Going to Seed
Published at Lucky Peach website in 2015.
Photo by Shawn Linehan.
The first time I encountered Anthony Boutard at his stall at the Hillsdale Farmers’ Market in southwest Portland, half a decade ago, I bought some plums and dried beans. Anthony was wearing a little felt cap like you’d find on a yodeler, and a red raincoat that hung down to his knees. He is a rare specimen: a plant breeder, seed producer, and farmer, all rolled into one.
Anthony and his wife, Carol, have a loyal following among Portland chefs and eaters, who rhapsodize about the depth of flavor of the Boutards’ seventy-some products—among them dry beans, flint and popcorns, ancient grains, Chester blackberries, plums, grapes, greens, and more. Carol and Anthony work in partnership on the farm. Although they came to farming late in life, they didn’t come ill equipped. Anthony was raised on Berkshire Botanical Garden, where his father was horticulture director (and where he and Carol met and worked after high school.) He is known for his intellectual rapaciousness (he holds degrees from Harvard and the Yale School of Forestry, and is a published author) and political doggedness. When he smiles, which he and Carol do a lot, he looks like a mischievous child who is about to tell you something unexpected. Carol has an inborn, fun-loving self-deprecation and sarcasm that seems to keep them both in check. Her deep laugh skitters like an engine revving.
What makes Boutard’s practice so markedly different from typical seed operations is that he is putting his plants in uncomfortable settings. It’s a very old idea, but uncommon for contemporary breeders, most of whom coddle their plants with ample water and fertilizers, creating populations of weak “prima donnas,” as one farmer explained it to me. Anthony’s outdoor plants, grown under organic conditions, have to cope with uncertainty, which makes him one of only a few renegades increasing the resilience of his plants even as he’s layering on selections for good eating. Where most farmers today are buying seeds grown under vastly different condition from those on their farms, Boutard’s varieties are adapted to the little rhomboid plot of earth where he farms.
What Anthony is doing is both as basic as a page out of the Farmers Almanac—or better yet, one of his favorites, the Roman naturalist and historian Pliny the Elder’s Natural History—and in a league of its own. A classicist, naturalist, academic, and food-lover, Anthony has the varied skills and inclinations to bring the hippy homesteader’s self-reliant dreams to life: he is shedding the expensive, sometimes debilitating dependence of all farmers on someone else’s seed. More than that, he is creating varieties adapted to the economy and environment of their farm.
Carol: I am Joe Public compared to Anthony. I am the uneducated, unwashed masses. Anthony arrived in this partnership with a giant bank of scientific background—I didn’t have any of that. I just had an eater’s experience and some understanding as a lifelong gardener. I was guided by the industrial model: You need our help to make your food possible, because you’re incompetent. We will sell you these seeds, and we will wear these little white coats, because we’re much more educated than you. And if the seeds don’t work, it’s your fault, housewife, not our fault. I had to learn by experience that what I thought of as the norm was completely false. We needed stuff to be different than what we were buying and what we could find.
We had been buying Borlotto [beans] for years from an Italian seed producer and suddenly, I don’t know what we were getting—just terrible stuff. And of course I would say: What have I done? And Anthony said: What have they done? They sent people out who didn’t care. They were looking for quantity not quality. So he went through 400-foot rows and hand-selected a handful of plants, all of which had the characteristics he was looking for.
Anthony said: “Look at this bean. We need several things from this bean. We need this bean to stand up straight, to be interested in climbing the pole like it’s supposed to.” Not, “I’ll climb the pole some years, and other years, it’s too much work.” “We need this bean to be able to be picked by hand. We don’t need this bean to be strong enough to be thrown into a huge truck, transported, and put through some heavy machinery. We need it to be soft enough to be edible—you want it to taste great. We need a short season, because this is where we live. We need this bean to be comfortable in our zip code.” And I never thought you could ask all of these things from one plant.
Anthony: You have a series of criteria that you need. In the Borlotto: It has to ripen in a very narrow period of time—preferably within a two-week period so we only go in and harvest once. And we’re very close to that. I need a pod that has no more than four of five beans inside and is loose. For some reason these traits are linked to better flavor. Grex—that’s a valid word for Scrabble and stuff—is what you pull out for your breeding population; that’s next year’s population that you’re segregating out each year.
Carol: You have to go out and hand harvest, most especially for your seeds. You cannot have a machine between you and your food. That’s what he did. He went through the fields and rejected 99 percent and selected just the best. You don’t sell [the best] as food; you hold that back for seed.
Anthony: I’m a farmer growing and selecting his own seeds—it’s not saving, and it’s not heirlooms. I’m not interested in that. There are some old traits that aren’t worth preserving. There are traits that we like, and we think about it. I don’t want novelties because we’re doing this year after year after year after year. We don’t trial. We’re more Steve Jobs–esque than that.
Carol: Without the income.
