the continent, yeah, and I think that speaks to the fact that there's so much genetic diversity that we are really not tapping into as we think. You know the way we think about corn breeding. You know, it's like, oh, we have to, you know, there's this long history of trying to track down all these races of corn because we need those genetics. We have these oak trees with like unlimited genetics, basically just sitting there in our backyards, quite literally, yeah, and we're not doing a whole lot with them.

Ken:

No, and you know the whole point of this oak thing kept hitting me on the head over and over again. But one of the things I've discovered was this network of people that collect acorns for the nursery industry and that was really kind of just retired folks and other people, occasionally some young people that wanted to make a few extra bucks somewhere. It varied quite a bit on who was collecting that. It would be like a housewife living in a trailer, but it would also be a PhD candidate for neurophysiology going to the University of California.

So you have this huge variation of people that like to just collect acorns, or maybe they want to make them available, and for some reason, they were attracted to me. Of course, I'd buy them from them, but a lot of times, they just did it because it was an enjoyable hobby. You know, I remember an electrician that sold me quite a few acorns from a park in Pennsylvania and excuse me, and he was doing it with his son, and the idea is his son would make some money, and he'd save the money. And you know, it was kind of an enjoyable hobby for many people.

And for me, I got a chance to grow thousands of seedlings from that, and you could see this beautiful variation. And then sometimes I would go, I'm going to, you know, tie a little ribbon around this tree, and I'm going to plant it out in my orchard, and that's kind of one of the methods I use for getting that diversity.

And, yes, we, there's so much, yet what are you going to do with that? You know, yeah, I didn't even know and I still I'm a little confused about it, but the idea is then to create a crop from, from a oak is people have been doing since a long, long time ago. You know, and now you're trying to think about it in terms of an orchard crop, and that that's quite challenging and it involves a lot, of, a lot of research and probably money from individuals to work on it.

Andy:

I don't think it'll ever end up in a university type of setting, but it has landed there a few times, so you never know, yeah, and you know what the thing about acorns is, that, in terms of like a nut that you can crack open, it's such an easy, high, like a large nut to work with, compared to, like you know, black walnuts or hickories, which are delicious in their own right. You know if, if I handed you an acorn or hickory and I said which one would you rather crack open, it's going to be the acorn every time, you know what I mean, and that just seems like a no-brainer. It's like one of the most important plants for the landscape and it's so easy to access in terms of like getting the the nut meat out of it yeah, yeah, it comes out whole, it has a thin shell.

Ken:

It could probably be used for many different things, and you know there is a movement now with various folks who are beginning to incorporate it into food and learn how to process it.

You have that aspect of it. Then you have, you know, the breeding part of it is kind of mixed, with people that say, oh, you could have varieties, and then others saying, well, you know, maybe we could just grow seedling orchards of them and harvest them, almost like a wild crop, like pinyon nuts or something, where you just go out every year and then others are trying to use the wild crops that already exist, these old trees, maybe they're in a park or somewhere and they're cleaning, they're raking up acorns.

But that whole thing is fascinating to me. One of the things that I really enjoyed doing was collecting the acorns at my farm and then processing them and making cornbread out of them, and then I would give a lecture or something somewhere, and I'd bring that with me, and I'd bring that with me, and so I used the Betty Crocker recipe, but it was like three-quarters cornmeal or three quarters acorn meal and a quarter cornmeal or something like that, and it was quite a delicious bread. People really liked it.

But it was fun to do that, and it kind of does give you an idea of the acorn and how it's been used traditionally in a flower type of base product. And then one of my acquaintances said I'm going to make oil from acorns and this guy owned an oil company that made olive oil, so he had these big presses and all this and he stored the acorns for so many months, and then he pressed these I think they were California oaks, and he pressed them into oil, and he said I said, well, that's fantastic, thanks for doing this. He sent me a little jar of oil, and then he said, well, it was great, but I'll never do it again. It was quite hard, actually.

So you know, some of this processing thing is going to have to work itself out.

I met another guy who was going to make commercial acorn chips, and in that process, he got in trouble unbeknownst to him because acorns at that time were listed as a poisonous part of a plant, so he borrowed another chip manufacturer's chip maker and when he ran him through that, and everything was fine until he got to packaging and he started selling, and USDA fined him. Then the equipment that was used for the chips got locked up for so many months, you know they couldn't use them because essentially it was poisonous.

But nowadays, you see the attitudes kind of change, and they say, well, okay, you can use acorns, but you have to process them. You know it is safe to use, but you have to process them. But I think going back to this whole idea then becomes how safe are acorns to eat and how can we make sure that they're delicious and nutritious and they don't have the tannins or anything that would hurt your liver or damage you in some way?

Andy:

Yeah, yeah, there's definitely a lot of questions that still need to be answered. Yeah, and I'll do a quick, shameless plug here we are doing, through the podcast and our people that listen, an acorn, a burr oak acorn harvesting project, and part of it is.

People send acorns to us. We spent a little bit of money and got a tannin testing equipment. Oh yeah, I'm not the most qualified person to talk on it, but we, we spent the money based on someone else who knew better than I do so we can actually say, yes, these are the nuts that we've got, this is what their actual tannins are before we do anything to them, and then saying all right, we got 12 acorns, whatever it might be. We tested four of them, the other eight we're gonna go. Four of them will sample. We tested four of them; the other eight we're going to go. Four of them will sample and taste, and then four of them will plant. So that way, we've got all the genetics.

We can grow them out like seedlings and start to be able to say that, obviously, not every acorn is the same, but we have something to work with and some kind of data to actually back it up.

Ken:

Yeah, that's a good idea. I should send you samples so you can take a look at some of the ones that I think are very good.

Andy:

Yeah, absolutely. And that way, again, you have some data to kind of back like this doesn't taste very tannin, and it's like, well, yeah, I can actually prove to you, you know, with some actual data, that this is this compared to like a. You know I'm sure we'll have some come in that are higher, yeah, and you know you can kind of get that spectrum of what we're actually looking at and how big a deal it is when you find one that's low tannin or tannin free, yeah, or if there really is any that are tannin free.

Ken:

Yeah, that's actually a good question. Yeah, because I don't know. Yeah.

Andy:

You'll see people like Sam Thayer recently, yeah, was talking about this tree, bur oak in Minnesota that he was like, this is tannin free, and it's like, well, it probably tastes that way, but is it actually? And like, to your point, what kind of risks are we actually taking if we're consuming this in any volume?

