A Plant Scientist on Death Threats, Debunked Studies, and Why Uganda Rejected a Vitamin-A Banana

Kevin Folta [00:00:00] Fall armyworm this, like you say, it's not getting a worm in the apple. This is going to bed at night and waking up the next day and your crops are gone. These things,

Vance Crowe [00:00:09] It's that fast.

Kevin Folta [00:00:10] These things are like a blanket on the field when they come. This is the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:19] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. On Wednesdays, I sit down with an expert to figure out what is it that they know? How did they learn this deep field of study and what should we know about that's going on in the world that we might not have access to if we aren't an expert like you are in your field? And this week I sat down with University of Florida plant scientist named Kevin Folta, who is a prolific researcher, a teacher and a science communicator that is known around the United States and really all over the world for his exceptional ability to take really complicated ideas in plant science, in domestication of animals, all sorts of topics, and turn them into stories that other people can understand, appreciate, and even maybe begin to change their perspective on things like the value of modern agricultural technologies. Now, Kevin and I have known each other for several years, which makes an interview like this sometimes a little bit difficult because in order to make it interesting, not only for you but for me, I have to be asking questions that I don't already know the answer to. And because Kevin and I have spent so much time together, many of the things that I think are interesting I've already heard him talk about before. So today I tried to venture into areas that I haven't asked him about before. Or if I did know it, I was able to bring a level of skepticism to my questions that maybe normally in a conversation I would let pass. So what you might observe during this interview is that I poke Kevin quite a bit.

Vance Crowe [00:01:53] I push him on the value of things like vitamin A being put into bananas to to cure vitamin A deficiency. And we talk all about, you know, what is the value of farmers going out and talking about their stories or sharing their farms and the work that they do on things like YouTube. What is the value of that? And ultimately we start talking at the very end about some controversy that Kevin got himself into. I tried really pretty hard not to make this interview about the controversy. There is so much stuff out there about Kevin Folta being a science communicator that is known around the world. He's talked about in the New York Times in Buzzfeed. He's had major lawsuits happen all around him. So he's out there and if you wanted to go look him up, that's okay. But I thought for this interview that what we would do is really stay and talk about if you were embroiled in controversy, what did you learn about what you could have done better, what you could do more so that others that are listening can maybe miss some of the pitfalls that happened to him. So we don't spend too much time. The rest of it is all on science and application and fascinating ideas that Kevin knows about you will see right away why Kevin is a world recognized expert. And I'm so glad that you have joined me today. So buckle in and enjoy a very different ag communications science conversation with my friend Dr. Kevin Folta. Dr.

Vance Crowe [00:03:23] Kevin Folta, welcome to the podcast. Oh, this is so cool. It's, it's great to have you here. It's just a quick trip. You're heading to Mizzou? Yeah,

Kevin Folta [00:03:34] Over University of Missouri. I'm giving a talk about research from the lab for once rather than communications.

Vance Crowe [00:03:40] And what sort of research are you gonna be reporting on

Kevin Folta [00:03:42] All of it? It's actually really cool. I'm, I normally don't like to do this. I usually like to focus on one of the projects from the lab, but I'm gonna talk a little bit about everything. I kind of do a lazy Susan of science and I don't normally like to do that 'cause it comes off a little bit surfacey when scientists like to dig deep. But there's a, the message is more for the grad students who invited me that you gotta sometimes think outside the box and then color outside the lines. And so that's kind of where the overarching message needs that kind of more surface treatment.

Vance Crowe [00:04:15] And so your lab is at the University of Florida. What sort of projects are you working on there?

Kevin Folta [00:04:20] Well, we do three things and, and, and so funny that, well, we'll we'll talk about this in a minute. We do three things. We work on first the way light controls traits in plants. And this has never been more important because of vertical farming. And we are rewriting the book on how vertical farming works in terms of the lighting and the plants that you use. We're really contributing to that. We're doing a lot with genomics and strawberry, which means understanding the genes that are present and how they contribute to important traits like flavor or disease resistance. So we study that and that's mostly computational tools these days. But then the third thing we do is super cool. We make new proteins that the world has never, universe, has never seen likely from random DNA information. And we put random DDNA information into plants and into bacteria just to see what happens. And once in a while it does something beneficial. A lot of the times it does something deleterious. But in an age of no new herbicides and no new antibiotics, being able to kill something you don't want there is actually a good thing.

Vance Crowe [00:05:27] So you're making transgenics there then you're, that that's like a, the core A GMO

Kevin Folta [00:05:32] That'ss, right? They are transgenics, but that's just because that's the fastest way to help us create the new chemistry in the place where the chemistry works. So in other words, all the big companies are trying spraying everything they can on plants to see if it'll kill it. Especially things that are registered for human consumption. You know, medicines that are safe for humans, do they do something to a plant? Just collaterally. But what we're doing is we're letting the plants, we're, we're transforming thousands of Arab ops. It's a little mustard plant. We're putting the gene in the thousands of different plants where each plant gives you a new peptide, little protein from the random information we put in. And once in a while, one of 'em makes more flowers, another one grows really funny with a different leaf leaf shape, another hyper accumulates pigment, another one dies. The ones that die say that we've introduced a cluster of chemistry that somehow mucked up the mechanics of the machine and it gives us a new target where now people who know more about chemistry can exploit that target to design new herbicides that may be specific to plants and very safe for the environment and for people.

Vance Crowe [00:06:42] So is this just going on in mass? So when you have a pesticide company, they're trying to discover a new, a new chemistry. They are trying out an anything they can get their hands on just randomly out there, or they, they have a, a circle around parts that they think are more promising than others. I mean,

Kevin Folta [00:06:59] Well I think they do like gauntlet type work. They use these libraries of chemicals.

Vance Crowe [00:07:04] And you're describing the laboratory that I had when I was in second grade when I'm going outside and spraying hairspray on the lawn or totally, you know, like the, it's that random.

Kevin Folta [00:07:12] That's where it is now. It's you're trying to take anything that's safe for humans and see if it has another application because going through the approval process is so rough and there's dozens of companies in the space, they're doing what's called chemical genomics, putting chemistry on to see if it has an effect. And once in a while it does. We're doing the opposite. We're creating novel chemistries that never existed in the world before inside the plant and seeing if it has an effect.

Vance Crowe [00:07:41] Okay. So

Kevin Folta [00:07:42] It's, so this is a way of kind of flipping that upside down.

Vance Crowe [00:07:45] So somebody that is less trusting in you than I am. 'cause we're longtime friends and have known each other, been been through thick and thin together. It sounds like you're describing the step before Jurassic Park happens.

Kevin Folta [00:07:59] That's right.

Vance Crowe [00:07:59] It, it sounds like you're describing the moment where people discover something and then they, then they need to decide, should we or shouldn't we? And they say, yeah, the heck with it, we should, let's go do it. Because now they have,

Kevin Folta [00:08:11] Yeah, this is Jurassic dork. This is one step. This is where you're, you're just, you're you're, this is what's so cool about this. It's the dumbest idea in the world. You put random information in there, random DNA information. It's like having a blueprint for a house that now you decide we're just gonna take a, we're going to, we're gonna give a, a chimp a sharpie marker and have it redesigned this little quarter, this little room over here. And you know, once in a while it turns it's just absolute garbage and gravel. Another times it's an elaborate tower that does something important for the overall structure. And so this is what, but it's rare that that happens. But because we can work with bacterial colonies or this easy to transform plant in a rabbit opsis, it allows us to find that very rare event at some frequency.

Vance Crowe [00:08:57] So you described the experiences at Blueprint and saying, you know, we have this little room over here and we let 'em go scribble on the walls there. That's describing something that's really precise as in like, we are using CRISPR 'cause we're gonna put it in, in exactly the right spot or exactly the same spot that we want every time, as opposed to randomly injecting it into the DNA, which is what most of how Roundup ready and these other types of GMOs are created. They, they randomly put them in there and then when they accidentally fall into the one spot that they need it to be, then they use that one. That's right. Which are you doing?

Kevin Folta [00:09:36] Neither? We're actually putting things in random places with no precision and we're putting in something that we have no idea what it does because it never existed before. I always liken it to standing next to a very elaborate machine with, with a hundred thousand moving parts that all have to work in synchrony and we're throwing monkey wrenches into it. And once in a while they're going in and bouncing out. Other times they go through and it doesn't matter, that's the majority of the outcomes, but once in a while it sticks in the gears and grinds the machine to a halt. And so when we start to apply that same technology to staph aureus, which causes MRSA or your sinnia pestis, which causes the plague, these are difficult to kill bacteria that now we can have a rapid pipeline to develop new chemistries that disrupt their physiology. Whoa.

Vance Crowe [00:10:24] Okay. Well, so on that explanation, what I had missed out on was I thought you were just still living in plant land where the things that Kevin works on are agricultural products. I I didn't have an understanding that you could apply this out to any pathogen that that is harming either us or our interests. Yeah.

