Make some money with plant breeding ?

[nicollas]

i've came across such a thread on tomatoville board (cant locate it right now), and i'm interesting by discussing it here. With no surprise the answer is that it is very difficult to make money breeding OP because anyone can "steal" all the work by growing seeds. The only possibility seems to go hybrid but i dont like it and it does not match my breeding projects.

So do you are thinking on some creative ways to get some money back for all the sweat involved in breeding something new and interesting ?

For now the only way i'm seeing it is by some crowfounding to "unlock" the seeds. It is just a way to ensure that the xx first-year buyers are buying from you with a minimal threshold.

[billw]

It depends a lot on your goals. Do you want to make some extra money, or enough money that you don't need another job? Making some money on the side is easy. I made enough money last year to survive with no luxuries (other than freedom), but I don't need much because my previous career left me with some land and no debts. Without that head start, I wouldn't be able to survive. I hope that I will be able to increase my income enough over the next few years to be able to save a little money as well. But, my expectations are very low, which makes success easier to achieve.

Do you want to be a pure plant breeder, or are you willing to make that just a part of a larger farming business? I set out to find a way to spend as much time as possible doing plant breeding. The most obvious strategy was to become a seed retailer. Whatever I make, I can sell for a few years before others have a chance to buy it and build up stock. As far as I'm concerned, having other people selling my varieties would be great, even if that means that they are competing with me. I only need about 1500 customers per year to make a living. If another company with 50,000 customers starts selling a variety that I have produced, some of them are bound to discover me through the wonders of the Internet and maybe the next year, they will be my customers as well. Their greater sales don't necessarily hurt me and may benefit me. If someone with a larger scale operation can beat me on price, I can probably still outpace them with novelty.

There are also plenty of examples here of people who make most of their money as market farmers and breed new varieties to support that.

In both cases, breeding is just part of the business, but that means that you don't have to be so protective of your intellectual property in order to get that passive income.

I think it is also worth considering whether small plant breeding really should require the same amount of sweat that is involved in big, institutional breeding. Certainly, with plants that are propagated asexually, one can producing interesting, exciting, salable varieties almost every year. Sure, they won't be the 1 in 100,000 or 1 in 1,000,000 varieties that the men in the white coats produce, but if you are selling directly to customers who have an appetite for variety and experimentation, maybe you don't need to act like you are going to revolutionize agriculture. Do new sexual varieties need to be absolutely stabilized before you make them available? Maybe more variability is acceptable to small growers. Maybe it is even desirable. Do new varieties need to live forever? Maybe five years is enough. Make something exciting and then let other businesses or customers decide whether or not to keep it alive while you move on to something new.

I think there is a lot of opportunity if you are willing to be a businessman and a plant breeder. If you want to be a pure, independent plant breeder, it seems like you would have to be really, really good and have an excellent lawyer.

Big agriculture thinking interferes with creative solutions.

[templeton]

This is an interesting question - and Bill has raised some great points.
There are some simple sums you can do - I've been thinking about this too - indulge me while I do the back of the envelope calculations for myself.
If you really want to protect your intellectual property (if that's how you think about it) you could go the extra step and introduce some cytoplasmic male sterility into your breeding lines, if the species in question is amenable to such manipulation.

At the most basic level, I reckon seed selling economics comes down to time, rather than intellectual rights protection. How long does it take you to isolate plants, harvest dry and clean the seed, store and label it, keep good records, germ test it, then re-pack into fiddly little bags, which also have to be labelled. There are some economies of scale, but every additional variety you wish to sell involves each of these steps be carried out in isolation. Then comes the marketing and sales. How many packets can you sell in a year? How long will it take you to process the orders? What's the margin on each packet? It's relatively easy to produce mountains of seed, the problem is all the other steps. And producing good quality seed does take more care.

Let's say you have a profit margin of A$3 per packet. To make the median A$ annual income of $75000, that's 25000 packets of seed. 480 packets per week, or 68 packets a day, every day of the year. More modest expectations will reduce the number, but to make $10000 per year, that's 27 packets every day.
Observing my own seed purchasing addiction, the selling price often isn't an issue. Assume your variety is so fantastic, you can sell it to most of the audience for $6 profit per pack. That reduces the target to 14 packets every day to make the $10K annual income. I buy 5-10 packets most times I put in an order (but I've never paid $6 per packet - I hit a personal psychological barrier at around $5 per packet, I think). For the $10000 income target at $4.99 per packet I would need to sell 2000 packets - at 5 packets per customer, that's 400 customers - do-able, but I would need to find a customer every day, and an extra one each weekend, all year.