Anthony: If we think it’s really good and we got initial feedback, I don’t need to trial it; I need to improve it. You can go to a catalogue and buy a shirt, right. This [he points to his shirtsleeves as he straightens his supremely long arms] is a ‘long, tall.’ When I have my dress shirts made, I can reach my hands out and it ends right there at the wrist. I can go in there, and they have my dimensions, and I say, ‘I want palazzo cuffs.’ No one knows what the fuck a palazzo cuff is, but I have them. There’s no top pocket—I don’t smoke cigarettes and I don’t carry a penholder. It’s the same with the seeds we produce. We want them tailored to our farm and our customers, not a research plot. There is a substantial investment in producing your own seed, but it pays off in the long run.
If you see something and one plant has it and one plant doesn’t, that’s basic genetics. It’s that simple. I can show you some of the things we’re doing. There were problems we were seeing that were very common in the black radish: a splitting root, and then last year to a huge degree, acute sensitivity to frost.
Carol: I never thought those were genetic characteristics, just a result of the weather or poor spacing.
Anthony: Those are genetic characteristics. What happened: That black radish seed was grown in a milder place. I call these seed production artifacts. Part of my frustration is: I don’t think the quality of seeds for small organic growers is up to snuff right now. We also had splitting in the pumpkins seeds. When they split they’re bitter. And so once again I had all these people who seemingly knew about agriculture: Oh it’s cultural: You had a late rain, or something. And I said, ‘That doesn’t make sense, because I have pumpkins out there that have no split seeds in them.’ We started working with the interior architecture of the pumpkin.
Carol: He even wanted a say in how the interior is organized! I said, ‘You can’t do that.’
Anthony: We want a well-organized cavity. Size doesn’t matter because the number of seeds to the size of the pumpkin is tenuously correlated. You can have an enormous pumpkin that’s hollow inside. You want a very, very dark green seed. That’s an indicator of the oil content. Those are the criteria—the design brief—that we have. And again, synchronous ripening: if you can get them ripening about the same time, you’re better off.
Driving through their fields in spring, small patches of otherwise bare land have tufts of flowering plants, like misplaced whiskers on a poorly shaven face. Along what was once a row of late Treviso, a chicory in the radicchio family, he’s pulled everything but his chosen plants, marked with blue flags.
What began with a few bean and corn varieties has multiplied exponentially. In the bean and pea category alone, he’s guiding the genetics of his “Borlotto Gaston,” named for the town where their farm is located, “Zolfino,” “Purgatorio,” “Dutch Bullet,” “Tarbesque,” “Bianchetto,” “Black Basque,” and “Tualatin Chickpea.” As each variety comes into its own, they rework the name, especially when the original variety name is attached to a location.
And then there are the “Kakai” pumpkin, grown for its hull-less seeds, “Astiana” tomato, which has “a big fat bottom,” “Amish Butter” popcorn, “Roy’s Calais” flint corn, “Peace, No War” flint corn, a purple-almost black variety, “Ave Bruma” melon—“behold winter” in Latin—which ripens to a honeydew-like state in December, “Arch Cape” chicory. The list goes on. Recently, they’ve also begun selling a small amount of seed.
Anthony: There is no single prescription; every crop has a different set of characteristics that are important. With the late Treviso, you have to have this clean white vein. You have to have a darkish red blade. It’s got to be loose. There’s a whole set of qualities that are all linked to the flavor. The chicory population we were getting was going to hell in a hand basket. I didn’t want to start producing chicory seeds because they’re really hard to do—they’re obligate outcrossers. Beans self-pollinate. Corn is really straightforward, although you do have concerns with pollen contamination from your neighbor’s corn. Here, there is a lot of wild chicory nearby, so we have to control the perimeter of the field, making sure there are no wild chicories flowering nearby, which will harm the qualities we are seeking. It takes two years because by the time the seeds are ready to harvest and thresh, we are past the time for planting chicories that year. And it is very hard to hull them out. You have to bash ’em out with a pounder.
But these are so sweet. Our working title is Arch Cape, because look, they’re arched capes. They remind me of travelers huddling around the fire.
Carol: Now he goes, Weeeeeeee, off the deep end.
Anthony: I want to bring Oregon geographic names into what we’re doing. [Arch Cape is a destination on the Oregon Coast.] But I'm very happy; the improvement gained in our selection is huge. That’s why it helps to be an eater and marketer when producing seed.
Ayers Creek Farm, where the Boutards live and work, is 144 acres, including 22 acres of oak savannah. Anthony and Carol are die-hard naturalists, and they’ve built dozens of birdhouses—from lofty wooden homes to retrofitted barrels to standalone perches—to shelter red tailed hawks, great horned owls, barn owls, kestrels, hummingbirds, and more. These birds are their wardens, keeping the underworld of voles and mice at bay, but also their favorite diversion. Their house is surrounded on all sides by a sprawling flower garden, where dozens of hummingbirds dive bomb each other and interrupt Carol’s work to demand their sugary feed. I watch her scrubbing clean the filthiest birdbath I’ve ever seen, where the red tails bring all of their field dustiness. It looks like a basin of sludge scraped off the sides of a compost bin. “I have to do this every day,” she tells me.
Anthony and Carol are outliers. From their organic certification to their birding habits to his seed production, they farm differently than their neighbors.
Anthony: I’m an immigrant to this region. I’m a child of immigrants. I talk funny. This is true of a lot of Willamette Valley organic farmers. It’s very hard for people who are related to everyone in the town to do something different. It really is, hugely, a challenge. I see this in farmers all the time. When they go down to the tavern, down to the Ace, and have a beer with people, people say, ‘What are you doing out there?!’
Yet that stubbornness to change stands in direct contradiction to the newness of most contemporary farming practices.
Anthony: Somehow or another we’re absolutely convinced that the last fifty years we’ve gone light years in advance. But go look at the old pictures. Look at Bruegel. Those farmers were doing it really well, growing without chemicals, and they didn’t have refrigerators. I love looking at Flemish, Italian art of the 1600s. You want to see beautiful vegetables? You want to see how a cardoon is supposed to look? Juan Sánchez Cotán. He’s a Spanish Baroque still-life painter who was fixated on the cardoon, and many of his paintings include a blanched cardoon, with its characteristic bend. They’re hanging; they’re on the table; they’re amazing. There are about thirty different oils, painted I think in the 16th, 17th century. These are people with strong opinions.
Anthony freely shares what he knows. He sees no reason others shouldn’t begin following suit. He regularly contributes to Growing for Market, a publication for small-scale growers, and he participates in a loose affiliation called the Culinary Breeding Network, which brings together plant breeders, seed producers, farmers, chefs, and others who, like him, believe that flavor and eating characteristics are as, or more, important than the four holy guides of breeding: yield, storage, shippability, and uniformity.
Anthony and Carol even have their own personal chef sidekick—a dear friend, Linda Colwell, who puts everything they grow through its paces in the kitchen and shares back what she learns. Over six years of regular visits to the farm, she’s added a strong culinary voice to their work, and they’ve, in turn, changed the way she understands ingredients. “It’s like a Borg mind meld,” she tells me. “It’s like Jean-Luc Picard getting his head enwrapped with this Borg thing, and it changed him.”
Anthony’s collaborations with chefs have evolved in new, highly unusual forms. Recently, he put forth an invitation to one of his favorite customers, Ava Genes, a restaurant nonpareil in Portland for making freakishly delicious vegetables.
Carol: We had about seventy Christmas melons, and they all looked the same, pretty much. You don’t know if it’s going to be a sumptuous, sweet, luscious, fragrant thing, or just kind of bland and uninteresting. The pressure is on when it’s meant to be stored for months while it continues to cure and then you open it. You can’t just go back out to the field and poke around. This is what Anthony did…
Anthony: It was beyond us to sit and taste every one. The staff of Ava Genes visited the farm, tasted the melons, and a couple weeks later Sam [Smith] asked about them, his curiosity primed. So we gave them to Ava Genes, and I said to the staff, pull the ones that you’d like to buy next year. Take the seeds out, rinse them off, put them in the refrigerator. I’ll be back to pick them up. They set aside seed from six out of the seventy melons we delivered; those six melons they considered exceptional. I liked delegating that task.
Anthony and Carol have developed their own collection of theories to keep them on track. One of the most important is Anthony’s orientation around the 45th parallel. He doesn’t want to grow things in Oregon that don’t stand the chance of a profitable harvest, and he measures that in part by the plants’ daylight needs: Is this plant adapted to our latitude on the 45th parallel?
Anthony: It happened fairly early: I noticed that certain things failed because of our light regime here. I love okra and I love field peas, but at the 45th parallel, the summer days are long, and many crops acclimated to more southern latitudes need a shorter day length to start flowering. The field peas would not bloom until late September, and by then it is too late for a productive crop to ripen. So we would get field peas [that cost us] $150 to $200 per pound to produce.
Carol: He served me a bowl of peas in October and he said, ‘That’s the most expensive thing I could give you, more than lobster dressed with gold.’
His hunger for field peas led him to growing adzuki from Hokkaido, Japan—also on the 45th parallel. Risk and experimentation are part of what’s going on at Ayers Creek, but a more constant theme is observation and analysis. In an email to me, Anthony wrote, “Agronomists today are taught to discount the power of their own observations, relying instead on statistical theories to overcome ‘bias’… Reading Pliny, you realize what a pity that is. Good observations are far more useful than statistics, with their nihilistic emphasis on the null.”
Carol: When you work a physical, mental, and emotional job at the same time, it’s tricky. It’s hard to do a physical job and at the same time, manage the analytical part of it. Anthony is one of the better analysts I know. He can identify what may appear to be disparate factors and see their connections.
Anthony: When you start working with these plants, you develop an intimacy with them, year to year. Fifteen years with a plant is a long time. You get to know them better and better. Sad thing is, when we really know them, we’ll be in the grave.
Carol: We’re almost there, honey.