Kevin Folta [00:10:44] Anything that is efficiently transformable. So anything where we can put DNA in at a relatively high frequency is game for this particular assay. And we've made these li we call libraries, which are collections of 800,000 random sequences that we can shove into any population of organisms and then ask what happens. And so anything that is where there's efficiency in getting the genes in is a perfect candidate for this particular approach. How can

Vance Crowe [00:11:13] You possibly do this at scale enough that, that the randomness, I mean, it would sound like you're throwing grains of sand, you know, trying to get it outta the universe or something. Yeah, I don't how, how, how do you do this at scale?

Kevin Folta [00:11:26] Yeah, that's the big, that's the big challenge. And that's been the problem with this project is we haven't been able to convince, you know, deep pockets that this is something that is in their, in their interest. They all think it's a great idea, but they say, give us a product that we can work with and we'd love to work with you.

Vance Crowe [00:11:43] Is this, is this biology's form of like a SETI project? Is this like, is it, is it that big of wide open space that you're looking to find something?

Kevin Folta [00:11:52] I I, I, I don't think so because the way it's different is that Seti is casting this giant net and looking with high resolution to find something.

Vance Crowe [00:12:00] So SETI is the search for extraterrestrial

Kevin Folta [00:12:02] Intelligence

Vance Crowe [00:12:03] Intelligence and, and it's an actual funded project. Like, oh yeah, millions of dollars go into it. People are using radio telescopes, they're using high-end mathematics and computers. It's a legit thing. However, I think most of the world looks at Seti and says you're searching for something that you'll never find. You're, it's, it's like looking out, being in Hawaii and hoping in a coconut comes to you from some other place. Like, yeah,

Kevin Folta [00:12:26] Maybe

Vance Crowe [00:12:27] It'll happen, maybe it won't. No,

Kevin Folta [00:12:28] This is a lot different in that we know that it works and that we're, we're looking at

Vance Crowe [00:12:35] Biology

Kevin Folta [00:12:36] Is a lot easier to disrupt because there's many ways that you can disrupt the way two, two critical proteins interact with each other or the way that a membrane holds together or the way that a certain part of the cell functions, whatever. And we're throwing something in there that biology never intended and evolution never shaped, we're throwing it. So evolution always takes these funny steps because of mutations by slightly changing a protein or slightly changing a gene in a way that introduces a slight variant or sometimes a radical variant that changes biology. We're throwing in something that doesn't belong there and showing that it, it can at times integrate with what is there and sometimes does it in a way that is either helpful or deleterious, but is something that gives us a another way to manipulate biology. Do

Vance Crowe [00:13:23] You see this long-term always being about killing the the thing because I mean, that's actually like, you're just trying to say, can we throw in one wrench that knocks the whole plan out? That's why it's valuable for something like MRSA or some other sort of disease or a pathogen like a fungus. You could do that with, with like rusts that travel. Do you imagine a, a period in time where this randomness is much more directed in your instead building from random blocks?

Kevin Folta [00:13:51] Absolutely, yeah. We can throw a monkey wrench in the machine and it kicks out twice as many widgets. And we've seen that we've, we can make things flower earlier, we can change pigmentation, we can get different architecture of plants. So there, it's not strictly a deleterious function, even though that one has great importance in bact in future invention of antibiotics as well as herbicides, especially if they have low environmental problems. But

Vance Crowe [00:14:20] Dude, okay, so as like you're describing all this, I see your, your facial reactions, your eyebrows are raised, you've got this like excitement about this. I think that most people when they hear that somebody is intentionally throwing in genetic wrenches, it's not just like, oh hey, we're doing work in our laboratory now you're getting pretty specific about how, it sounds like you're doing mad scientist stuff.

Kevin Folta [00:14:45] It is, but no, what it is, is we're shaking the snow globe of life and watching how the snow falls and learning new ways that we can create variation that is desperately needed. We need ways to protect people from bacteria and you know, there's antibiotic resistant strains and there's no other way to come up with it. This is a way of being extremely disruptive with a chemistry that never existed that we can learn from and learn how to design the next generation of drugs that may have taken us a much longer to do if we didn't have the seed of a guide to help us get there

Vance Crowe [00:15:21] Are other people doing this sort of random DNA random chemistry mixture.

Kevin Folta [00:15:27] No one did it. Well, I should say it was done in the 1970s, late seventies, early eighties to identify ways in which proteins bound other proteins and it was something called fe.

Vance Crowe [00:15:39] What does that mean? I mean, most people, they don't deal in the world of proteins. Yeah.

Kevin Folta [00:15:42] So let's just say that you were trying to understand, they did this a lot with early immunology and other types of processes where you wanted to understand the ways that, so proteins are the, are the enzymes and the structural components of cells. And so they're, they're the functional, they're the things that make things happen. They're the things that make structures. So how do you make, so proteins function by interacting with each other and interacting with other molecules. And so the question always is how do these things, how does what is one protein interacting with another one? They were able to take viruses or bacterial viruses, phages and give them random information and then test to see where that random information would bind a given protein. This was back in the seventies and early

Vance Crowe [00:16:28] Eighties. I know that Fred Perla did a lot of his microbiology work in phage research.

Kevin Folta [00:16:32] Yes. It was huge for a long time. And so now the question was, so back then people were doing this and someone just got the Nobel Prize for it actually came outta Missouri now years later, and I didn't know about this when we came up with this dumb idea, we started to do this and then realized, well, back when we were looking to get the process patent protected, that anything that was close to prior art was done in phage. And so that's where we realized that this had been done, you know, sort of before, but we were really the ones and we're, as far as I know, we're the only ones who are actively pushing this because we created the library, you know, we have the pool of, of the resource.

Vance Crowe [00:17:13] And when you say you created the library, it's saying we've al we can show you what we've already tried and that will make it so the guesses that you have will be much tighter.

Kevin Folta [00:17:24] Well, what it means is that we have the 800,000 random DNA sequences that can be introduced into a population of organisms. So we, we made that and it was wasn't trivial.

Vance Crowe [00:17:36] How did you choose those 800 rather than, or did you say 800,000?

Kevin Folta [00:17:39] 800,000. So it wasn't that we chose them, it's that we randomly created them. So trying to make 800,000 independent anything would be very difficult.

Vance Crowe [00:17:49] That's right.

Kevin Folta [00:17:50] And so we did this and, and so that was the feat, you know, how do you ensure that you're getting 800,000 as you continue to amplify it and change it and do all the things we have to do as we make it. And so it's a really important resource. We're very excited to have it and we're actually crowdsourcing other people's resources if they would like to collaborate with us. And so We'll we can talk about that if you like.

Vance Crowe [00:18:13] So are you very familiar with the I GM project?

Kevin Folta [00:18:16] Sure.

Vance Crowe [00:18:17] So had, did you, have you ever sent a team out there?

Kevin Folta [00:18:19] No, I never sent a team, but I actually was there last year for the podcast. I did go in maybe 2017.

Vance Crowe [00:18:25] No kidding. Yeah. So for the listeners, I, GM is a project, it stands for International Competition of Genetically Engineered Machines. And they bring in undergrad college students that are like, they, they look like little babies, right? They're just outta high school. They're fresh faced, they are excited about science. And instead of saying you can only do these types of science projects, they say you can do something that we consider synthetic biology. Really it's genetic engineering on a pretty intense scale and come up with a problem that you wanna solve and then go solve it. So I was, I, I was there four years ago and saw some crazy things like these kids figured out from China that they could engineer a bacteria to express a property that created a magnetic field and it was able to pull in water molecules that had been polluted by heavy metals and then grab it all into one space and then float to the center of the water mass and then you would be able to pull it out. So they had, they had figured out how to use synthetic engineering, synthetic biology to be able to solve water pollution. And that's just one of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these examples. Oh

Kevin Folta [00:19:40] Yeah. I saw some kids who they would 3D print a little box that you could then add a very inexpensive reagent to say your corn and be able to detect aflatoxin or any of these really deadly mycotoxins and they would distribute these in Africa.

Vance Crowe [00:19:55] So it, it's funny that you mention aflatoxin, this is a, a bit of a rabbit hole, but I was just recently invited to the South Dakota State University and they, they invited me in to, to give a talk and I talked about Aflo Toin in Africa and how when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, I actually was in a situation where the people in that were in the Peace Corps with me in our home stay, we thought that the corn had aflo toin in it. Somebody had, somebody's parent had called up and said, or sent, sent like a CNN article saying Aflo toin is broke out in Kenya. So we thought that meant our village. So we thought maybe there was alo toin in there. Is it really as deadly as what we were led to believe? It was like they would say if you have a microgram, you have a, you an undetectable amount by the eye, you'll and you eat it, you're dead. Oh,

Kevin Folta [00:20:48] It's horrible. It it's,

Vance Crowe [00:20:49] It is that bad. Oh,

Kevin Folta [00:20:50] It's an insanely carcinogenic compound. It's a compound that's created by aspergillus flavus. It's a, it's a common fungus and this is the kind of fungus that when a crop is damaged, it, like from insect damage can get into corn, can get into soy, can get into anything. And the standards in the industrialized world are so good and we test for it and farmers know how to suppress it. No problem. I mean, it's very good here. They will reject entire loads of grain if they detect this stuff above some tiny, tiny level food safety is good. In Africa. No, in Africa, when you're storing your grain at home, if it's not sufficiently dry, you will get aflatoxin.