While the 'net does give us international markets, there is also a lot of competition - 'net marketing is another whole level of complication, and expenses, that you would need to embrace.

An alternative approach is to sell direct - if you've got a great variety that people want to eat, grow it and sell it to them - or contract someone to do it for you. Alternatively, befriend a market gardener, who also wants to protect their exclusivity, and make an arrangement to supply them on an exclusive basis. This limits the amount of seed you need to produce, and both of you have an incentive to protect the exclusivity of the variety. You control the seed, the market gardener has an exclusive line to sell. This assumes the product doesn't produce ripe seed at the market stage.
The crowd funding model is one I hadn't thought of. Wonder how that might work...

The question I've had to ask myself is "where do i get the joy out of plant breeding?" For me, it's the creativity, discovery, and boasting rights. I think I'm actually better off doing my real job that I get paid an expert's wage to do, and save the hobby for pleasure, since I'm never going to really be able to do it like someone who does it professionally. This is not to discount the value of what I develop which I think is high, just to recognise the economic reality of division of labour. And I've found at farmers' markets over the last month that tomato seedlings are way more saleable than packets of tomato seed.

Slightly off the point, check out Dan Brisebois' blog "going to seed" for a couple of days great reading on the economics of seed farming.

Look forward to others' comments on this issue.
T

[MikeH]

From the table at the bottom of the page, this patent patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=PP15659.PN.&OS=PN/PP15659&RS=PN/PP15659. I'm not a believer in patenting Nature but Paul Friday has invested 52 years of his life in peach breeding. I think that he's entitled to protect his work and earn a financial return.

If P.F. 24-C does well for us, then the patent will be even more vindicated in my mind.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I have chosen a life of poverty, so I can't comment very directly on monetizing plant breeding...

However, I have noticed that the highest prices at the farmer's market are paid for first-of-season produce, (whatever that happens to be on any given week). Also higher prices are paid for out-of-season produce. A couple of examples: At my market this year, the first couple of weeks zucchini was brought to market customers were paying $1 per fruit. Later on the going rate was 4 to 5 fruits for $1. So if a farmer could develop a variety of zucchini that was a week or two earlier there'd be a handsome profit. The vendors at my farmer's market only offer strawberries for a few weeks per year. If a variety of strawberry were developed that thrived during our summers and was truly day neutral and produced fruit all summer long the farmer/plant-breeder that was growing it would be richly rewarded. The genetics already exist and are easily available, it would just require screening a suitably sized population for plants that thrive in a particular garden.

I have noticed that varieties that are customized to a particular garden thrive while many commercial strains struggle. Creating a strain for a particular garden can lead to more reliable production and higher yields. Every year at my farmer's market there are some species that did poorly for nearly every farmer at market... I think there is a lot of potential in being the only farmer to be able to grow a crop. As an example: About 1 year in 4 just about all of the apricots in my valley get frozen at about the time they are flowering so the trees don't produce fruit. What if a farmer had developed a variety that was more frost tolerant or flowered later and avoided the frost? Profits would be much higher in the off years for the only farmer in the valley to have apricots for sale. As another example: I was the only farmer that took okra or mixta squash to my farmer's market this summer. I have spent 3 to 5 years working on breeding them, so the meager harvests this year didn't even come close to paying for the breeding project. And around here people are not used to eating okra or mixta squash, but if they were routinely available a following would spring up around the farmer that could grow them reliably. I am the only farmer at my market that reliably offers muskmelons grown in our valley. That's a good place to be. Any farmer at market could buy a melon from me and plant the seeds. I'd be delighted with the prestige. People in our current culture are predisposed to defer to experts. I'm the expert on Joseph's best cantaloupe. The muskmelon project has more than paid for itself, but there was zero return on investment for the first three years.

The biggest financial boost I have noticed from breeding my own varieties is saving on the input costs: Seed, fertilizer, and -cides. And I suppose on labor associated with things like weeding and trellising. I have developed varieties that thrive without fertilizer or -cides, and that compete well with weeds and produce well as sprawlers. It is possible to grow enough seed in a single year to supply decades worth of seed for a garden if it is stored frozen. That interferes with ongoing plant breeding efforts, so I tend to grow new seed every year, and eat the banked seed after a few years.

It is easy to share a few seeds from time to time with collaborators. However sharing a lot of seeds with a lot of people comes with a very heavy regulatory burden. (Designed to keep small-scale growers from competing with the corporations that bought the regulations.) Seeds that are sold require higher standards and more care than seeds that are shared or swapped. That requires additional labor, storage, and sorting equipment.