Ken:

That's a very good point. And there are actually a couple of things that people are aware of, with fiddlehead ferns, for example, you know those have that same issue, and you really need to get those very clean to enjoy them because they're very tannic. And also there's a, there's a tropical fern where this one culture uses this fern quite a bit for food, this fern quite a bit for food, and they've kind of discovered through various tests that this one type of cancer that is only common there was a result of the consumption of this fern and it has high levels of tannins.

So there are certain aspects of that that you know you really have to think about because you don't want to. And there are other food crops like that, I mean like potatoes, have solanine, and if some potato, someone breeds a potato that's high in solanine, you can't release that to the public because people would get sick right away, yeah, and sometimes you can't taste.

I guess you can't taste necessarily taste solanine, or some people can, like I'm very sensitive to it, but other people can't really have an effect, maybe the their saliva is different or something, and so there's this aspect of okay. But then there's the processing aspect too, like how far, how many washes to make something safe to eat, or is there actually any so low that it doesn't matter that you wash it? And that was one of the things that I was always searching for and talking with others about it. They say, well, it might vary from year to year, and it does seem to vary a little bit from year to year from the same tree, but maybe, maybe not. Maybe it just needed to sit and ripen longer because there are some chestnuts that are like that too. If they ripen later and longer, that diminishes, and the acorn can be used.

But whatever it is, most people just do the blender method, and that one woman, Suellen Ocean, wrote Acorns and Eat'em from California. She was probably one of the first. She described her experiences in her cookbook, and she, you know, was talking about using the blender method and getting out all the tannins and then making various types of foods from them, and that's probably the most modern-day book that came out on it.

And then prior to that there was the Native American tribe I forget the name of it, I'm sorry I forgot, but from southwestern California where they were doing demonstrations on how to process acorns using ash and grinding and putting it in a stream and so forth. Interested in the new food crops and acorns was kind of one that I took on early on. It was enjoyable to meet so many people who were interested in that.

Andy:

I would agree. The potential for oaks is just. There's a lot there. I'm glad people are getting into it.

One of the trees in particular that you've worked with is Ashworth, right, so could you talk a little bit about Ashworth? It's a bur oak, right? It's a bur oak cross.

Ken:

If you read the story about Fred Ashworth, he was the forerunner of the nursery for Bill McKentley's farm in New York, and so basically, he had discovered this on a road coming back, and there was a road crew working on something, and he picked a bunch of acorns off this one prolific small tree, and they were quite delicious. He found them very delicious, so Ashworth “borrowed” that original one along the road. He took me back to his nursery. It was grown there for many years and the seedlings from it I think had spread a little bit too in that area.

So we're talking like a zone three type, very cold. And then Fred Ashworth happened to know another plant breeder in the Northern Nut Growers Association. He was, uh, Miguel Marquez, and Miguel had this property in El Paso. And then Fred would occasionally visit him, according to what Miguel told me, because he had relatives there. And so he eventually got scion wood from that original tree and put it on his trees. He had super alkaline, high volcanic-type soil.

So he had initially these trees that are multi-grafted that sometimes had dozens and dozens of grafts on each tree, and then he would let those grow out and flower and bag them, and he sent me the acorns from those trees, and that's how I ended up with the Ashworth Burr Oak at my farm and the ones at my farm. Some of those had kind of hybridized with the white oak so you can see a little variation in them.

But each of the two trees that I have that are just amazing in the amount of fruit that they produce and the amount of acorns. It's really heavy. But it also alternates, which is a common characteristic with oak trees. You know, you have one year that's just banner, and then the next year nothing. That's kind of an issue for a crop plant, yeah, but either way, there are some that have more of a consistent yield from year to year, but not as high. And then, of course, there's frost. Late frost can sometimes affect pollination.

But that Ashworth bur oak so many people have had it and grown it, from St. Lawrence nurseries as well as other places, it's all around. I've seen other trees of it in Lansing Michigan. A few years ago Someone had planted a bunch of them. So it's a very popular, well-known bur oak that was grown for acorns to eat. And then another one that I found out about early on was a forester that was Gene Ulrich from Ennard, Oklahoma, and he had kind of, you know, he would occasionally munch on acorns, and then he sent me some of these huge bur oak acorns from that region, and I still have those trees now. Some of them are about 60 feet tall or so in terms of geographic race.

That particular acorn ripens in November, december, so it's really late and they hang up on the branches and you can see the squirrels going up in there and dropping them. But generally, these types of things, farther south you go, you know you end up with a different ripening period. The farther north it's a different ripening. But what's fascinating to me is that many of these southern oaks are able to tolerate zone five even though they're from zone eight or nine. So it's really quite an amazing range of adaptability with the oak.

Andy:

Are they keeping their size, the acorn size?

Ken:

Yeah, pretty much, but some are smaller than what they were by maybe a quarter, and I think that's because I have real sandy soil. Some of these were collected near river bottom-type soils. Yeah.

Andy:

I know there's, I think, a sub-variety of macrocarpa. It's like a swamp bur oak or something. So it must be those guys, right? That's awesome. You know there's a lot of research on why the bur oaks are so much smaller north, yeah. And then you, you know, you think about like climate change, and it's like, well, if it is the longer seasons, then that's not really an issue anymore. I'm sure the length of your seasons is not significantly less than what Oklahomas were a years ago 150 years ago.

Ken:

Yes, that's correct, unfortunately.

Andy:

But that also speaks to the importance of trying to move these trees across the landscape because the climate is changing way faster than these trees can move on their own. So we do have a responsibility to help them adjust to this new climate.

Ken:

Right and you have there's kind of two. Some people are for that; some are against it. But I think one of the things that, as a crop plant, you really have to look at the full range of that plant's growth. Even if it's in Mexico, you know you have to think to yourself, well, wait a minute. Even if it's in Mexico, you know you have to think to yourself, well, wait a minute. If this plant grows here, can it be expanded? And what value is that going to be to the cultivation of that crop plant?

And with the big oaks, with the big acorn ones, it's funny because I have several from Texas, and out of all that group there's some that are just massive. They're huge trees now, but they've never shed an acorn, you know, never. But I have one tree, one tree that's just filled with these large acorns, and a lot of the ones from Illinois, even though those acorns are actually quite large too, have done very well here. And so you know. You know, going south, yes, you can, but the farther south you go, you don't even know why the tree survives, but yet it doesn't produce fruit. I don't know what that is. Maybe I have to wait another 20 years.

But, it's fascinating just from the standpoint of breeding and it actually kind of relates to pecan. You know, you have this long life, this big, huge tree that's so amazing and diverse, and you want to figure out, okay, how can we do this, and how long will that take? And so my thought would be then to have both seedling orchards as well as grafted orchards of many kinds, so you could kind of develop that as time went on because there isn't really any place you could do this at other than private, some private land somewhere. I don't know if that would be. The next step is if you could have other than my farm, which everyone is invited to come and visit. I have no problem with that.