Vance Crowe [00:21:35] So this is what was happening was, was there were people, the reason the Peace Corps volunteers freaked out so bad is that they were noticing that at night people would gather up their grain that they had left outside and started storing it in their houses because people were coming by and stealing it. Yeah. And so they were bringing it inside the house where it would be moist or the, the house would capture the heat rising off of the grain and then a fungus would go. That's, that's the myth that we were told and we were scared.

Kevin Folta [00:22:02] No, it's true though. And, and what, you know, what's so beautiful, I mean I we'll give that hair scary story is though, is that it leads to liver cancer. And when you go to, you know, you were in Africa, I've been to Africa, you don't see a lot of old people walking around. And a lot of that is because of diseases that come from these kinds of mycotoxins, from foodborne products, and it's very pervasive. But the beautiful part of this is that people have solved this problem with very simple ways. There's a guy named Brett Ryerson, who works with the World Food Program, where he sells a or sells or gives away a plastic drum that's hermetically sealed. So it allows an African family to store their grain in that drum, seal it, and then the grain is absorbing oxygen because the, you know, respiration like the little embryo in there is getting work done and it sucks all the oxygen out so the fungus can't grow and it's sealed and it changes the lives of families. Something as simple like that one woman he worked with was growing coffee and her income changed from being very poor to extremely middle class based upon sealable bags, her medically sealable bags that would preserve her grain and not allow the fungus to grow. And she, and this just is so heartwarming in a way, but heartbreaking in another, she told him, you know, I'm, I'm sorry, but I'm going to be poor again. And he said, well why, why would you be poor? She says, my bag broke and doesn't work anymore. She didn't even know that she could get another bag or have it repaired.

Kevin Folta [00:23:34] You know, this bag was her livelihood. It changed her life to be able to hermetically seal, to keep aflatoxin out out of coffee. Wow.

Vance Crowe [00:23:42] You know, and we think about things so simple as Tupperware, right? Where you just throw your stuff in your refrigerator. The, the, it's really jarring when you go to a place like Africa and you see that they don't get to store food for even one additional meal. Right. You can't make food at lunch and then eat it again at dinner because the stuff will grow in it. Bacteria, you know, food poisoning can happen in that short of amount of time. So you have to spend so many more hours cooking that, that whatever time you had leftover from actually being out and pulling weeds out of the garden or wandering around with water, trying to bring it back to the house so you can boil the grain, the amount of time you spend cooking and making that food is, is all of your time.

Kevin Folta [00:24:30] Yeah. Yeah. The, I had to hitchhike a ride back to in Teb from where I was one time, and the kid who gave me a ride, he's giving me a ride and had to deviate from the route. And I'm like, where are you going? I gotta get to the airport. He goes, I have to take the milk home. You know, he had milk for his family and they don't have a refrigerator, you know, he's gotta get that home in in his family's home. And, and that was it.

Vance Crowe [00:24:52] So when he starts pulling off the road, did you, did you think you were a garner?

Kevin Folta [00:24:56] I had a Garmin watch on and I punched it on and I hooked up, connected to the internet and I said, here's where I am right now. I turned on my GPS

Vance Crowe [00:25:04] Because

Kevin Folta [00:25:05] I didn't, I mean, it was kind of weird. No,

Vance Crowe [00:25:07] I've been there before. I, there was a time when I was in Balboa, I was in Panama City and we were with a cab driver and I knew the way from where we were, the bar to the ship, and he took a left hand turn before we got to the yards. And I was like, okay, you gotta be ready to jump out of this car because he's taking you somewhere where you don't want to go. It turns out the port had had one of the gates turned, you know, shut down for that night. And so he was going to another gate. He just knew more about the situation than I did. But that feeling that you have when you're in a foreign place and somebody takes a turn that you aren't expecting, that's scary. Oh

Kevin Folta [00:25:47] Yeah. And I have 3,200 bucks in my pocket. Us

Vance Crowe [00:25:49] Oh man. And

Kevin Folta [00:25:50] I had an iPhone on me. That'd

Vance Crowe [00:25:52] Be more money than he's Oh yeah. The most of the people I've ever seen.

Kevin Folta [00:25:55] That's three middle class incomes for, for three families. And, and he took me through some places that were just mobbed with people and he said, put your phone down because you know you don't want to have it. Someone will take it. And I did, but we kept driving and we weren't on the main road. And, you know, it was, it was getting a little funky, but, you know, it was what it was and, you know, but those are, those are the kinds of things that make memories, I guess.

Vance Crowe [00:26:21] Yeah, I I mean it's, it's those adventures where you figure out like, did I push it too far? Because you can, right? You go on an adventure and you think, Hey, this is, this is great. I figured out how to live and survive in this new place. Look at me, I'm hitchhiking or I'm taking a cab, and then something goes sideways and you think, was I Icarus? You know, did I, I go, did I go too far?

Kevin Folta [00:26:44] Yeah, I guess I, but that was the funny part is that that particular adventure was kind of the cherry on the Sunday.

Vance Crowe [00:26:51] Oh, of all the craziness? No,

Kevin Folta [00:26:53] There was, well there was that whole, that whole trip we broke down somewhere and I had to be in Washington DC the next day. What

Vance Crowe [00:26:59] Were you doing there? Who,

Kevin Folta [00:27:00] Who brought

Vance Crowe [00:27:00] You there? I

Kevin Folta [00:27:01] Was there for a conference and then after the conference was over, I went with a friend and we

Vance Crowe [00:27:05] You were in Africa for a conference? Yeah,

Kevin Folta [00:27:07] It was a high level biosafety conference where we were speaking with the Minister of Science Technology. They called him Science, science and technology minister. He was going to the parliament to try to get approval for a mechanism to deregulate the bacterial wilt resistant banana and the high beta keratin, the vitamin A banana, because these are finished products behind a barbed wire fence.

Vance Crowe [00:27:32] So these are products that are, could be grown in, in which country was this? In

Kevin Folta [00:27:36] Uganda? In

Vance Crowe [00:27:37] Uganda. And they're not being grown. And the vitamin A what, what kind of a difference would that make to people living in Africa? Oh,

Kevin Folta [00:27:43] Tremendous. Tremendous. I mean,

Vance Crowe [00:27:45] Just something so small as bananas with vitamin A make

Kevin Folta [00:27:47] A big difference. So, so, well, well meto bananas are part of every meal and it's a starchy banana. You use it like, like, like rice, like Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:27:55] It's more like a sweet potato kind of.

Kevin Folta [00:27:57] Yeah. It's kind of the basis of the meal. And there's a huge problem with vitamin A deficiency and blindness followed by other immune problems and physiological problems, you know, that lead to early death and it's endemic all over the world. But in the lakes region of Africa is particularly bad. And African scientists and University of Queensland scientists came up with a banana, their local, you know, the one that they want, the one that people consume only it makes betacarotene, the corn stuffing carrots. And when you consume that, it turns to vitamin A and alleviates the blindness. This exists in their research park. Look, looks great, grows great, but you can't have it outside of that park because there's no rules to deregulate it. And I was there to try to talk to the, to help the science and technology minister talk to parliament to get it that in place. And I left on like September 29th and October 4th, I got the text message that it was approved.

Vance Crowe [00:29:01] Hey,

Kevin Folta [00:29:02] Well, yeah, I cried for a while. I really was, I was so happy. But then the president overturned it.

Vance Crowe [00:29:08] Oh.

Kevin Folta [00:29:09] So I mean it's, I mean, I, I laugh because it's such a horrible situation. Here's something that can save hundreds of thousands of lives, tens of thousands of lives locally. And it exists. It's like having a medicine that could solve kids from dying and they don't distribute it. It's behind a barbed wire fence. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:29:26] But so, but let's be candid though, like, is this, that they're gonna have to eat 300 meto bananas for the rest of their lives. Like how much vitamin A is actually there? How much of it can be absorbed this, like, as you're presenting it, this is actually going to solve it? Or is it just like one of the compliments to help sign it?

Kevin Folta [00:29:45] No, I believe that it does. The num the numbers are sufficient in the amount that they eat. And you know, to be honest, I don't need something to be a hundred percent effective for everybody in order to make it very useful if it helps a child stay above the threshold most of the time so that their health and vision deteriorates slowly or you know, less rapidly or, you know, if it gives somebody something, you know, it's worth doing.