Alan Kapuler and Dave Christensen will have a loyal following regardless of how many other people sell their seeds. Who do you trust more as a source of Painted Mountain Flour corn? Dave Christensen, or The Corporation, or Joe Smoe down the street? It seems to me that Painted Mountain directly from Dave will always command a premium price and respect regardless of whoever else might be selling the seed. Boasting rights could be monetized by a suitably outgoing farmer. That's not something that I expect to be able to monetize. Joel Salatin comes to mind as a farmer that makes more off the bragging rights than from the materiel.

Royalty payments to plant breeders are commonplace. I pay and receive royalties every year. 5% of the price of the seed seems to be the going rate. It's easy to pay, and it adds up for the plant breeder.

[mrsage]

Forget the "market", breed the variety that YOU LIKE... and breed it to the end, before you know it you'll be known as "that guy" with "that breed". (the one time in life you actually want to be "that guy" lol)

[nicollas]

Thanks for the answers, very interesting as i expected

My case is a little special because i'm not a farmer, but i would like to make hobby breeding because i enjoy that, and i would like to get some money back for the time and effort involved because my professional job is not making much money right now. So i'm on a kind of speciality small-scale breeding (this is why i look at things like crowdsourcing).

For farmers, breeding for the farm makes sens and it can save money by saving on costs, adding productivity or adding something special on the farmer markets as you said Joseph. And the farmer can sell some seeds too as you do William (btw i remember that you want to develop hybrids for you farm and to sell, is this because of the control that hybrids bring you over seed production or it is for growing purposes ?)

Like you said Joseph reputation is important too and seed variety are a thing, and good strains of it is another thing (good isolation, good selection, growing techniques close to home-scale ones) so this is a good point, even if there are no plenty of Alan Kapuler or Carole Deppe But i think i'll create a blog with my breeding projects because i love sharing those things so i think it can helps to create a community of people involved. I wnt to look more onto the epigenetic side of breeding, so maybe this (the environment or growing method) can become a more important side than it is actually.

That bring us to landracing too, because one can copy/"steal" landrace for the reason than what define a landrace is less (fixed) genetic than creativity at bringing in varieties, climate and growing patterns. By definition a landrace is tied to a person and a location.

Mike, i'm against patent in general, but if the patent system could be used such that the patent holder allow propagation among amateurs, farmers and small company, and apply a fee to big company for each plant sold, that would be much better. But i dont know if it is possible because it could be seen as an incapacity to defend the patent so that the holders couldnt defend again inappropriate use from big company. But the patent system is like 1000 times to expensive for me anyway.
I think that if i come with something not really important for food/reliance but interesting from a commercial point of view (say a pink parsley) i'll try to make a deal with a big company so that they have the first year seed to get an head start or even it can apply a patent for themselves.

T & Mr sage. Thanks for the link to the blog, i'll look at it. yeah i want to breed what i want and keep the fun of doing it, because i dont have the skills, land, equipment to try to compete with the bigger anyway. Being "that guy" with "that breed" is appealling but for sure i dont want to go into breeding for fame, and i would like to be "that guy" with "that money made from that breed" too But it is a difficult situation because i dont have much mean to make money with the breed from a side effect like farmers can. i do can make money by selling seeds with a little advantage (first in, and reputation) but what i would be happy to find is a fun way to make money from the actual fact that i've invested time and research and work to breed that variety. But maybe there is a way that has to be invented, beside patenting, royalty, crowfunding ... ?

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I forgot to mention things like breeding show flowers: orchids, dahlias, etc... There are organizations that are devoted to hosting shows to find new and exciting cultivars of flowers. Some of them might welcome small-scale breeders and reward them with royalty payments if a new variety is developed that takes the shows by storm and gets adopted by a major grower.

[kazedwards]

The main thing that comes to mind when I read this tread is the story of Mortgage Lifter tomato. He didn't make money off the seeds but off the plants sold and the hype about how it can feed a family of six. With today's fast pace world I don't think that would work. But low maintenance plants would be very appealing to a lot of people.

The second thing that I think of is a little out there. What if you could predict to a good extent what the outcome of a cross would be. Then market a product as a breeding kit. Offer a two varieties with instructions on how to cross them and then give two or three selection paths with different results. You could market it to schools and such and charge a lot more for it, but it would take a lot more time and a lot of observation. A kind of 'create your own' type of thing.

[ilex]

It would be easier if you were in the US. Just selling seeds can be a problem.