But the idea of having it in other public areas, in different regions, kind of gives an idea of what you're up against because then you go, oh, here, it does this and that, and the more data you get, the faster you could create a new crop from acorns very fast. You don't have to wait dozens of years for breeding, either. That's ridiculous. It's already been bred, not just my little dinky thing, but also in the wild. I mean, I have seen trees many, many times. Uh, that I'm like, good lord. That is amazing. You know, there's big clusters of acorns all over the branches and the yields are really good. So it's not necessarily needed.

Andy:

It's more or less finding it, yeah, and that's kind of why we've done this project is, yeah, I was thinking, I thought about, uh, we're going to be doing some episodes on some of the folks from like the early 20th century J. Russell Smith, John Hershey, and all those folks yeah and you know J. Russell Smith, one of his big things was that, like basically what you're saying, that we basically need to have these, these collaborative, federal, private nurseries yeah, to try to do exactly what you're talking about.

And, uh, one of the tools that he used with the Northern Nut Growers Association and TVA was this idea of like contests, of like the tree. Like you said, the trees are already out there.

Oh yeah, and the problem, you know, as like you think about, like Hershey's Farm, he had all these cultivars right, and they're all great, and they're amazing. But I mean, I wasn't around in the 40s, but I imagine, like in the 20s, 30s, 40s, when he was doing this, the access to getting in front of people, like even if it was popular, like maybe 1% of the population was thinking about it. So it's like you probably tapped into only 1% of the potential of what's out there.

So trying to again bring these ideas of this stuff is already out there, ideas of the stuff is already out there. We just need to find it and then, as you said, start growing it and, you know, trying to make it so it's something we can tap into. I think that's really important and trying to even if my, if I don't see it in my lifetime for future generations to then have this, you know, resilient crop that can feed people, help, all these huge ecosystem benefits. As nice as it would be to be the person who gets to buy acorn flour at the store for the price of, like, you know, any other flour, I know that's not in my lifetime, but it could be in my kids, you know.

Ken:

Yeah, well, you know you're really looking at worldwide. I think you know you probably the Spanish equivalent of feeding the hogs with the mast trees. As you know, they've developed some varieties for human consumption and then also ones for feeding animals, and so that's probably the farthest along it's got worldwide. But there are probably other cultures too that just naturally use the mass for various things, like Korea. Some Mediterranean cultures have used acorns for humans, even in recent memory.

But again, I just wish there were more public places where you could see that in some manner, taking all these wild, the wild germplasm, assembling it, and making it available to the public in some way so it's not locked up in research. I don't like things locked up in research. And if there's one thing that I try to do to get out what I've created as soon as I can, even if it's not completed. It's like here you take it, whether I sell it or give it away or trade it. You know, I'm not really concerned about that as much, but you know, the idea of having this future, like you're talking about the future crop in an environment that's going to be more difficult.

You know it's going to be more and more difficult to grow annual crops out west. So I think the potential would be to have these new crops tested in some of the most harshest conditions to see. You know where we can get this new crop started and fruiting. You know, I know there's a big movement for established tree crops, like pecans and so forth, to move those farther north and west and figuring out the details of that. But then you have the farmers. The farmers themselves are so hamstrung they can't be experimenting. Farming is not experimentation anymore, it's production, it's all production. So I often think that whoever owns their land, and maybe there could be other possibilities for having these research facilities in other private hands, you're going to need hundreds of them, not just a couple dozen.

Andy:

I absolutely agree. One of the things that's been really nice about this podcast project is seeing how my own perspectives, based on conversations with folks like you, have evolved my understanding of what our job is as individuals. Should we be trying to grow our own food? Should we be collectively trying to grow our food, food communally or realistically, is our job really as a conductive piece in developing future food systems, which is kind of where I'm at now, and I think this kind of work is so important. And one of the things you brought up earlier, and I think this kind of highlights a bigger, whether it's hickories or acorns, right? It can be so time-consuming.

And it turns people off from saying that could never be a crop. Right, like sunchokes, right? And then it's like, well, yeah, you could say the same thing about black beans. If we didn't have mass production for black beans outside of certain cultural groups, most white Americans don't buy dried black beans. Right, we buy them canned and processed. We can take that model and apply it to a lot of these foods. We have the capacity; we have the infrastructure. Yeah, even if we don't have the specific tools yet, right, right, like the same thing with sunchokes, you could, instead of everyone having to have them in a crock pot for 12 hours, we could have them pre-processed, and you buy them canned or jarred or whatever, just like any other food that needs to be processed similarly.

It's just a matter of kind of getting there, and I think that is the part that is missing from a lot of these conversations. We're all trying to do this ourselves instead of thinking about the resources on a bigger scale. That brings you to this idea of more of like your philosophy behind your breeding and kind of now, having been doing this for 40 years, what some of your thoughts are on how you started, things you wish you had done differently, advice you'd give to younger people that are just maybe where you were in the 80s thinking about. I want to just kind of start breeding these things, collecting them, thinking about what their potential is in the future.

Ken:

Well, when I started, I will say this was fascinating to me, and I still haven't really figured it out, but there are always certain individuals who really love something. They were very, and it was like a single crop. It could have been just hazelnuts, like one person who loved hazelnuts, and they wouldn't talk about anything else. You know, I was like, man, Cecil Ferris was a good example of this, and I was like, boy, this guy loves hazelnuts; what's the deal with it? But he, he bred them, he developed them, he just loved to talk about him. He had this, did this thing in his backyard. He was I think he was an engineer. He worked for GM, and that was his thing. And I met other people who loved apricots. They just loved apricots. That was the only thing they wanted to talk about and I was like, well, that's kind of interesting. They stuck with something and they really worked on it back and forth, back and forth.

There was a lot of progress in those individuals because they focused on these single crops. But there are a couple of things that came out of it. That was what happened to them. What happened? Did it end up in the public domain somehow? It was kind of sad, never mentioned in research, never mentioned by other plant breeders in commercial settings. It's like just forgotten and it's kind of sad. I thought, you know, there's a legacy. Now, a couple of them did write books. Maybe they got it in a book or you know they did produce that, but it's not as you know. Now, that's kind of like the story of Pawpaw with Corwin Davis. I felt you know he worked so hard on Pawpaws. He just loved Pawpaws, and you don't hear his name mentioned really that much, and yet he was one of the original researchers on Pawpaws.