Vance Crowe [00:30:11] I so I, so I often, you and I have talked about this before, the concept of a steel man where you take the other side's argument and instead of making it weak or making a caricature of it, you actually give a good description of what it is that they think so that the person that you're talking with that believes, that actually agrees with you and says yes. Yeah, that's right. That's how I would say it too. So what do you think is a steel manned argument that the president of of Uganda would have? The the of why not to approve it?

Kevin Folta [00:30:44] Yeah, I, I what he said is that in what you hear from a lot of people there is that if it's not good enough for the EU and the USA, then it's not good enough for us. And I understand his argument because they were under repressive colonialism and they had, you know, and this is something in everybody's mind, and they don't, and when they see the industrialized world turning their nose up at at technology, they somehow feel, well maybe the things that we hear are true, that this is poison and that they're just going to foist it upon a developing nation, you know, to use us for our resources or whatever. You know, that. And so those are the arguments that you hear

Vance Crowe [00:31:25] And that, so to, to your point, and I think this goes on in the United States about us thinking about another culture, but when I was living in Kenya and I was doing condom demonstrations, I could go to a church the next day and the, and the preacher would be up at the front of the room saying, don't use condoms because the liquid inside of them is designed to give you HIV and aids. Those that came from people that use condoms and they don't know any different, but they open up a condom and it looks like that. And they've had bad experiences or they've been told that the reason that they're in dire poverty is because of the Americans or the, the karu, the British. So I can see yeah,

Kevin Folta [00:32:07] That

Vance Crowe [00:32:07] If you were the president of a country that thought that even if you yourself did not believe that, if you thought that your people believe that maybe you wouldn't, maybe you wouldn't approve it either.

Kevin Folta [00:32:19] And that's what's so sad about this. It's scientists from there that have created these solutions. You know, it's not the big American companies or anything like that. And that's,

Vance Crowe [00:32:29] Oh, you weren't going over there to like represent Florida's?

Kevin Folta [00:32:33] No, no, no. I, I, I was,

Vance Crowe [00:32:34] They, they invented this, they

Kevin Folta [00:32:36] Invented this and the, the science and technology minister. So I gave, I went there and gave a talk about communication and how you roll out technology and how we discuss technology with people. And that was an important step, very counter to the way that most people there were discussing science, which is much the way we did it here. It was very heavy handed, data driven rather than connecting through values and feelings. And that was a big step. But the minister was still the science minister, he's a physician, was still citing the Elli paper, the one with the lumpy rats that ate the GMO corn that has since been shown to be total garbage. He, you know, he's getting asked questions about that from parliament who still sees that paper as a roadblock to why this technology should not be deployed. And he had to be able to answer that with correct scientific resolution.

Vance Crowe [00:33:29] So you talked about the rats, the lumpy rats, and you said that's garbage. And I know that that's garbage in the sense that I've heard that rats that were used in the study are more likely to get tumors. And the only way that you could get tumors that size would be to allow those rats to have lived in really horrible conditions, way beyond whatever you would medically need. So they were actually stretching to be able to make this look bad. But that's only one side. Does the, does does Sirini believe that he hijacked that study? I mean, is there a way that he could have conducted that study to receive those results and they're just an anomaly?

Kevin Folta [00:34:08] Well, I guess the, the good answer to that is that it's been repeated four times since only with more animals and better protocols. And it was 15 million euros that have been spent trying to replicate the data that he claims back in 2012. And in the what now? Seven years in suing, no one has come close to reproducing those data. Now the original data came from a type of rat, which by two years, which was this time point, 77% of those rats presented with those tumors. If you look at the table, table two, the control rats also had the tumors. And so when you, and this is the way that I look at that paper, I only have to say two things, three things. There's that figure with those three lumpy rats, it was GMOs, GM Roundup in the water or GMOs in Roundup, where's the rat that didn't get a treatment? They couldn't show that rat because it had tumors too. And if they showed that rat, that figure doesn't have any impact. The other thing that's bad is that on the panels of the figure, it didn't say transgenic construct, you know, mon 8 0 1 or whatever it was, it said GMO scientists don't use that term. That was put there to link that term with that lumpy rat. The third leg of that stool is they let those rats suffer past when they should have been normally euthanized. If my laboratory had rats or any laboratory, any laboratory in the states or in my university, let animals go to that point with those tumors, we would be shut down forever.

Kevin Folta [00:35:46] Period. You don't do that. So here they were letting animals suffer to the point where they could stick them next to that three letters, GMO, and leave off the control. And it achieved exactly what they wanted. It shut down progression of this technology. It scared a generation and it changed policy in places like Uganda to stop technology from helping people. It could help.

Vance Crowe [00:36:09] So in your opinion though, that that means that somebody had an agenda, an intention, and why, why would somebody have the intention of of creating that much fear in the, in the environment?

Kevin Folta [00:36:24] I mean, I can't second guess someone else's intentions to be honest. And I, I would be wrong to go there, but I can say it's part of a history where he has, where that group has published for many years now, experiments in a Petri dish where they would say, you know, we look at testosterone levels in lighting cells. So cells from testicles, they would say that when we put incubate them with Roundup herbicide that they don't make testosterone as much. And then you would look at the data and it would be like only the lowest concentration had a little bit of an effect. High concentrations, it didn't matter. But the entire setup of the paper was fertility rates are going down in around the world as is increasing in the amount of herbicide. Maybe there's something to do with the two. So they would create a story and then find some weird data point to support it and then count on the insane internet to spread it and propagate it. And it does, it works like a charm. So that that whole group, they've been mostly labeled as irrelevant now because they, none of their work can be repeated. It's been shown that it harmed many people indirectly. They've got as big as a body count as wakefield, if not more. And what

Vance Crowe [00:37:37] Do you mean by that?

Kevin Folta [00:37:38] Well, meaning that the bad science that Wakefield published results in now measles cases and all this anti-vax movement, sini is the wakefield of the genetic engineering world in that he's the figurehead that they hold up as the, you know, maligned savior who told the truth that, you know, the big bad companies wanna shut down. And so he still has a tremendous following. He's got a very strong presence online is looked at, very favorable, speaks at conferences, and yet nobody can repeat his data. And nobody. And, and what he has published is largely considered was large when it came out. Most of us looked at it as though it was highly suspect. And

Vance Crowe [00:38:21] So there are heads of technology and science of entire countries that are citing this guy's research.

Kevin Folta [00:38:29] Kenya shut down genetic engineering approvals upon publication of that paper. And this was at a time when they could use the corn, they could use BT resistance in cotton, they could use or insect resistance in cotton. They could use a lot of virus resistance. Fall armyworm looks like it's going to be a formidable problem in Kenya. They need technology to be present on the table and at least deployable. And this arrested it finally being lifted.

Vance Crowe [00:39:03] The, the fall army worm that you mentioned is an interesting concept because most people, they have no interaction at all with insects in their food. Right? Like the most that we deal with with insects, if you're living in suburban America, is you have mosquitoes or the black gnats or some ladybugs around your house that you don't really want. But that's about it. But when you're talking about food now you've got a whole different thing going on there because it's not like they can say, oh, there's a worm in here, I don't want to eat it. They don't want to eat it. But they don't have that many options. And, and I, I think that when you start talking about an infestation of worms, you're talking about a situation where they could eat the entire field and have just the scraps left over for any human beings that were around there. And what are their options right now if they were gonna try and stop it without genetic engineering?

Kevin Folta [00:40:01] Yeah, right now you got old school pesticides that sometimes are, you know, organophosphates and carbonates. Things that we use here, very, very limitedly and things that have been banned from other places in the world. These are the old school pesticides of the seventies and eighties, sixties, the neurotoxins, you know, the, the, the organ phosphates. This is what they have and this is what they use on to combat fall army worm fall army worm. This, like you say, it's not getting a worm in the apple. This is going to bed at night and waking up the next day and your crops are gone. These things,

Vance Crowe [00:40:37] It's that fast.

Kevin Folta [00:40:38] These things are like a blanket on the field when they come and the fall army worm spins a little web and gets caught on wind currents and can travel 60 kilometers, sit down somewhere else and start another colony. This thing is a formidable opponent. And we need to be meeting this with every bit of technology we can throw at it. And especially on the African continent and, and, and not just, not just genetic engineering, but you know, gene drives and everything else we can do all, every trick in the book needs to be deployable. And now you've got governments who are so

Vance Crowe [00:41:12] Gene drive, let's wait. You know, so gene drive is when you make a change to the DNA of an an insect or a mammal or something, and then you put it back into the wild knowing that it will propagate. Knowing that that DNA change that you've made is going into the wild and once you put it out there, you can't pull it back. Is that, is that an accurate description of gene drive?

Kevin Folta [00:41:35] Yes. And that's why it works, is because it goes out and replicates faster than other the alleles or other.