[nicollas]

It seems to have more profit to do with ornamentals than with edible, but i'm not very fond of things that does not have any edible or medicinal purposes. But breeding for ornamental edibles (edimentals) is still possible but it seems that ornamental breeding is very focused on a few species.

kazedwards, i dont have a clear picture of what a breeding kit could bring, but i was thinking of something similar. With non stabilized potentially cool stuff that could come from breeding projects ? Like unstabilized hybrids, or seeds from usually sterile species...

Ilex, i think i'll be small enough to not be bothered by B*umaux & co, and i can even work with them on some exclusivity rights or similar

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I suppose that the most bang for the buck with a plant-breeding-kit would come by offering F2 seed for sale. Under that scenario, the farmer/breeder has done the grunt work, and the buyer can reap the benefits of the cross and the segregation without investing two years with little to show for it.

The only time I ever made money from plant breeding was with glass gem corn. A photo of the corn went viral after I had already inadvertently planted a crop of it. People were so desperate for seed that they were willing to pay $1 per seed. I was one of the few farmers with seed and an already established marketing channel. It was a nasty experience for me because of all the liars and scam artists that were also desperate for seed, but I muddled through.

I wonder about how one goes about creating a craze... And how one could be pre-positioned to take advantage of manias. For example, suppose a TV chef started promoting the joy of eating lagenaria squash... What if there was a farmer in a northern mountain valley that offered the only variety of lagenaria squash that grew really well in cooler short-season northern gardens? What if the shape of the fruits were cucumber/zucchini-like instead of bottle-like? They'd slice up so clever. I wondered about Carol Deppe releasing her book before she had seed available for the varieties that she was promoting in the book. It seemed to me like there was a lost marketing opportunity there.

I have been getting a lot of rave reviews about my okra this year. And my muskmelons are highly valued by local people that have the space and inclination to grow muskmelons. Commercial seeds of these two species do not grow well in our valley. But it's very much a niche market. I basically only acquire prestige for my plant breeding efforts, and food that I really enjoy for my table, for my family, and for the food pantry. I really aughta stop whining about not being able to make money from plant breeding when I have specifically chosen to not monetize my efforts.

[blueadzuki]

Oct 7, 2014 13:35:38 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

I wonder about how one goes about creating a craze... And how one could be pre-positioned to take advantage of manias. For example, suppose a TV chef started promoting the joy of eating lagenaria squash... What if there was a farmer in a northern mountain valley that offered the only variety of lagenaria squash that grew really well in cooler short-season northern gardens? What if the shape of the fruits were cucumber/zucchini-like instead of bottle-like? They'd slice up so clever. I wondered about Carol Deppe releasing her book before she had seed available for the varieties that she was promoting in the book. It seemed to me like there was a lost marketing opportunity there.

I've had some thoughts on that too. As you recall one of my pie in the sky plans is trying to create a strain of soybeans which has wrinkled seeds (like peas can) for the edamame market, on the theory that, as wrinkled peas have a higher sugar vs. starch content than non wrinkled (which as I understand it is why they wrinkle in the first place) if soybeans have the same gene at the root of their wrinkling (which is possible a lot of the pea traits are found in multiple legumes) the resultant edamame will be sweeter and tastier than the regular kind. This project is still at the incredibly early stage (as in the "try to get enough of the beans to grow reliably enough" that I have a stable population to work with and THEN can get around to selecting" But after the stabilization, after the breeding to get it into a usable state (at the moment, the only wrinkled soybean I've found is in those climbing black soybeans I get in Chinatown, and their pods are way too small and infrequent to make it a viable vegetable crop on it's own), so there's going to need to be a LOT of crosses.) there is still going to be the matter of getting anyone else to WANT the things. To do that, it's going to have to be a REALLY tasty product, tasty enough to offset the decreased viability and vigor that comes with the wrinkled genes, and to make people be interested in a soybean that is really ONLY good for edamame, as opposed to the current ones which in a sort of roasting corn situation (i.e. you can pick them for edamame when they are young, and anything left that gets too old can be used for dry soy purposes.)

[flowerweaver]

Remember when wrinkled Sharpei dogs were all the rage? You could market them as Blue's Sharpei "the wrinkled soybeans" TM!

[blueadzuki]

Perhaps but not with the "blue" part. The beans will most likely still be black at the end, and I have a rule of thumb that goes "do not select a name for a strain that is likely to lead to confusion on the part of the buyer with regards to the nature of the plant" I wouldn't use my real surname for the same reason). For example if you were releasing a new climbing bean, and you shared the same surname with our former president, I don't think it's would be a good idea to name it the "Bush Pole Bean"
Maybe "My Favorite Granny" would be good so you could say "It's wrinkly on the outside and sweet on the inside" g>