So I think part of it is you. It's great that people you know I can provide inspiration for them from the things I've done. And I'm not really holding out a lot of hope for the things I've developed as much, but it's possible that someone would take it even further and move it along. It's just like that with anything. We're all standing on the backs of giants. It's just like that with anything. We're all standing on the backs of giants, and we have to acknowledge what we're doing, and we're helping somebody else get there.

And that's how I view my crops, you know. I'm like, okay, well, you can take this now and do this, and even though I'm selling those things now, I don't feel that's very satisfying at this point. So, I am doing that, and I don't know how much longer I will do that, but I do like that.

But going back to the beginning, I could tell within the first 10 years or so I'm like, okay, this nursery scenario is not profitable, and it probably won't be profitable, really. But I had help with things so and I had a stable home life, family life, and I was it, my wife was working, so there was a certain level of stability, the whole thing. But I thought I know what I could do is I could start planting and just expand it to seedlings, to seed-grown plants, because then you could see this diversity that we're so much in need of today. So that was a smart idea. That was one of my better ideas.

Now, the worst idea was trying to accommodate these niche markets because they're just so small that you would fulfill them quickly, and that was it, and then it would drop off, you know. So it's like the world's smallest restaurant in many ways. You know people go, oh, I love going to this restaurant, but then when the owner gets a little crotchety and old, well, we're not going to go there anymore, and it's closed now, and we're going to go on to the next small restaurant.

But you can inspire people and work on crops in a very low-cost, ineffective way and, probably because of your love for that, you will make way more progress than someone who's getting huge research dollars, and it's being piled into one spot, and there's a lot of talking heads and people that are on you about what you need to do, and I think part of it is just the love that people feel towards their fellow humans and the plants themselves. They love the plants and the single-crop guys. They're like, man. I love apricots, you know.

And it's just that whole thing. It just seems to lend itself to progress, actual scientific progress in that field of knowledge, of scientific breeding, even though it might not be considered scientific by the person doing it. So, anyway, that's my spiel.

Andy:

What I really appreciate about you is, in a lot of ways, I accidentally found myself doing a lot of the same things as you Before we started recording. I'd mentioned, like, I'm trying to get river cane up here, and that's something you've talked about as a difficult plant to work with, but I think it is going to be really valuable as a plant here in the Northeast as climate change continues. Chufa is another one that doesn't get much attention at all, and you're one of the few folks that I've seen growing it.

I've also seen you talk about sunchokes, like breeding them in terms of like actually cross pollinating them to create new cultivars, and again, this is something me and a couple of folks I know are doing. So it's just like everything you've done. I feel like I'm kind of going down these same rabbit holes, and my ADHD gets me focused on it, but then I kind of jump to the next thing.

So it's really interesting to see how you've evolved in the stuff you're growing and how you look back at that kind of work that you've done and the hope you have for those things to continue, which is, you know, you've made a really good point that we don't do a good job outside of again the J Russell Smiths kind of folks of actually honoring and remembering the folks that have done this work.

Ken:

Oh man, it's so long that cultivars, oh yeah, it's a long list, yeah, I mean I'm just starting to talk about a few of them, and more of them are coming in my mind, you know, and there are people like I just thought of Clifford England, even though I've only met him once but I mean just amazing collections repository these folks have. You know, that was kind of their hobby, and there were people before him that I met in the Northern Nut Growers that had these huge collections. And then sometimes people will. I have one group of guys that have come here a couple of times, but they look up the collections, and then they go to the death records, find out where they lived, and then go to their home, so I'll try to figure out where that is and then collect scion wood off something that they're hoping to propagate.

Andy:

Yeah, I won't say I've never tried that.

Ken:

No, no, it's a little elaborate.

Then it ends up in the nursery system, and that's one part that I've been trying to discuss with some younger people, and that, for some reason, falls on deaf ears often because they have this plan, and I'm like, that plan is not going to work. But I'm not that brash about it, but it just happens to be. You know, an industry where the pricing is such that it's very difficult to, you know, make a living from it, and there's so many different things affecting it's a huge industry, so certainly there's a way to make it profitable.

But the method I used wasn't, is not, but there are some aspects of it that would probably work. So then you end up, you know you're really competing. It's very difficult to figure out what you're going to do with those things that you're growing. That really is where the nursery industry is. If you create a new plant or have something new, how is that going to be applied to the public at large, and who's going to buy it and use it? And are there other things that people would not buy because the pricing is not low enough?

So because of the way forestry works, you have a combination of, you know, really bad forestry practices that are finally, people are saying this seems like a bad idea. You know, forestry, in general, is almost like no one could criticize or scrutinize them, and the same goes for conservation practices. Some of them are just horrible, and they'll always be horrible. They'll never get better until you know we jump in and say you need to stop doing that; it's not working. So that falls on deaf ears.

But I think part of it is it'll be this rise up of folks like you and younger people that will take hold of these crops and apply them. It's almost like a type of technology we're going to apply this to this, and then we're going to create this, which will then create that. So you have this ground-up interest. The only thing that may be missing is money. I don't know, but maybe that will have to come into it to make this happen. These ideas can happen. A giant conglomeration with a means of fulfilling those goals over the course of a couple of decades. That's really what you're looking at.

Andy:

Yeah, I'm thinking a land trust model might protect some of those cultivars and also maybe codify them a little bit without going into that industry the way you're talking about and allow them to scale up or grow out enough to have an actual scale to then be applied for production or food production or whatever it might be.

Ken:

Yeah.

Andy:

But it really is difficult, and I don't really. I'm not going to pretend I have an answer because I don't.

And you brought up a lot of really interesting points. You know this idea of all these stories being lost that you know, unfortunately. You know, like you'd brought up like going to track down like a farm where somebody that was an NNGA probably had certain things that we don't know about. Yeah, and there is one site near me that I recently went to trying to track down some hickories that I thought may or may not have come from.

They had been in NNGA in the forties, and then they made it a public farm with a preschool on it, so you could go hiking there and stuff. So I went there to kind of check it out, and there are these big old hickories, and I'm like, I bet these are somehow related because they're all on the edge of the farm. They're all about the same age, and oh, they're all dead.

And I'm like, oh, you gotta be kidding me. They're all just standing dead trees. And then there's young ones popping up that are like 15 feet tall. None of them had any nuts on them. But yeah, uh, you know it, there's so much out there that's been lost, and so much that's on the brink of being lost that, you know, maybe if I'd been there five years ago, I could have grabbed some nuts.