Vance Crowe [00:41:42] Sure. But

Kevin Folta [00:41:43] I wasn't gonna let you

Vance Crowe [00:41:43] Just like slot that one into the, into the game without people understanding what you're proposing. And,

Kevin Folta [00:41:48] And of course there are many, many scientific evaluations and so societal social evaluations that need to be done too. And we've talked about this quite a bit in different contexts, but the idea is, is that that needs to be on the table. We can't categorically dismiss anything including pesticides, organophosphates, maybe there's places where they do have to be used safely and reasonably and away from populations where they could affect people. We have to have every tool on the table. If we're going to take on some of these tremendous challenges, we we can't do it. WW with the old school tools

Vance Crowe [00:42:24] Is starvation as far as you could tell a real problem still in Africa.

Kevin Folta [00:42:28] It's something that I think in pockets, there have been discussions of the word famine. Again, because of fall army worm, others would decline to say that that's true. That there's ways we can get aid to people now that are unprecedented. It

Vance Crowe [00:42:42] Is striking to me that, that now as an adult, I mean, 'cause I can remember as a kid Dan rather coming on and talking about what was going on in Somalia, the extreme famine. Ethiopia. Ethiopia. I remember as a kid, and even when I was in Kenya, what I began to realize there was for them to hit a famine is hard. It's not impossible, but it's, it's hard. But what they have is a serious lack of nutrition that, that, you know, they love ugali. I've talked about that with another guest where it's like this grain with ground corn with oil and water and, and it's just a really basic starch. But there are people that, that's all they eat. Yeah. You know, like so, or maybe a little bit of oil and a little bit of fruit, but that's it. So they're able to survive, but they definitely don't have the optimal, you know, conditions under which humans thrive.

Kevin Folta [00:43:36] That's very true. And, and, and I think you see that more and more that there are a lot of examples where we tend to our world's food staples are rice, potatoes, cassava, you know, other corn wheat things that don't have a lot of nutrition other than carbohydrate.

Vance Crowe [00:43:54] Right?

Kevin Folta [00:43:54] And so where do you get the micronutrients? You can attribute so much death in malnutrition to iron, zinc, and vitamin A. And those are things where a grain of sand of zinc or a grain of sand of iron, a grain of sand, of vitamin, a separate life for death for six months for people.

Vance Crowe [00:44:12] Is that right? Tiny, tiny

Kevin Folta [00:44:14] Amount. Tiny, tiny amounts.

Vance Crowe [00:44:16] So to be totally honest, I mean I wasn't pulling your leg up about the vitamin A bananas. I've always been a little bit suspicious of that because it seems like how low could they be on vitamin A and how much could you actually get to them from a banana? You're saying it's legit?

Kevin Folta [00:44:31] No, there's it, it's, it is. So here's the real answer. Nobody has ever done the experiment. You can't give a bunch of, of the vitamin a banana to people and then measure soluble or betacarotene bananas and then measure soluble vitamin A in the blood. It can't be done ethically. It hasn't been done. Wait, wait, what do you mean? I mean

Vance Crowe [00:44:53] This is the same thing. Okay. And Fred and I have talked about this before, but this is a, a great conversation to have. People say there's no GMO studies on human beings. You are saying we can't go test the bananas on these people. We're saying it will help them. Why not? What is the, what is the possible explanation you can have that we can't test this on humans? Well

Kevin Folta [00:45:15] There's a couple of levels on this. 'cause you can imagine the PR that, well I don't wanna say pr, the noise that would happen around this with there you go testing this on Africans.

Vance Crowe [00:45:25] Yeah, but we test

Kevin Folta [00:45:27] You.

Vance Crowe [00:45:27] Sure. But drugs actually do get tested that way. Vaccines actually do get tested that way

Kevin Folta [00:45:32] Because drugs and vaccines are, are things that we know have a discreet toxicity. We know they have a discreet mechanism of action. We know how they affect human physiology. We can look at that and monitor that. And so when we're doing clinical trials, that's because we know so much about how it works and what we would expect and can look for collateral effects. This is taking something and saying, let's just give it to people and see what happens. And that's not science. What what we did do and what has been proposed is to test those bananas here in Iowa State University. And they had somebody here, they were gonna pay students like $900. I remember that

Vance Crowe [00:46:13] Kid wore that stupid banana suit from

Kevin Folta [00:46:15] Yeah, what a dork. But they were gonna eat bananas and get like 900 bucks. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:46:20] Yeah, yeah. And

Kevin Folta [00:46:21] Then they would measure the vitamin A levels.

Vance Crowe [00:46:23] Right.

Kevin Folta [00:46:24] And those experiments got shut down.

Vance Crowe [00:46:25] They did, yeah.

Kevin Folta [00:46:26] And

Vance Crowe [00:46:26] Was that that banana guy? That's what that's from that guy wearing the banana around and handing out pamphlets and things like that.

Kevin Folta [00:46:32] Yeah. The, the woman who was going to do those experiments, she's a chemist who looks at levels of the OIDs in the blood. She doesn't care one way or the other about meto bananas, Uganda, GMOs, she measures the levels in the blood. And the fact that she was gonna do this, she got death threats because she was going to be the person analyzing the blood in the incident.

Vance Crowe [00:46:53] What is going on? Who is it that is so inflamed that they would threaten a, a professor at a university that's doing a test that seems as innocuous as that.

Kevin Folta [00:47:03] Well you know, it

Vance Crowe [00:47:04] Is it 'cause they don't want it released.

Kevin Folta [00:47:06] It's, it's because they're people who are against technology. Because if you save one kid with a vitamin a banana, then the whole other fear of genetic engineering goes out the window. Right. Like if you say, if you show that these kids that you gave them this, this plant product and now their vitamin A levels are high and now they can go to school and now they're surviving and now their level of vitamin A immune deficiency and diarrheal diseases goes down. Now people don't fear roundup ready corn. They

Vance Crowe [00:47:37] Don't. Do you think the whole stakes come down to, to you, you think they're like, you've gotta win on this front, otherwise we lose all the rest of the game. A

Kevin Folta [00:47:45] Hundred percent. I think it's the first domino. And I think that's why they downplay the, the impacts of the BT bridal and Bangladesh, which are irrefutable. That the, there's an eggplant that protects itself from insects and using

Vance Crowe [00:47:58] BT just like the cotton that that Fred Lac tucked. Exactly.

Kevin Folta [00:48:02] And once that shows to have efficacy, it now changes the whole conversation. Why aren't we doing more of this? And so I think it's important to shut that down.

Vance Crowe [00:48:13] What else could we be doing if we weren't doing vitamin A bananas?

Kevin Folta [00:48:17] Vitamin A zinc high. Zinc high iron. They're doing this with traditional breeding, the long way vitamin A, they've done it to sweet potato. The African sweet potato is white and the orange flesh sweet potato that we have is very sweet, but theirs is very starchy and white. They had to breed the orange into it be rather than just add the gene in a lab. And it took decades to do it.

Vance Crowe [00:48:43] Really? Yeah.

Kevin Folta [00:48:44] But they,

Vance Crowe [00:48:45] 'cause they were trying, they would just keep trying to create hybrids that would, one of them would have the orange color or Well

Kevin Folta [00:48:50] It's, it's, you have to get all the traits in one place. Right. And you have to get resistance to the insects resistance to, you know, a disease you have to get, keep all of the susceptibility of a western sweet potato where you have plenty of protection for it with chemistry where it has to grow in the African continent, which then again has diverse soils and geography from top to east, from north to southeast to west. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:49:14] That's right.

Kevin Folta [00:49:14] So it's, you know, you had to come up with, you had to solve on many fronts this orange flesh sweet potato. And they did this, they have different breeders all throughout the continent that are working on it. Won the world food prize in 2016. But the kids, the other cool part about this is, is that it wasn't just enough to give people an orange potato and say, here you go, it's all better. That you have to change the mindset of the consumer. They're of no different than us in that regard. That when you're used to eating a white flesh, sweet potato, your high whole life, now you've got this orange thing. And men, as I understand it, are, they don't want to eat orange things that are sweet.

Vance Crowe [00:49:55] Huh. And

Kevin Folta [00:49:55] There's even places where they say, well it'll make you impotent or make you, you know, or whatever. Say a lot of things about that. That's, and so men stay away from them. So they start with the children and the children start their day in a lot of parts of Africa saying they, they, I saw these videos, these kids are adorable. They're banging on the table saying this chant of, if I eat the orange potato, I'll be strong. If I eat the orange potato, I'll be, I'll be smart. I eat the orange potato. And then in all the soccer fields and everywhere, it's all cartoons of orange sweet potatoes.

Vance Crowe [00:50:26] It's interesting to hear you say this, right? 'cause that's straight up pop propaganda, right? Right.

Kevin Folta [00:50:31] It is, it is.

