Andrew’s Got Knowhow
Our new “Got Knowhow” campaign features individuals who have such deep subject matter expertise on tactile (hands-based) skills that they’re effectively able to solve pressing issues with creativity and ingenuity.
Andrew Barocco is Head of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Area 2 Farms, a certified organic farm in Arlington, Virginia. Andrew’s a self-described Cajun boy from LaPlace, Louisiana, who loves cooking.
We chose Andrew for our debut issue because he’s not just growing plants; he’s actively shaping the future of agriculture right before our eyes. Engage him with a question, and you’ll find yourself swept away in a torrent of knowledge. In other words, Andrew is our favorite kind of expert.
How did you first become interested in plants?
I come from plant lovers on both sides of my family, but growing up in LaPlace (Louisiana), my dad was a big-time vegetable gardener. He actually became a rosarian, which I actually found out after I myself got into roses. As a kid I’d see my dad planting this tomato called Celebrity (F1) Hybrid. I didn’t know what any of those terms meant and he’d explain them to me. It was also interesting to me that he had to order the seeds every year. I’d ask, “Why can’t you save the seeds?” Learning that saved seeds come out differently than the parent, and why, piqued my interest in this whole plant breeding endeavor.
And when I was 12, I wanted to know what would happen if you crossed a purebred tomato variety with an heirloom, so I crossed this Polish heirloom tomato variety called Soldacki with this other variety called Sanibel and the result was an intermediate between the two parents, and I thought that was so cool.
Were you already interested in genetics at that point?
Not until high school. That’s when I read this amazing book called Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, which was all about human genetics. I was also inspired by the movie Gattaca, which is also about pushing the limits of human genetics. I’ve always been very curious and interested in innovation in that sense – what happens when you think outside the box.
“That’s what’s happening with jalapenos these days. They’ve been crossed with bell peppers to get their size up, at the sacrifice of flavor unfortunately.”
At what point in your life did you start to think about plant breeding as a career?
I always had this interest in it, but didn’t consider it a career when I was younger. I was a finance major at first before I switched to nutrition because I love cooking, then food science. But something was missing and the passion wasn’t quite there.
I took a good year and a half off for personal reasons, after which I decided to go back to college but change my career plan and study horticulture and plant breeding. It was the best decision I ever made because this light just turned on.
How would you describe the stress level of your job? Plants can be quite calming but I imagine breeding them is different.
You have to be very careful, especially with field crops. I’m more of a field breeder as opposed to a molecular breeder. Those guys are in labs doing a lot of work under the scope and PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and stuff, which is different from being a breeder out in the field. Both are needed, nothing’s wrong with either, but a field breeder is a very, very sweat-heavy profession. A lot of these crops are harvested in late summer, early fall, and when I was working down south I would go through three shirts a day in the summer. It can be very labor intensive.
But in general, you have to be very careful with your data because you’re coming up with these new varieties, you’re testing hundreds and thousands of potentials. Each is a genetically unique individual, and you’re putting them out in the field. It’s expensive because you’re investing so many resources into this endeavor: the farmer’s real estate, the labor, recording how the plants look, what the yield is. If it’s a greenhouse, then you’re running the air conditioner or heating, you have to have light if it’s too dark, you have people watering the plants and tending to them, AM and PM. You have to be very organized with labeling because if you mess up a label it’s a big deal.
You also have to organize it so that you’re there when the two plants you want to cross are flowering at the right time. A lot of plants have perfect flowers, which means they’re capable of self-pollination. If you get in there late in the morning and the flower has already self-pollinated, then it’s useless because it’s not a cross. That’s a bummer.
You also have to be careful about cross-contamination between pollen from one plant and another variety. If you’re not careful and something else got on it and you’re investing all this time in a plant and you don’t know what it was pollinated with, then it can become useless. What we do is very precise and careful. You come early in the morning or make sure the flowers are emasculated, which means the male parts are removed before the pollen bursts and the plant flowers. You can protect them with a little wax paper cap, or remove the petals so insects aren’t attracted to it and mess with it.
How did you get involved with Area 2 Farms?
I was in California at a company called NuCicer where we worked on breeding chickpeas with higher protein - by the way, shout out to NuCicer, they’re continuing to do well - but I wanted to move to the DC area to be closer to my fiance. I reached out to a guy I knew named Oren who’s this amazing entrepreneur and amazing guy in general and asked him if he knew of anyone looking for a plant breeder. He said, “Yeah, me.” He’s one of the founders of Area 2 Farms. So everything went from there, and I’m very happy and honored to be here.
It’s a totally different universe here, and I’m breeding for traits I have not read for in the past or have experience with – like compactness.
What is your day-to-day like here?