It really speaks to a lot of people on the internet who love to throw away or throw around the term ancestral knowledge, and this is really that, in some ways, what we're talking about is like these, the knowledge of these trees, these species, these cultivars, and what they can do for the landscape and for us, right, and that can be a really big challenge to try to figure out like you said, what the right steps are for us to protect these plants. To honor the giants that stood before us.

Ken:

Yeah.

Andy:

So we're not recreating the wheel in so many ways like I'm kind of doing, you know, doing the same experiments with sunchokes and so on. You know, starting from scratch instead of, you know, the work that's been done before.

Ken:

Well, some things are much faster to cycle through, too, you know, and others take a lot longer.

Andy:

Yeah, absolutely, especially stuff that's annuals or short perennials.

Ken:

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned, there was a guy I think it was last year or so and they said oh, it's right across from 7-11 on this street, you know, and it's in the median of the of this road, you know. But this guy obviously owned this property, and they turned it into a road, and it was a two-way road, and they kept the hickory there, but it's a grafted hickory, so it's kind of, oh wow, it sticks out. You know it's like you'll see it.

Andy:

No one else will, but you will, yeah.

Ken:

Most people just drive by. But it's just fascinating to me. Yeah, whatever happened to those. And there are some amazing collections here in the United States that people have and it's kind of fortunate. But to me, I'm thinking, well, you know, what is going to be the future of that, and how can more people benefit from that collection? Because it's not just a Christmas tree, that farm that has been abandoned.

It's more than that. It's this genetic repository that could be used for something just spectacular, and someone with a vision will find it maybe and start using it. But the way the system is, the way we have it now, you have the repositories and genetic repositories, and some are available, some are not, and then you have the USDA seed banks and things. So there are some things, but to me, it's almost like you want a living collection of oak trees in particular. To me, that seems like that would be just spectacular. Yeah, I would agree people could go away from that and just be impressed.

The University of California, in Davis, has a had a, and I think it's still there and pretty much an intact huge collection of oak trees. And there was a professor there who made this collection by using another oak breeder from the University of Utah, and he said, you know, we should try to bring all these oak hybrids out west because they'll grow in these incredibly dry locations. And so they, you know, they recreated that there, and the pictures I got from there were just their Polaroids. It was before the Internet, really, and I was like, wow, that's fantastic.

Look at all those acorns. It's just a barren field there, and some of the trees. You wouldn't imagine them being able to survive there, these different kinds of shrub live oaks that are just these thick, evergreen things. Once again, you have this genus that just shows amazing diversity and tolerance to bad conditions, and it has an acorn, it has a fruit.

I mean, to me, it's like the perfect tree. But the fact that someone else recognized that in a university and made a collection, that whole thing is really kind of just a random interest, I think. A lot of times I don't think nothing is ever planned out with that. There are no repositories of oak cultivars to speak of, and some things get cut down, too. You know, if it's like, well, we used it for a while, and we're all done with that, and it's not an ornamental oak tree.

It won't end up at Schmidt's Nursery, Frank Schmidt's Nursery, and it probably won't be cultivated to any extent in that way.

But if you said, well, I want to make commercially cultivated oak trees, I tried to do it through Mark Krautman's Heritage Seedling Farm, Heritage Seedling Farm, but they couldn't accept the scion wood because of this blanket thing about oak wilt that is in the state of Michigan. So even though it hasn't been found in my county oak wilt, you'd have to survey the whole county and figure out where oak wilt is able to allow you to send a couple of sticks of scion wood to a nursery in California.

That was rather disappointing for me because they had figured out how to cultivate, you know, clonally cultivate an oak and do it quick, and I could probably get a few hundred of those done right away, and I was really excited about it. But then when we started researching more of the county by county, even though someone found oak wilt 60 miles north of me, that's just, you know, that was a deal killer for that.

Andy:

So yeah, it's unfortunate, yeah, there's so much. As you know, Doug Tallamy is pushing, like, this idea of restoring our yards to be more native. Right, but to your point, you can't in a lot of ways because accessing, especially perennials that are native, can be really difficult, like in that nursery space. You can go to certain places and obviously get oak trees and stuff like that, not in the way that landscaping is traditionally done.

I do want to transition our talk a little bit because one of the things I heard you talking about recently is a potato-oak understory with your perennial potato project. So I got to ask about that.

Ken:

Yes, so that was the idea. The emphasis behind that is what other things could you grow under an oak canopy? And it's actually quite open. There's actually quite a bit of light that penetrates through an oak canopy. It's not like sugar maples or something. So I started experimenting with true seed potatoes, but the goal was to actually find overwintering seed potatoes that would grow in the soil and then spread throughout a canopy of an oak tree. That would be kind of like the ground cover would be potatoes. I found something like that actually that is rhizome-natured.

So it's very competitive in a field environment, and at the same time, it produces the little berries, a little green fruit which you could extract the seeds from. I started doing that, and it kind of worked out pretty well. The other aspect of it was I thought, well, if I'm doing potatoes, you know, I'm kind of, you know, at least that's edible. But then I thought, well, what about, you know, river cane or some other types of plants where you could have thick mats of something growing, and then, when harvest season comes, you could harvest that or mow it down, because it's a, there's a huge resource underneath these trees that's not being used, so a ground resource.

So I thought, well, what sorts of things could you grow in there? That, and I have, you know, ferns, a type of fern, just as a ground cover. Then the other part was potatoes. Sunchokes would have worked. The issue was the predation by deer, by whitetail. Deer was too heavy, uh, for the foliage to keep going.

It's interesting because I've become accustomed to the deer at my farm, but there are really only a few deer that actually stay there at night. Most of them are coming in from surrounding areas to feed. So this time of year in particular the paths really get worn. But anyway, there's a resource. That's a resource that could be used for other things underneath oak trees that you could harvest something from and make it usable for people. And you know I have other types of things like spring beauties or, if that could be usable in some way, or Solomon's seal, if that is possible, edible as a perennial, or different types of asparagus in those environments.

Could I have a perennial asparagus that would work in there? So, there are possibilities with the idea that when the crop comes, that area is mowed down and flattened. You could put tarps down or shake the trees if you're using equipment and uh, but in the meantime, you're still harvesting fruit and vegetables underneath the tree. It's a second crop. So that's another thing we should be looking at because, really, these orchards now are just parents. You think about the orchard of today where you have just a strip herbicide strip and then grass in the middle and nothing else, just the fruit plant. Yeah, so to me, it's like a lost resource.

You, you got land there. Why can't you use that for something?

Andy:

Now, why did you go with potatoes instead of groundnuts?