Vance Crowe [00:50:31] It's straight up propaganda. But,

Kevin Folta [00:50:33] But, but it's, it's not propaganda that's, it's on the

Vance Crowe [00:50:35] Good guy's side.

Kevin Folta [00:50:36] Well, no, 'cause propaganda has is based on intent. Right. And, and this is information using the same tools of propaganda, but for not from malevolent reasons or to manipulate people. This is to get to raise awareness, which, you know, what's the difference I guess. But this is to where, raise awareness for these kids. And you know what the most cool thing is? Is that when they did this, you could go into these places and draw their blood and you see the increased vitamin A. So it does work. And, and, and that just makes me so happy.

Vance Crowe [00:51:06] Yeah, it's, it's an interesting, i I, you know, I'm, I'm just kind of pulling

Kevin Folta [00:51:12] Your

Vance Crowe [00:51:13] Leg about the propaganda side, but I mean, I do believe it in, in a way, like, I remember when I would see HIV AIDS commercials on television. And although I was on the same side as, hey, I want, I want you to know that because I was in there as a Peace Corps volunteer. Part of my work was HIV and AIDS prevention and the other part was malaria prevention. And when I first got there, I, we did a lot more hiv aids. And I remember seeing the commercials and being like, yeah, that those are the good guys. And then you'd see that there, that some of the fear tactics that they would use and you're like, ah, that's kind of scary. But I'm glad they're doing it 'cause they're right. But you gotta have a, you gotta, you gotta at least say, how do I feel about, you have to at least think about the fact that you're using propaganda.

Kevin Folta [00:52:07] Well, but it's, it's what it is, is you and I, and you and I know this, right, how do you change the way people feel about something? How do you change someone's opinion or they

Vance Crowe [00:52:16] Have to have a new story. Yeah. And the story has to be better than the last one.

Kevin Folta [00:52:19] And, and how do you get people to take action? They have to have some sort of impetus to do that. And we can appeal to intellect sometimes, but sometimes you gotta go for the emotional center of the brain. And that's what we've been failing on as scientists for so long. When we communicate these things, we're trying to make high level executive function connections with people we're trying to convince. And really what we need to be doing is telling those more emotional stories, talking about the kids that can benefit from these technologies. You know, we, we went about it all wrong. You can give you more facts and figures and change your mind. But you know, as Maya Angelou who said, people forget what you say and they forget what, what you told them, but they'll never forget how you made 'em feel.

Vance Crowe [00:52:59] Yeah.

Kevin Folta [00:53:00] And I believe that, I mean, that is the most important part of science communication is how do I leave these people feeling different than when we came in? And sometimes that takes emotional tools and it takes getting them to convince that our ethics are in line and our values are on the same page.

Vance Crowe [00:53:17] So you and I have both heard it said and probably said it ourselves quite a few times of either farmers or scientists. You need to get out and tell your story, tell your story. What do you think has gotten better about what farmers and scientists have done over the last few years and where do you think there still needs to be work?

Kevin Folta [00:53:38] Well, I love the fact that so many good ones have gotten into this and done it better than I could have ever believed. And I'm so excited to see people getting traction in those areas that are telling the story effectively. And, you know, just the, I mean, I could throw so many names around. I mean, I, I should actually, but, you know, but people like Leslie Kelly who does high high heels and canola fields does. That's

Vance Crowe [00:54:00] Right. Yeah. With Rob Sharkey.

Kevin Folta [00:54:01] I love her blog lately. And Rob Sharkey is another good one. You look at people like Leah McGrath, who tell great stories for dieticians. Marcelle Cardell at my university has a great Twitter feed. These are all scientists and others who are starting to engage in those areas from stories and their experiences and how they're meeting people and creating the change they need to see is by creating those good connections and showing those realities. And Leslie popped into my head 'cause she's done such a great job just over the last few weeks up in Alberta, they've had horrible weather that really threw a monkey wrench into their harvest plans. And when she shares this, that's a story that never got out there or never got out there before. You didn't have people showing that, you know, here's a farmer, farmer that they lose X amount of crop because of a freak snowfall. And this changes the life for a family for a year. You know, and the, and I think you see, when you make those human connections, it changes the way people feel about it.

Vance Crowe [00:55:05] Yeah. I mean, I've, so there's a guy that both of us know Brian Scott, the Farmer's Life actually sent me a hat. Yeah, cool. And you see the power that it has for a farmer that's growing popcorn, regular corn and soybeans, to have a video of his son turning a combine around or pushing the buttons to, to let go the grain. And I mean, there you just see him interacting in a way, and then people can't say anymore, I don't know, a farmer or I've never, I I, I wouldn't know what they do because he's there all the time. He's showing this is what's going on at the harvest. We had a, we had a fire in the combine. Yep. And what, at what, where, where do you see this having made an impact?

Kevin Folta [00:55:49] I think it does, because people finally are starting to connect with the idea that somebody, there's a person on the other end of that food supply. It's not just coming from your grocery store, that there are families who have consequences because of weather, because of policy. When we have soybean tariffs. How that shifted things for soybean growers who talked about this publicly, how most of all, like things that, like Brian's a great example. You know, you take a picture of a sunset in a hubcap and that gets, you know, so many hundreds of thousands of downloads. It reminds people that, that this is there and this is happening. Farmers have been too, there's not many of them by po you know, relatively by population. And the ones that are there have been silent and kept to themselves, either because they feel they don't wanna brag about their operation or that it's nobody's business. Right. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:56:45] I mean, I think it's a selection pressure in a lot of ways, right? It is the type of person that's gonna go live out on the panhandle of Oklahoma. Yeah. Or in the middle of Iowa or Nebraska. They don't really want to be out there talking to a lot of people necessarily. That's

Kevin Folta [00:56:57] Right. And same with scientists. I mean, we, we've selected an elite group of people who are good at sitting in front of a computer and writing papers and grants. Right. Same kind of thing. And so it's, it's really what has changed is that now we see the people who are willing to engage, engaging and being welcomed into the conversation. And the science geeks who are out there love to see what's happening on the farm. They love to see what's happening in the lab. They love to see a scientist synthesis of something or a farmer's opinion on something. And just having those personal contacts because of the conduit of the internet and the power that brings, allows those relationships to happen.

Vance Crowe [00:57:39] So, but speaking of those relationships, when I was working at Monsanto, you know, this as well as anybody would out there, a lot of my work was saying, we wanna find different tribes, the farmer tribes, the science tribes, the skeptics tribes. Let's find these groups and well, let's do is let's introduce them to each other. So that way if Brian Scott is putting something out, then the skeptic Miles Powers hears about it and says, oh, that's interesting. Maybe I should have him on my podcast. Or he did it. He, he did that with Rob Shirkey. And then, hey, the skeptics, we want to connect them with some of the scientists. So you were on Miles Power's show, right. So you can see that these are getting interconnected, but the, the challenge with interconnecting these groups and having the farmer show off his life is that you have one domain on which you wanna be connected with that other person and all the other domains that make you a tribe. So the books that you like to read, the sports that you care about, your political beliefs, which is a huge component of it, when all of a sudden those were not congruent. Like when Donald Trump was elected, I think a lot of people watched friend groups break up, but my Twitter was like, Armageddon. It, it was like people being so ruthless and brutal to one another because they both had political opinions. And now when Trump got into office, there were a whole bunch of people in the scientific community that were connected with farmers. Now had their political opinions come into disagreement with what the farmers thought.

Vance Crowe [00:59:15] Do you think that, that you can make these artificial tribes come together? Or will the politics that people have drive them too far apart?

Kevin Folta [00:59:23] Yeah, that's a tough question. But I think the way that I look at it is that I don't know the circumstances that the farmers are in. And if I was in their shoes, in their boots, and I was seeing the regulatory pressures and the things that were making my costs go up and the the thing, the policies I thought were unfair and restrictive, then maybe I would feel a little different about political issues too. None of us agree a hundred per, well, there are a few who fit into an R or a decamp a hundred percent. Right. And that you Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:59:57] Most interesting people, it, all of their beliefs don't line up neatly on either the blue team or the red team. Right, right,

Kevin Folta [01:00:04] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:00:04] They, they, there's some, if there's not some crossover, if, if between the, the blue team, the red team, the green team, and whatever the other teams are, right? Like, if there's no crossover, then all you are is ideologically possessed. And that's not interesting. That's boring.

Kevin Folta [01:00:20] Right. And then, but that's, but that's also when we look at the, how we communicate across political divides is we have to align ourselves on the priorities that we share. And I think that as an agricultural scientist or a scientist who, who has a facet in agriculture and a very strong desire to help agriculture, you know, I want to do what I can for farmers. I put aside political thoughts and I say, how can I help you

Vance Crowe [01:00:45] Be

Kevin Folta [01:00:45] Effective in what you do on the farm? But what I do, how can I help you share your story? How can I help you better amplify what you need? Amplified how, and, and that has nothing to do with politics. I need to help them. And I like to think that when I do that, maybe we build a bridge there that helps build a little trust so that when we want to talk about an issue of, you know, I've had people say to me, doc, you know, what is up with this global warming thing? You know, we start to make inroads into some of these other politically contentious areas because we establish a, a foundation of trust that show that transcends that.

