9 Questions With Matthew Johnston, CEO Of HM.CLAUSE
June 10, 2015 The world’s population is increasing and is expected to hit 9.6 billion by 2050, and people will need to be fed. It’s a simple enough statement, but providing food – among other things – will be a challenge.
Looking to find solutions to growing global problems, a partnership was formed recently among the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS); Limagrain, an international agricultural co-operative group and the fourth largest seed company in the world; and its subsidiary, HM.CLAUSE, a global vegetable seed company. Part of that partnership comes in the form of the Challenge 2050 Project. The program combines resources from the private, public and academic sectors to help prepare tomorrow’s leaders to sustainably address the agricultural, environmental, economic, social, and health challenges that lie ahead. (Click here for details on the Challenge 2050 Project collaboration.)
During a reception at an event held in Florida this spring announcing the partnership, Matthew Johnston, CEO of HM.CLAUSE, sat down with American Vegetable Grower to talk about a variety of topics including their breeding program, their position on GMOs, and their role in meeting the world’s future food and nutrition needs.
- When HM.CLAUSE talks with vegetable growers, what attributes are they focused on when choosing varieties and how has that changed in the last few years?
Matthew Johnston, CEO of HM.CLAUSE
Johnston: To respond to that question I’ll start with the thing that has not changed: yield. Vegetable growers are looking for yield as the primary objective with their variety selection and that will never change. As a vegetable seed producer, yield has to be paramount and it plays considerably into our decision-making about which varieties to advance through our breeding programs.
One thing that has changed over the last few years is that there is a greater emphasis on consumer preferences: flavor, appearance, and shelf life. Those attributes have always been important, but we have seen a heightened emphasis on them in recent years. Because of that, many consumers have become more discerning, and that feeds back to growers in those markets.
Let’s take tomatoes for example. We are in Florida [this week] where tomatoes are an important crop and there is a lot of discussion about how they should taste. When it comes to flavor, you are talking about very complex traits that determine what a tomato is going to taste like. We are working closely with the University of Florida to understand this better and one question we are asking is: What is driving flavor? Some schools of thought are focused on Brix and sugar as the driver, while other scientists are focused on the elements and the compounds that are associated with the volatiles in tomatoes. Our scientists and plant breeders are integrating tools from both of those perspectives into our work. I think it’s important to be receptive to all the ideas that are coming out of university research programs and to harness the benefits of being exposed to varying perspectives.
- Are we any closer to gaining consumer acceptance of GMO crops?
Johnston: In the long run GMOs are a necessary component of solving food security and production needs, but at the same time, we have never been further away from consumer acceptance. There are two vegetable species in the U.S. with varieties that contain GM traits which are deregulated and available for farmers to plant. These are squash and sweet corn, and the squash was introduced back in 1995 with no other product launches since.
I think consumers in America are further away from accepting modified vegetables than they were 15 or 20 years ago when these products were first introduced. I was a sales rep for the company that introduced the squashes 20 years ago, and we didn’t think much about the consumer not accepting the product back then. Perhaps we were naïve at the time, but I also think the opposition to the science behind these products was less in those days.
Unfortunately, we have this situation in the U.S. and in Western nations where we have been so successful in production agriculture that few people have to worry about where their food comes from. We have had that blessing for so long that many people have forgotten that others do not have it so easy. I think that this paradigm of imbalanced access to food has enabled activists to create so much anxiety and opposition to these technologies.
We have let the negative argument over GMOs take center stage, and I think in agriculture we have to take this step by step and help people understand that the technology of trait modification is just one of many tools that we have at our disposal to increase productivity when conventional breeding has not been successful. Maybe in some cases we put too much emphasis on the issue of modified varieties and products, when the concern should be more about deploying all of the tools that science has given us to feed and nourish people into the future.
- What will it take to get consumers to accept genetically modified vegetable crops other than sweet corn and a few squash varieties?
Johnston: Education. I think the education can come the easy way or it can come the hard way. The easy way is we do a good job helping people understand the importance of science and the tools we have at our disposal to help feed the world. Our responsibility in the West is to help those nations in the parts of the world that cannot feed themselves. If we are fortunate and if we are lucky, we will do that while we still have plenty.
The difficult lesson may come by experiencing food insecurity ourselves and realizing that we must have these tools. Today, that may be genetically modified corn or soybeans, but who knows what that may be tomorrow. It will surely be advancements in science and technology that will enable us to meet the food production and nutrition needs of a growing world population.
- How are you addressing the need for high yields, disease resistance, and other attributes?
Johnston: Yield is still the first thing growers will look for and without good yield they will not select the product. To attain yield requires a number of things and quite often it is the disease resistance attributes of a variety that will give farmers the results they seek.
Mother Nature, however, always has the last say. What was important in disease resistance 10 years ago is not the same today. Nature is constantly evolving and this requires a significant and sustained effort in plant breeding to provide products that allow farmers to farm successfully.
This need for disease resistance accounts for a large part of our research investment. The science of plant pathology is a critical element of breeding disease resistance. In this area, we seek to identify pathogens as they emerge and then find the specific traits or genes in plants that are responsible for conferring resistance to those pathogens.
- What is happening in the area of developing varieties that are better suited for mechanical harvesting or varieties that have better holding capabilities in the field?
Johnston: The question of mechanical harvesting will be entirely driven by supply and the cost of labor. Absent a tight labor supply or high cost of labor, you just don’t have a need.
I think there are some crops that we produce that will ultimately only be economically feasible for mechanical harvesting, while for other crops that have enough value it won’t be necessary or cost-effective.