Ken:

I do have groundnuts, too. Deer also consume foliage, but I still have some versions of them that I plan to experiment with more. The other one is ground nuts, and then also a hog peanut.

Andy:

Are you breeding those to get bigger nuts or not?

Ken:

The hog peanuts are so small, a little dinky, and then the groundnuts were kind of slow in that environment because it's dry where I am and so that particular crop is more of a wetland species. But it can be grown. I have it growing in a couple of spots on top of a hill, but the yields are very low in that environment. But there are other possibilities in those areas. I suppose you could develop a really good ground nut that's more competitive against grass and so forth in these drier locations.

Andy:

Yeah, I really like that hog peanut idea.

Ken:

Yeah, the hog peanut. There's one guy, I think he's from the UK, that has selections of it. Oh my gosh, they're amazing. They're the size of lima beans, and wow, yeah. And then I did have one researcher call me about them, and I said, you know, no one has ever gone down there and dug around because it's just, and it's so hard to find them.

The dirt hangs onto a sticky substance on the hog peanut itself, and so you, you're digging it up. It just looks like a clump of dirt. But there are different colors. They can be white, speckled black and kind of a mix, and the black ones are really kind of cool. But again, I have moved some of that project to these grow bags, so I could kind of take charge of that a little more just to see. But with the hog peanut you're looking for a more clustery type of fruiting, not where it shoots out a runner. And then we did grow it on a tray system in the greenhouse which worked really well. Basically, it was like a tray on top of a tray, and then the peanuts formed on the mat, and then you just pop it up, and then you could pick all the peanuts.

Andy:

Oh, that's awesome.

Ken:

Yeah, and I could see where you could do that almost commercially. There were enough peanuts there. It's almost like chufa is the same way. Chufa is the same way, chufa.

Andy:

You have this clump, and they need so little light, too.

Ken:

Yeah, you have this clump, clumpy plant. You want it to grow out and select it over time. People probably selected for clumpiness. And then the potato, not so much clumpiness they probably didn't want clumpiness. But with the hog peanut there's so much variety of them that you could easily develop that into a crop. But I spent hours digging around trying to fulfill those orders for that one selection that I had, and then we grew it in the greenhouse in another location, and it didn't do as well in the shade. It was a little too shady in there. In other places where it was shady from oaks, the yields were pretty good.

Andy:

yeah, it's fun to dig around in there and look for them, just to see especially your first couple times you're like are am I sure this is not pois”

Ken:

Yeah, sometimes I don't even know where it is. Where is it? And then I found out when I was doing that there's some vole that loves those things and they'll catch them. So you'll be digging, and all of a sudden, you'll see like a whole pile of them, and I go. Well, there they are. You know, better leave some for him. I'm going to take the rest.

Andy:

I'm sorry, pal. Yeah, you better leave some for him. I'm going to take the rest.

Ken:

Yeah, you did the work; I'll give you something, yeah, yeah, but a lot of times they'll, they'll catch those. They'll catch the groundnuts too, or not. Not the groundnuts, but the sunchokes. You know, prairie voles that do that, but the other voles, I think we're eating them and just storing them in little spots, and it may have. There might be 20 or 30 in a little spot that they've cached them in during the winter. But that is really a cool plant, and when I started cultivating it, I got a letter from someone who was just upset that I was even selling it. It wasn't an email, it was a letter like with a stamp on it and I was like, oh't, an email, was a letter like with a stamp on it and I was like, oh, this is serious.

Harvested hog peanuts.

Andy:

What was the problem?

Ken:

Well, it turns out that's one of those plants that, if it gets in compost, it's hard to get rid of. So they don't, and then landscapers don't want that thing in their compost, so here I'm promoting it.

Andy:

Honestly. I mean, you think about it in terms of full-shade plants that we have for options. This is one of the areas that I just feel like we are both in landscaping, especially in landscaping and food production. No one knows what to do with these full-shade spaces, and this is a great option for both sides.

Yeah, you know, it can just take over an understory.

Ken:

That's what you want, you know.

Andy:

Yeah, yeah, it's perfect, such a great plant. I'm just surprised that people got that upset about it.

Ken:

One person did, but I think part of it is that one person.

Part of it is the landscape industry. They it fixes nitrogen for trees, it does this, it does that. It's really kind of a plant, too, that grows in almost like disturbed areas where deer used to be. You know, that's when it really spreads, and then if the deer don't or other things are not there, some digging and digging up and looking for them. That actually increased the volume of them before it was confined to little areas, and when I started digging, I noticed that it spread.

So the digging actually improves the performance of the hog peanut. I wish I could find larger ones and more clumpy ones, and that's. I have a couple that I kept that are in grow bags today, and I'm hoping. I'm like, oh, maybe I can figure this out. It has a very complicated sex life, the way that the seed forms. You get some that it's, there's a seed, and then it also, underground, it fertilizes itself too. So there's, it's an amazing little plant.

But it's so funny, that guy that one researcher goes, I'm looking into because I like it's like some secret, don't tell anyone, but I'm looking into it. Oh, okay, I go. Well, you'll find a lot of variation, and I got mine from an intern and he was up north at his cabin and his property, his family's property, and he sent me back a bunch of them.

He goes man, they're thick here, and you know, like along the roadside, they're just dense, and that's the type of environment that they probably would grow real thick northern Michigan, thick foliage, maybe not a lot of competition from other things and wham yeah, they're, one of those things I'm like I got to get more in-depth research on this because it's really interesting and totally, totally underutilized.

Andy:

Yeah, but it's on my to-do list to dig in more on it, quite literally.

Ken:

Yeah, that's what you need to do, yeah.

Andy:

Yeah, and the other one is Chufa, which I know you've worked with too, and I saw you posted about them maybe like six months ago on Instagram, and I'm like, oh yeah, finally somebody's talking about Chufa. There's such a cool little plant that you know you could really use as a landscaping plant. If you had like a diverse grass-type landscape or if you use native grasses, you could throw chufa interspersed, and you know, especially if you could breed some bigger ones, that would be amazing.

So, I'm curious about your thoughts about its potential to be bred for bigger nuts.

Ken:

The one thing from that was I learned from that was, first of all, the mistaken identity of chufa versus yellow nutsedge. So I have to tell people that constantly, and I'm not sure that always is successful, telling people this is an annual grass, a tropical grass, it's not yellow nutsedge, which is a perennial, and so there's an aspect of that. And the yellow nutsedge is so much imbibed into the weed legislation that just the thought of selling something similar creates ripples. People don't like it. But you have to tell them no, this will die in the winter. Even if it doesn't freeze, it will die. It's tropical. But, having said that, it is widely used and available, but it's only grown in a few regions of the world and sold. I don't think it's grown here commercially in the United States anymore.