Vance Crowe [01:01:22] Yeah. I a hundred percent agree with that. That that nobody's gonna listen to you if the first way that you encounter them is you, them, you telling them what they've done, that's wrong. Right. Like the, the humility is what allows you to go into a community. It's what allows you to hitchhike with a guy or meet somebody when you're out on a ship. Or, you know, humility is what lets you come into a group and say, there's a lot here. I don't know. And even though it might strike me as something I don't agree with the, like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be comfortable just, just being humble and saying, I don't really know where they're coming from on that. And that's on all sides. Well,

Kevin Folta [01:01:58] And that's a very powerful thing. And most of us don't get this because everybody wants to go into a conversation and be Right. And I think it was sometime after my, you know, doctorate training.

Vance Crowe [01:02:08] I, you know, I don't think that's right. I, I just, I I, go ahead. I think that a lot of times people put things out there because they want to get along with other people, and they, and the more emotional their answer is, is really just showing, I really, really wanna be a part of this group because there's so few things when I look at what people are upset about in politics, that the person I think could get themselves that worked up about that specific issue. Maybe this just me, but my sense is what they're actually saying is, Hey, tribe of people that I wanna get along with, look how hard I'm willing to work to be a part of your group.

Kevin Folta [01:02:47] Hmm. That's, that's an interesting thought. Yeah. I, I know that when I go into those conversations, I always kind of go in and say, you know, help me understand why you feel that way and help me. Or, or, you know, I go, I really do go into these things very humbly saying, I don't know. And, and I like that even in scientific conversations where I'm an expert is, you know, help me understand how you feel differently about this. And that took a long time to be able to do that.

Vance Crowe [01:03:14] You know, I've been playing around with this idea of, you know, I, I, so I did this project this year. I wanted to run 500 miles. And at, at first I, I decided I hate every minute of this. And then you get to a point where you're like, wait a second, the more that I hate this, the more it's punishment for me. So finding a way to embrace this or like this, you know, all of a sudden takes it from being a punishment to being something that I want to do. And the only difference between those two things is my perception of it. And I think that that's an ability to embrace the suck. I don't really have a better, I don't, I don't have a better way to put it, right. Like, but I think that's maybe a David Goggins line, but that's like a, the more that you say I wanna be here, you know, if you're lifting weights and you're like, ah, this burns and that feels great. That's the only reason I'm here. That takes you so much further. Yes. Than, and, and I think this applies to communications. 'cause I think there's too many people that they start a conversation and they think I'm gonna do the toughest thing that I can, which is disagree with this person, as opposed to the toughest thing that I can do here is engage in the conversation and also put my ego down thinking that I'm just sitting here smirking, waiting till they get done saying their dumb thing and instead listen to the other person as though they have something to teach you.

Kevin Folta [01:04:41] Yes. 'cause sometimes, well, almost always they do. And even if it helps you better shape your argument, you know, there's a lot of good things that happen when you start to listen to other people like critically. And it took a long time for me to get that, because as a scientist, we're taught, we, we do everything. We're listening to poke holes in an argument.

Vance Crowe [01:04:59] Right.

Kevin Folta [01:05:00] And I'm an old debater, I was debater, you know, I did that kind of stuff in college. How do we listen to poke holes in someone else's argument rather than listening to understand and understand, understand their basis for their argument and understand the circumstances that brought them there.

Vance Crowe [01:05:15] That's right.

Kevin Folta [01:05:16] And if I take the time to understand that, now that gives me a better basis to persuade them of what I know and what I and what I feel.

Vance Crowe [01:05:24] And as long as you are, 'cause this is just like jiujitsu, right? This is just like you show up and the other person is going to try and choke you. You're gonna try and choke them. One of you is going to win. But both of you actually, the person that lost gets to learn the most. And so you have to remember, if I win every time, then I am nowhere where I'm learning anything. I'm just sitting here, you know, dominating the other person. But you know, you need to have an iron that is equally as strong as you. So I think that that's one of those things people want to be like, I cannot possibly understand the other side's position. Well, that's the, the game over. Yeah, game over.

Kevin Folta [01:06:02] Yeah. No, that's, it's like having a black belt and debate. You know, you're, it's, it's having the capacity to be able to listen, to understand, and then be able to present with respect. And the beauty of that is that that's how we actually are changing hearts and minds. It took a long time to get here. And I think that, and I'm saying we, I think the larger scientific enterprise as well as ag, ag producers and industry,

Vance Crowe [01:06:26] Why do you view ag as a, as a we to you that, you know, you said, I really care about agriculture. What, what is it for you that made it be something that you feel connected to?

Kevin Folta [01:06:35] Well, as a land grant scientist, you know, I work at University of Florida, that's a land grant school. And our mission is to serve farmers and the communities and students. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a multifaceted issue with an extension appointment, you know, and, and for me, let me go back to when I first was hired, I was hired to work on strawberries with no background in strawberries. And I worked on rabbit opsis, that funny model plant, the white lab rat of the plant world. And the legislature created the position and there was nobody who worked in strawberry genomics because genomics was a brand new field. But they had the wisdom to create that position knowing that it would be important for the industry. So I, hi, I got hired into the position and I was told by the indu,

Vance Crowe [01:07:20] Is that common that somebody that does a rabbit opsis would be thrown into a whole different crop?

Kevin Folta [01:07:25] No, but that, that's why they had took so many failed searches. They had to find the right weirdo who wasn't afraid of trying something completely different. And that was me. You,

Vance Crowe [01:07:34] Yeah.

Kevin Folta [01:07:34] And what was so cool about that was I had to, they asked me to give a talk and they were gonna fund my research. 18 do $1,800, 1800, that's it, just $1,800 to get my research going. And they said, you gotta come down here and tell us what you're gonna do for us. And so I drove down to Plant City and I was thinking for days, how do I, and that's the center of the strawberry universe in Florida. And I was thinking about how I was going to present, you know, I'm gonna tell you about all the problems of modern strawberries in Florida, which is total bs. So I went down there and said, I brought a folding chair and I put it on the, on the stage. And I said, you asked me to give a presentation and I may have an answer, but I don't know the questions. And I said, I'm here to listen. I'm here to try to understand what the problems are before I can try to help, help with them. But I'm on your team and I'm willing to do what I can to solve it. And I really won the hearts of that industry that day, because I wasn't another egghead coming down from the, you know, main school campus to tell them what they were doing wrong. I was there to understand what their problems were before I tried to insert my, my solutions. And that created a very complimentary dovetailed program that has been very successful now for almost 20 years.

Vance Crowe [01:08:53] And you said that you're going to Mizzou to talk a little bit about what you learned in strawberries. You told me a fact one time that I tell everybody, so I hope I got it right. So I'm gonna repeat it to you and you can tell me if I got it. Which is that if you're going to have, if you're gonna go buy strawberries, you don't wanna buy the big huge monstrous ones because the, the ones that are smaller have the same amount of dissolved sugars in them and that you'll have a sweeter berry per bite if you choose the smaller berries. Did I get that right?

Kevin Folta [01:09:23] That's right. No, the big berries, just more water. And it's the same amount generally of dissolved sugars and volatiles, the things that give it very dis distinctive character notes. Notes of it's aroma notes that comes from the volatiles. And they're the same in a smaller, a large berry. It just expands more.

Vance Crowe [01:09:40] Where did strawberries come from?

Kevin Folta [01:09:41] Yeah, interesting. The originated center of origin is in China, but the have radiated since to all over the northern hemisphere and also Chile. And what's really interesting about this is that strawberries exist at different levels of what we call ploy, different chromosome numbers. You and I are diploid. We got a set of chromosomes from mom set, from dad, strawberries, diploid, but there's also tetraploids. So two sets from mom, two sets from dad. The modern commercial strawberry is Octa. So it's got four sets of chromosomes from mom, four sets of chromosomes from dad. And the chromosomes that are in there come from different grandparents. And so it's a total mess in there. What's makes it even weirder is that one parent of strawberry came from North America. It was brought back from the colonists to Europe in the 15, 16 hundreds. And then in 1712, a Spanish, He actually was a spy who was in a no French spy who was looking at Spanish fortifications in Chile. He met the, what they call the Marci people or people, indigenous people who were growing strawberries there. And they were much bigger than the European ones, these little tiny, you know, gross things. So he brought some back and there they sat from 1712 in the botanical garden at Versailles. Those and the other ones next to each other, both making inferior berries. And then in 1860s, a guy named Antoine Duchaine comes along.