With enough time and money you could figure out a way to mechanically harvest most any crop. Take a strawberry for example. It is difficult to imagine machine harvesting a strawberry because it is such a tender fruit. And today, there is sufficient value in the crop to justify hand harvesting. I’m sure that someday, engineers will develop a way to harvest a strawberry mechanically if the market required it. I don’t see that happening anytime soon, but we have seen a number of crops such as processing tomato, beans and sweet corn shift over time to mechanical harvesting. Mechanical harvesting tends to work well in crops where the appearance of the fruit is not an element of the decision for the consumer and the value of the crop cannot justify hand labor for harvest. But, as long as consumers walking into the retail outlet are making purchasing decisions with their eyes, you will be challenged as far as mechanically harvesting the crop.
- With taste being paramount, how have you improved upon this aspect of vegetable variety breeding?
Johnston: The price is important to the consumer, but they don’t taste the vegetable until they get it home. I grew oranges and grapefruit in my younger life, so I’ll hold up the grapefruit industry in Florida as an example. Tell me how many people you know of the young generation that eat grapefruit? None. Nobody.
I’m convinced we ruined the fresh grapefruit market by focusing only on visual qualities and not on taste. I harvested and shipped grapefruit in South Florida in August, and I wouldn’t eat the grapefruit myself, but if it passed the State-mandated testing standards, we would put it on the market and we would get a big price for it. But it didn’t taste good, and I think a consequence of this was eventually a reduction in demand and diminishing value in the crop.
If a consumer takes fruit home from the market and it tastes bad, they probably won’t buy it again. People buy with their eyes; growers need to balance yield with visually attractive produce where the flavor and taste are acceptable, or demand for our products will be diminished.
As far as breeding for flavor, I will return the example of the tomato. We have to remember that what people in Florida may think is a flavorful tomato may be very different from what people in New York think. So, for a breeding program, adapting to the specific taste preferences in any given market is a challenge that will continue to be a focus of our work. In the coming years, I think it is going to be part of the main focus, beyond yield.
- How have you incorporated nutrition into the breeding process?
Johnston: There is a lot of rhetoric about nutrition. The challenge that still has to be addressed is what price the consumer is willing to pay for more nutrition in vegetables. So far, all we have been able to do is talk about elevated levels of certain organoleptic qualities or nutritional compounds in vegetables or specific varieties, and that is interesting to the consumer at a certain price point. However, above that certain price point, a consumer tends to say, “I don’t want to pay a premium for that, I’ll just have two servings of regular broccoli or regular tomato and I’m not going to pay more than normal price.”
I have a feeling we will find certain gatekeeping nutritional attributes that are going to be required in fruits and vegetables, and while you may not get paid a premium for having these, there may be a requirement to have them in your product.
I think we have an interesting challenge to resolve in the U.S. related to health. In most parts of the world — I’ll use Africa as an example — you have two distinct categories or groups of seed activity in the seed business. One is field seeds, serving the needs of cereal farmers and grain growers. In most nations around the world it is those crops that are providing calories, whether it is wheat for bread or beans for protein. The other category is vegetables, which is where nutrition in the form of vitamin content and nutrients come into play. If we can find a way to bring more nutrition into wheat, beans or corn, or perhaps protein into vegetables, we can make a big difference in the health and quality of life for people in places like Africa.
We need to find a way to bring these two production capacities together to ensure that we are providing both calories and nutrition. I think we have very different challenges and issues around this in various parts of the world. For example, in the United States there’s this problem with poor eating habits and nutrition that is driven by many factors, not the least of which is the fact that calories are cheap, while nutrition is not, and this affects eating habits. But in Africa and other places, calories are not cheap and they are not abundant, and nutrition is nearly nonexistent in many places.
The question is: How do we — production agriculture, government, and social systems — work together to ensure that the next billion people in the world have the right level of health and nutrition?
- How has seed treatment technology advanced in the last couple of years? What are the advantages this technology offers growers?
Johnston: You can track the advancement of seed technology along with how restrictive we have become with the application of chemicals in the field. We have dramatically reduced the amount of inputs in our soil and the environment through the use of treatment on the seed rather than on the plant. This is helpful to farmers who save money on chemicals, but also necessary for moving toward more sustainable agriculture practices that will allow farmers to produce more with less inputs.
I think this evolution will continue. If you look at Europe, the use of ag chemicals compared to that of the U.S. is significantly lower, even though American farmers have dramatically reduced their inputs. In Europe we see that consumer demand is equally responsible as regulation is for encouraging farming practices that reduce inputs.
- What’s the next big development we’re going to see in vegetable seed varieties, whether that’s breeding techniques or the varieties themselves?
Johnston: I don’t think I would describe any one thing as being the next big thing. I think we have reached a point where the improvements and the changes being introduced are more incremental than they were in years past when we saw the first hybrid vegetable seeds being produced and marketed in the 1960s.
Although I joined the seed industry in 1993, we were still introducing products in those years that were dramatically improved and provided farmers with significant increases in yield, disease resistance or other attributes. It’s not clear what may be on the horizon to change this dynamic, but I would not discount the likelihood that science will bring some breakthrough that will change our paradigm in a significant way.
I do think that one of the things we must anticipate is the combination of diminished land and water resources, increased regulation, and decreased water quality. Combine this with a more discerning consumer who wants a high quality product and we’ll see a continued shift toward protected agriculture systems for vegetable production. Advancements in this area, and other related fields, are as important as developments in seed technology. This is why we are partnering with the University of Florida on the Challenge 2050 Project. We recognize that it will take bright minds from different disciplines to find innovative ways of meeting the food and nutrition needs of the more than 9 billion people expected to inhabit our planet by 2050. As a vegetable seed company, I see it as our responsibility to be good stewards of our space in agribusiness so that we may facilitate the attainment of these goals. Our Chairman has a saying that I think sums up our responsibility and aspiration perfectly; ‘We want to be good ancestors.’
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