Andy:

I think it's mostly like Southern Europe and Africa.

Ken:

Yeah, Spain is a big producer of it, and the flavor of it and the yields are so amazing, and there's oil you can buy from it. I've had it all I love. I just love the flavor. I used to take the plants to my talks that I would give and just rinse them and leave the grass on it and set it there and people would just consume those things. It was like coconut, and it was so delicious. Here in the United States, the only use of that particular plant is wildlife food, so it's used for turkeys.

So there's this aspect of it. It's actually quite difficult to raise them at my farm because of that, and there are also mice and voles that eat the tubers quite heavily. But the idea of it is that you have this high-energy crop that just has a great flavor and has been extracted for oil that you could probably commercially harvest and clean it. There's all the technology for it, but no one has ever really stepped up on that.

My idea was to select a shorter time period for harvest. So I found some that were shorter periods, but I'm not sure if that's an actual varietal name or what because it's normally chufa isn't sold under variety. It might be, there might be black or white or something else or round, but there are no varietal names that I'm that I'm familiar with, but I know there are some. Yeah, for me, it's whatever I can get here in the United States and grow it.

Only a few hobbyists grow it, and it's probably the lowest-key root crop that I'm aware of.

Andy:

Like I said, I saw your post about it. I'm like, oh man, I don't think I've ever seen anyone else talk about chufa, and one of my thoughts is, like, it's so hard to clean that like it really makes a good candidate, and I say this as not an advocate for this system, but hydroponic systems, because of the fact that it is such a pain to clean. I really wonder, and I know nothing about hydroponic systems.

I imagine that is probably the best system for it probably.

Ken:

Yeah, it does make you think about it because it's so efficient at cranking out things and cleaning, too. Yeah, yeah, I could see where people would probably want to do that.

I don't know why you couldn't, couldn't do that. It does seem like one of those crops you know you're growing if you're going to deep space or going to space, going to the moon. Well, we're going to try growing chufa because it's such a delicious, high-oil, high-energy crop.

Andy:

Yeah, it's grass, and it grows quickly, yeah.

Ken:

Oh yeah, it grows super fast.

Andy:

You could really, even in our climates, get two crops in one year. Really, I think so.

Especially if you're able to play with the season, you know, the bookends of the seasons kind of extend the season a little bit. I think you could, but yeah, so your thought is that, basically, what we need to do is try to accelerate the growing cycle to get a better product out of those.

Ken:

Well, the one thing was then I thought with Chufa, there were two things. One is the usability of it. I mean, really, how usable is that particular little tuber? You could probably narrow the window for the ripening period and use existing seed sources. There's a couple, two or three places here in the United States that sell the seeds, and that's what I did.

But over the last couple of decades, I started separating them out from early ripening to late ripening and then growing them out. This year I decided to grow them out again and just test the you know the growth patterns of them and just see if there's any difference. But the issue then becomes okay, you get, you yank them out of the ground, and you have all these, and then you rinse them.

Now what Are you just going to eat them like popcorn, I do. But then I thought, geez, you know you can buy those little oil extractors, so I may try just a hand-pressed oil thing just to see what level of oil is in them because it seems like it could work pretty easily. It's, it's just one of those crops. It's almost like, it reminds me of garlic in some ways. The way that you know, you get the little cloves, and then, yeah, you press them, I could see that.

Andy:

I do want to ask about one other really niche crop that you're one of the only people I've seen growing, and that's the tuberous pea, and I'm terrible at the Latin names, yeah, Lathyrus tuberosus. I've seen people grow them in France. I've tried growing them. I never had any luck, yeah, but I've heard the flavor's incredible, and I've seen you post about them at least once. So I'm curious about your experiences with it and if you have any thoughts about it being an actual viable crop in the future.

Ken:

I think it will. The flavor is amazing. First of all, that's what I've heard.

There is some variation. I know there's a breeding project from some company that's working on them, and other people have experimented with them. But the one thing was, because they're in the pea family, they’re concerned about the neurotoxins. It'd be the same way as if you ate the highway pea. They're concerned about whether those tubers contain any of the neurotoxins. And almost everyone I know will say no, no, it doesn't. But they don't know if it's been tested.

But certainly people have never gotten ill that I'm aware of from eating it. The seeds might be bad, but the tubers are very crispy. They taste just like a pea. It's just amazing how much of a pea-like flavor they have. The yields are kind of low from what I've seen, and I still have one selection that I keep. But one of the things that I think is a failure about it is its ability to tolerate heat. It tends to go dormant in July after it flowers and sets seeds, and so I know, know it's more of an alpine plant, and so that might be what you know. It's been just existing in a very cool climate for many thousands of years and, uh, people have grown them and eaten them and enjoyed them, but there's never been anyone that's done anything with it.

As far as, oh, this is how much you'll get yeah if you do it every now and then you'll see the seeds for sale here and there, but it's really a rare crop plant

Andy:

I think I got my seeds from Croatia. That was the only way, and I was like, I can't believe these made it through customs. Yeah, nobody checked, and they didn't actually put them through like they should have done.

It was just a typical little envelope with some seeds in it, and they just showed up at my house. But yeah, they're difficult to find. I grew them out, and they vined out a little bit. They look just like a pea, yeah, and I got them to about stop growing. Yeah, that was it, and I was like, okay.

Ken:

So I couldn't quite figure out what I was doing wrong. Or maybe it was the soil type. Did you dig up? Did you dig up the tubers that formed after they stopped?

Andy:

Yeah, they were tiny—not even the size of my thumb. I think that's typical, actually. And I don't know the pictures I posted.

Tuberous pea.

Ken:

I don't remember if those were more than one-year-old tubers or not, but a couple of people said oh, those are pretty large actually, so that's a pretty good size, but I think the image is deceptive that I put up. It wasn't that big, but the flavor was very good with those. It was really amazing.

Andy:

I've heard they were historically very popular as a very high-end dish in France. Oh, really, in some parts of Europe, but they never really caught on as something that could be grown at scale, so they just never really became part of the diet.

Ken:

Yeah, there's another one like that, called Turnip-rooted chervil. I tried to grow it several times, and, um, it's more of an alpine plant, but it's a biennial, maybe a perennial in some cases if it doesn't flower.