Kevin Folta [01:11:13] He was a teenager whose dad worked in the botanical garden, who started drawing pictures of plants. And he started to look at all the different strawberries. And he realized that when these two crossed, they made a much better berry. And that is the modern strawberry. It came from a chance hybridization of a North American strawberry and a South American strawberry that got together in a European botanical garden. Duchenne presented these to the king. And these were new berries that never existed before in the world. So we're eating an elaborate hybrid with north and south lineage that has only been around for a few hundred years. Were people

Vance Crowe [01:11:47] Eating those berries before or They were Oh,

Kevin Folta [01:11:49] Sure.

Vance Crowe [01:11:50] And so the old, the old fashioned, when there were two different lines, those were edible berries, but they came together to form a hybrid that's totally different than the two berries themselves. Yes,

Kevin Folta [01:11:59] They were, they were small fruited or sometimes not as productive. And when you put the two together, you captured all of this hybrid vigor. You know, they made the mutt of the plant world between the north and the south that just made this outstanding berry. You

Vance Crowe [01:12:13] Know, the, the story of hybridization reminds me of how I heard that they, they taught farmers throughout the United States about hybrid corn. So it used to be that you would take not hybrid corn and it would be not, well you maybe know this story. What, what would corn have been like before you have hybrids? Well,

Kevin Folta [01:12:32] You had land races and you had

Vance Crowe [01:12:35] What's a land race?

Kevin Folta [01:12:35] Well, land races are the la are the types of genetics that small populations would maintain. And so they would have something that was superior for their purposes. Farmers would,

Vance Crowe [01:12:47] So like potatoes in a certain mountain in, in Peru might be this kind of land race because they raised it over and over and over again. And it's its own breed, but it's, it's very specific.

Kevin Folta [01:12:57] Yeah. And then so what you had happening in the corn industry before hybridization was different sets of farmers and different seed companies having open pollinated corn seed. It would just, would mix genetically within itself. And so you never got a lot of really good characters. But you also, you didn't have a lot of predictability. You got a little better every, every generation sometimes because it did homogenize a little bit. But you had these open pollinated varieties is what they called them. And only af after the 1920s when these open pollinated ones started to be deliberately crossed. Did you see the magic that happened of hybrid vigor where now you had hybrids that didn't, that you had two parents that were very different that now when you put them together, gave you an individual that was completely different

Vance Crowe [01:13:46] And you could predict if you tried enough, you knew, hey, as long as we cross this mom line with this dad line, we get the, we get the hybrid vigor. Well

Kevin Folta [01:13:55] The genetics of that are interesting. So what you would do is create two inbreds. You would inbred something over and over and over again so that it was as genetically uniform as it would be. And maybe you had a squatty little plant that made a horrible little ear that was completely resistant to disease. And then you had another one that made so-so ear that was a little bit taller, that maybe was a little stronger plant. And you had those two plants that individually were completely inferior, but genetically very uniform. Now when you mix them together, you create a hybrid that just has outstanding characteristics. And that hybrid, now if that thing crosses with itself, gives you some that look like one parent, some that look like another parent and everything in between. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:14:38] My favorite metaphor for this is like, you can't take a labradoodle and breed it with another Labradoodle and expect that you're gonna get a super labradoodle. You, you get some little ones, some big ones. Yeah.

Kevin Folta [01:14:49] You get labros and doodles. Yeah. And then everything in between. Right, right.

Vance Crowe [01:14:52] But

Kevin Folta [01:14:52] That was why the hybrid corn industry launched, was because now the companies that own the seed, own those inbreds could control the distribution of the hybrids and the hybrids could not breed true. And so farmers had to come back every year to buy those seeds and they did it because they got such a, a huge performance.

Vance Crowe [01:15:10] Right. And because it's, it's an entire process to be in breeding corn and keeping it for seed corn. 'cause you have to pull the tassels off and you have to do all this work. So people would specialize and say, I'll grow your seed for next year. You grow seed as a commodity for feed for our animals or whatever we're gonna do it for. And then when you have the, whenever you just take a portion of what you made off that one and then buy seeds from me next year and they'll be better and better and better. 'cause I'll be able to focus all of my time on breeding them better. The thing that I was gonna make the comparison to your Africa example was that I had heard that four H was fundamental in teaching farmers how to use hybrid corn first, how to even to to do hybridization or what it was, and then spread the word because there would've if four H would've been aimed, you know, enormous program because this was where, how do you get kids involved in teaching them about agriculture? And you know, it could be everything from horseback riding to livestock judging to growing corn.

Kevin Folta [01:16:13] Yeah. Well, and when you make kids, the teachers good things happen. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:16:16] Because

Kevin Folta [01:16:16] They take that very seriously and they do a good job.

Vance Crowe [01:16:19] Yeah. Well 'cause they get so inspired and they believe in things and they don't let the other stuff get in their way. Which actually is a good segue to the something you brought up at the very beginning, which was you're doing light recipes, you're, you're, you're, you're messing around with the, the way that the different light impacts plants. You're gonna talk about this tomorrow at Mizzou. Tell me a little bit about that.

Kevin Folta [01:16:42] Okay, well let's talk about tadpoles and frogs first. So when you have a tadpole and a frog, it's exactly the same genetics, the same DNA in every cell, right? It's just that time changes. This thing that has an aquatic dweller, that has a tail that feeds on algae, has a gills time, dictates the formation of limb buds, terrestrial habitat absorbing the tail change in diet. That's something that's dictated by time plants. It's very different. If you take a seedling and you put it in the dark, it will continue to grow and do its thing and it will not develop until it gets like cues and specific portions of the spectrum, whether it's blue, red, green, the stuff off the edge of the red or the ultraviolet. All of those different wavelengths have different information to guide the development of that plant. So in other words, changing the, the, it's like if you took a tadpole and put it in a dark closet, it would remain a tadpole until you shine light on it. And then if you shine blue light on it, maybe it would absorb the tail. And if you shine red light on it, it would grow legs. It would be this process that different parts of the spectrum control the development plants are environ controlled by the environment because they're stuck in one place. You have to pay attention to your environmental cues. And they learn about the length of the day, the proximity to neighbors, the time, maybe even season by the qualities of light they perceive. Now because we have available LEDs and very cheap narrow bandwidth radiation, we can control very narrow parts of the spectrum with great precision.

Kevin Folta [01:18:24] Now we can start to customize the blend of lights to influence precisely how we want that tadpole to turn into the frog or that dark grown plant into a light grown plant. And we can control things like pigmentation, stature, nutrient accumulation, the all, all different facets of plant biology. So instead of having to just get what you get by putting a plant in the field, we can do what's called plant whispering. We can go and give a specific series of commands, think of it as a vocabulary of, of commands in a language of light that dictates how that plant's going to grow and develop. So we can tell it what to do. And that's the power of this particular technology at this point. When we want to start growing plants in internal, in indoor environments, in urban centers, we can use these strategies to radically change how plants grow and develop and the nutrients they have.

Vance Crowe [01:19:21] Wow. And how far along is this research? How much is this is happening right now?

Kevin Folta [01:19:26] Oh, it's, it's, it's exploding right now. Tons of people are looking at this and the companies are actually really doing well. Companies located in urban centers are producing fresh fruits and vegetables, well fresh vegetables, mostly leaf wheat, greens and herbs that are going to urban centers at a significant co of profit for the producer. The big problem is the energy involved to do it. And that's where my lab is really focused. We've really been looking at ways to cut the energy by making plants that don't mind living in a little bit of dim light. So breeding for that environment as well as delivering the light and pulses in very specific combinations of wavelengths that allow the plant to, we invest every photon more wisely.

Vance Crowe [01:20:12] Wow.

Kevin Folta [01:20:13] That's, you think you have to think about it that way. The economy of photons, the economy of electricity used. How can we invest every single penny of that electrical cost? It translate that into some sort of mass in that plant or a trait we want.

Vance Crowe [01:20:26] And the bursts you were talking about at one time that, you know, lights can only, or plants can only accept so much light for, for a, for a brief amount of time. And most of the time we have lights on in a greenhouse and the plant can't absorb the light anyway. Well,

Kevin Folta [01:20:42] Photosynthesis has some limits as well. Does the, so light does two things. It drives the engine and it also steers the, it has a, and also has a foot on the gas and the brake. So different wavelengths dictate how that metabolic energy coming in through photosynthesis is partitioned and how it goes to do what it does. You have to think about light as controlling all facets of plant growth and development as well as being the gas in the tank. It's a foot on the gas and a foot on the brake. That's a great analogy. And so what we've learned to do is how to specifically step on the gas and provide enough stuff to drive the engine, but without going, putting extra gas in the engine to the point where the tank is overflowing and we're losing the investment. And so that's the stuff we're trying to really feather right now. I think we have identified the genetic breaks and if we can mutate the genetic breaks with gene editing this CRISPR stuff, take the genetic breaks out, I think we can even cut the energy more. