Published 7:00 am Monday, December 12, 2022
SALEM, Ore. — However many advantages can be gained from cover crops, they can’t do much good without first getting planted.
Farmers with short growing seasons may lack the opportunity to establish cover crops, commonly grown for soil and rotation benefits, since they don’t want to impinge on the time available to their main cash crop.
GO Seed, a producer of turf, forage and cover crops in Salem, Ore., aims to resolve this dilemma with a variety of experimental “falcata” alfalfa native to Siberia that survives for decades.
“The farmer can plant it once and forget it,” said Jerry Hall, the company’s president and co-founder. “You don’t have to find a window to plant it.”
While growing cover crops is often considered an annual proposition, the perennial alfalfa cultivar is seeded in autumn, allowing it to build a natural tolerance to glyphosate herbicides while fortifying its root system over winter.
By the following spring, the alfalfa can be mowed or grazed before planting and then sprayed with glyphosate alongside corn that’s been genetically engineered to withstand the chemical.
Though the alfalfa is hindered by the herbicide and competition from the corn, it’s able to endure the growing season until becoming robust again in the fall and winter.
The cultivar can thus fix nitrogen, prevent erosion and supply organic matter to the soil year after year without repeated replanting.
GO Seed wants to bring the alfalfa variety to market in the fall of 2023, providing corn growers in the upper Midwest and elsewhere with a new cover crop option while giving farmers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley a chance to grow the seed.
The company must always manage a balancing act with its commercial seed varieties. They must be affordable for the users but still generate a sufficiently high return for local farmers to produce them.
“It’s got to be a win-win,” Hall said, adding that seed varieties must also create enough profit margin for GO Seed to continue developing new cultivars. “There’s got to be a payoff or they wouldn’t let me keep spending money on my research addiction.”
The company sells about 50 proprietary varieties of seed, with its sales split roughly evenly between the turf, forage and cover crop markets.
The fastest growth, however, is in cover crops.
When GO Seed was started more than two decades ago, cover crops represented a small slice of its revenues — but in the near future, cover crops will probably make more money than the other categories combined, Hall said.
“With some of these cover crop cultivars being developed, we can dramatically change agriculture as we know it,” he said.
GO Seed expects competition to increase in the cover crop market due to USDA planting incentives meant to encourage carbon storage and other environmental benefits.
Hall said he welcomes the change, since traditional agribusiness companies have often seen cover crops as a threat to the synthetic fertilizer and chemical business.
The farm industry still has much to learn about marrying the right cover crops to specific climates and growing practices, since success or failure may depend on the cultivar, he said.
Too often, cover crops are considered ill-suited to a specific area or growing system even though only a handful of varieties have been tested, Hall said.
“Everybody knows that if you want to milk a cow, you don’t go to an Angus,” he said. “Don’t condemn the whole species because one variety won’t work.”
Exploring the connection between root biology and soil biology also holds great promise, Hall said.
For example, GO Seed accidentally found the roots of one of its annual ryegrass varieties reduced acidity when growing in test tubes.
The discovery must still be supported with more research, but it may have exciting possibilities for breeding ryegrass that naturally reduces the acidity of soils treated with synthetic nitrogen.
Encouraging roots to better cooperate with mycorrhizal fungi may generally boost plant health, reducing disease pressure and thus sprays.
“We can improve the sustainability by improving the microbial interactions,” Hall said.
The speed with which new cultivars are developed will also likely increase due to molecular-assisted breeding.
By quickly identifying beneficial DNA sequences, breeders can more rapidly select for desirable traits. They can rogue out specimens lacking the characteristics without conducting full field trials.
“The more we can purge plants in the greenhouse, the better,” Hall said.
As a high school student, Hall worked at a seed research farm where he learned the basics of greenhouse and field trials, among other tasks he still performs today.
Though he initially planned to get a degree in electrical engineering at Oregon State University, Hall ended up switching gears and majoring in agricultural economics.
After college, he was employed at a seed warehouse and went on to start his own research company while working for other seed firms.
Eventually, Hall’s company was subsumed by AgriBioTech, or ABT, a major publicly traded seed corporation that went bankrupt in 2000.
With his inside view of the collapse, Hall learned the intangible value of instilling a unified company culture.
“They were more focused on scaling than building a functional company,” he said, noting that ABT bought companies that ended up working at cross purposes. “All those things create opportunities for friction when you don’t have cultures that align.”
Fresh from ABT’s demise, Hall decided to forge ahead in the seed business and founded GO Seed with a former co-worker, Risa DeMasi.
“If it was anyone else, I would have told them it was nuts,” she said.
But since it was Hall asking, DeMasi had confidence in his “visionary” approach to the seed business — which has been borne out with his early investments in cover crops and other opportunities.
“He has an incredible eye. I would say he’s an artist when it comes to seed breeding,” she said. “He can see from A to Z in a second.”
Headquarters: Salem, Ore.
Founded: 2000
President: Jerry Hall
Employees: 12
Research facilities: 20 acres in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and a 5-acre test facility in Iowa
Revenues: About $20 million in annual sales
Markets served: Turf, forage and cover crop seeds
Proprietary cultivars: About 50