I planted a bunch of that this spring, but it takes two seasons to go through the cycle to germinate it, but that was one that the mice got into in the greenhouse. They seemed to love them. You know, I usually control mice in the greenhouse, but they could not stop eating them. But the idea was that this was before carrots and before sugar really to any degree, so it was considered a very sweet crop, and so people's palates were different back then. They really loved chervil, chervil-rooted turnip, and it's in the parsley family, and the few that I ate were really delicious. But I think those types of plants maybe they could be cultivated more. It's an example of maybe I'll try to grow out more of these to see if I can get a population of them started and then go from there.

Andy:

Yeah, there's so much opportunity and potential in crops because humans have done so much domestication. You know, you really wonder how much the landscape looked, what it actually looked like. Maybe you know 30, 000 years ago, in terms of what was being domesticated and we lost, or how different the crops that we don't think of as domestic, you know, like walnuts, like how, how much breeding was done to make walnuts what they are now, which we still don't think of as domesticated. But in reality, seeing as that we were not the thing that those evolved for, they evolved for dinosaurs with much bigger jaws that could just crack them like nothing you wonder what those must have looked like 10,000, 20,000 years ago.

Further, how selective planting and other practices have completely altered what the landscape looks like today, even though we don't see it.

Ken:

Yeah, that's true. There are two parts to that. Actually, it's the individuals doing that. Selection over time is kind of an upper echelon of the scientific community, so it's a very narrow window of people doing that.

It's not the public at large flavor, at least today. Yeah, flavor may not play a role, and nutrition probably may not play a role; it's kind of like we're doing it for the benefit of the farmer and for the corporations. I hate to say that, but certainly, there's the benefit of the animals and the people, but that's kind of low on the list. So there was a thing about asparagus a few years ago, and I read they were breeding a new asparagus variety, and they said this time we're serving thousands of asparagus to students and other people on this university campus to see what they think about these different selections. I was like, well, finally, you know, yeah, that's what you need to do. You taste test things. And that's another thing that's probably been lost is flavor, and that's probably what's driving a lot of these new crops.

With flavor, it’s really, does this really taste great, or different than what I'm used to? And this is true with the apple breeding. You'll see this. Now the cider folks are going. You know, that's fine; you want to grow these other apples. What about the flavor of cider? What about flavor in general? Can it be more complex? Can the apples be smaller and more condensed? Can they have more nutrition? And the answer is yes, they can have all that, but no one else is going to do that. You're going to have to do that.

Sorry to say that, but it's true.

Andy:

Yeah. To go back to the example I was just talking about. You know, 30,000 years ago, when humans were messing around with these plants, plant selection, you know, oh, the walnuts from this tree are much easier to crack open. Let's go plant a whole bunch of them. Yeah, and how is that? You know? That ripple effect throughout history. That's how we have evolved our food systems and the ecosystems around us. Does this taste good, so we should grow more of it? Yes, and you know it tastes better than the other ones or whatever. Yeah, and we don't do that anymore.

Our food is isolated in the way it's produced and grown and how we raise it. And you know, you've brought this idea of like scion wood, which is great that we can do this thing, where we can graft a tree so that we have the exact genetic thing that we grew someplace else. But the downside is that it's not evolving with the world around it, the bugs, and all that stuff.

Ken:

Yeah, exactly, it's not, and that's another fault of plant breeding. There was a there was this thing on LinkedIn a few years, uh, a few months ago about a book on plant breeding, and they had published the first page or two of it, and it was so weird because I felt it was very condescending to the public. But no one else said anything, and I don't like to get into arguments with folks, but it just seemed like we are plant breeders; we know why. Would you want a career in plant breeding? Well, this is what we do.

And I was like, boy. It just seems like you're treating the public like children, and you're so condescending. It just sounded bad to me. Now, maybe it was just me that picking that up, I don't know, but I really have a feeling that if you have to explain your occupation to the public at large over and over again, saying I am important, I am a plant breeder, then you've got a problem right there, and it should be, you know. This whole idea then revolves around these industries that are so locked in. It's difficult to do it. It can only be done on the level of the individual, at least initially, to create community, yeah, or community level.

You know, I love the Experimental Farm Network and all these things where he's bringing people together and I do appreciate anyone that does anything like that. And then some, you know, obviously not all universities are like that; there's some that are grabbing the, you know, the bull by the horn, so to speak, and putting it out there and bringing in people and getting more farmers involved, because that's the type of revolution we're going to need to make it through this next hundred years for sure yeah this is critical next hundred years.

Andy:

Now, I know you closed the farm up for a while. It seems like you're kind of open, quasi-open, now for business still. For folks who are interested and hear about all the cool stuff you're growing, they want to get some. You know what's going on. Can we follow you on social media, all that good stuff?

Ken:

Yeah, so I still maintain the Instagram social media, all that good stuff. Yeah, so I still maintain the Instagram, my Instagram account. I kept that going. I offer tours. People can either buy a tour or they can come for free. It's free.

I have a lot of people coming this fall to visit the farm and allow them to taste and test things just to see what it's like and take a look at mature plantings of many things. So that's really what I've been more or less focusing on is educational, and I'll probably I still sell the seeds and the science of some of the varieties for now, but I'd rather just focus on education. I'm trying to. I'm doing a couple of workshops and things this fall, and one of them is in the Detroit area. That's, uh, going to involve some cooking or something, I don't know, but the idea is that people can taste, test things, and comment on them in a public type of arena. So it should be interesting.

But the whole idea then, with my farm, is it's so much more enjoyable for me to show people and talk to people one-on-one there, and I really like that more than anything I do. I like to write, and I like to, so I recommend people sign up for my newsletter because that's kind of my extension. I spend a couple of hours everyday writing and it ends up in a newsletter, and I also have started making music, so I'm kind of putting together some musical interpretations of things, and so that's kind of my new thing.

Andy:

I really enjoy following you on social media because, like I said, the stuff you post about is not something you'll find in most places.

And I think that's really cool because, as much as my generation, I think it's becoming much more popular to be interested in these types of things. There are not a whole lot of examples of what they look like 30, 40, or 50 years out, so having what you have is so important for people to say so. This is what it looks like and these are the things that maybe you didn't think about when you started it, but you should have you know in terms of planting choice and all those things.

Ken:

Yeah, cause you'll see things, how that turned out. I know I do this all the time; I go, wow, that turned out a lot better than I thought it would be. And frequently, I've given things to people, and they would send me back images, and I go, well, that looks way better at your place than mine. You know, that's amazing how much progress you've made. You know, and I think a lot of it is just people's attention is more focused on it.

Andy:

Ken, this has been fantastic. I appreciate your time and I feel like we didn't even touch a lot of stuff I wanted to talk about, so we'll definitely have to chat again.

To listen to this interview, tune into episode #181 of the Poor Proles Almanac.