The farm crew gets here at seven in the morning, and I’m usually in around eight. I start with a thorough walkthrough because there are typically a lot of projects going on, and you’re heavily invested in these babies. You can’t get enough of watching them every day. It’s good to have a lot of different projects going on at one time because plant breeding is a very slow and patient process. If one project is taking forever, there’s typically some other project that we started earlier that’s now coming to fruition and is in an exciting stage. There’s always something going on.
If there’s pollination to do, then I do it. Or making sure plants are protected from male pollen or anything nearby if needed. There’s maintenance, like making sure irrigation is watering the plants, that there are no aphids or pests destroying the plants, or that they’re dying for whatever reason. You have to check for fungal infections, making sure the electrical is good, that the drainage systems are working fine. All of the things that play a role in what we’re doing here.
A lot of my day-to-day is harvesting and collecting data on plant yield and their traits, and then analyzing and processing that data to make sure we’re growing the right varieties that taste great and have potential breeding value. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel, but there are plants that have historically not done well in indoor systems that we are working on.
What are some of these current projects?
We have made great progress on root vegetables, sweet potatoes, and potatoes. There’s the Tom Thumb dwarf tomato, but that tastes horrible. We like to focus on untapped niches in the market and things that deliver the biggest economic value to the business.
My favorite so far is actually the chili pepper. Not only do I just love spicy food, but chili peppers have a lot of different flavors and fragrances that make them interesting to work with. They’re also fast – you get a lot of generations quickly, and they’re easy to cross within the same species.
We’re currently working on a very special hybrid that challenges the conventional wisdom that you can’t cross one species with another. The Capsicum genus has three main commercial species. There’s the Capsicum annuum that has japaneos and bell peppers that have thick walls and are fast-growing, so they’re durable and store well. There’s the Capsicum Chinense that includes the habanero, your Ghost Peppers and Trinidad Scorpions. These super hot ones are typically thin-walled but have more flavor and fragrance. And then we have the Capsicum frutescens that has Tabasco and several other minor peppers.
Generally, you can cross within a group, like you can cross the habanero and ghost pepper. That’s what’s happening with jalapenos these days - they’ve been crossed with bell peppers to get their size up, at the sacrifice of flavor unfortunately. But you can’t cross between groups, like the bell pepper with Tabasco.
Ours is a cross between three different peppers from two different groups: the ghost pepper, the trinidad scorpion, and the jalapeno. It contains the DNA from all of them, and has the best of both groups. The habanero group is slower growing and flower later, but have more flavor and heat. The jalapeno group has less flavor, but they’re tougher, they grow faster, they have more yield, they flower earlier, and they store better. Our hybrid has thick walls, the flavor and beautiful fragrance from the super hots like ghost peppers, but with a reduced heat level.
What are you going to name it? When is it going to be ready for consumers?
Naming is the fun part, but I haven’t thought about it yet. Right now, it’s an F3, meaning its a third generation. It still has a few more generations before it’s even stabilized. We have to see how it comes out. It can take a couple of years before we have seeds to increase our yield. Right now, it can still be a little unstable. It’s like the intermediate between both parents. But every generation, you can keep selecting for the ones that have the characteristics you’re looking for.
This is random, but I’m curious: Are you worried about the Cavendish banana being a monoculture?
Yeah, that’s a great question. Yes, I’m very worried. It’s a problem because the Cavendish dominates the market because it transports very, very well. Unfortunately, it’s weak to these new Fusarium diseases that are coming out. Even if it wasn’t - let’s say there was nothing wrong with the Cavendish - having such a monoculture in any industry is very, very dangerous because if something comes out and wipes out the whole industry, it’s going to have a butterfly effect on economies.
Today, it’s the Cavendish, but it used to be the Gros Michele, which is what all the artificial banana flavored candies were based on. That’s why Laffy Taffy doesn’t taste like Cavendish – it’s based on the Gros Michele that has a more intense banana flavor. I was just in India where they have so many different banana varieties that we don’t know about - pink, red, blue-green. Some are small, some are super large, some have seeds, others don’t.
The key to solving the Cavendish problem is to maintain our gene banks and germplasm repositories which are so important to our human survival and long-term future. These are repositories that contain genetic information – seeds cloned from the most obscure varieties you can think of throughout the world. Different land races, different varieties. Each one of those is adapted to a specific climatic condition, they’re so genetically diverse. This type of genetic diversity is the answer to solving not just the Cavendish problem but other problems in agriculture that are the result of global warming. We may not be able to slow it or stop it, but we can mediate the problem by making our plants more heat tolerant, more drought tolerant.
(This interview has been condensed, but if you’re interested in reading more about Andrew — and in particular his work as a rosarian and his award-winning Femme Fatale — let us know!)
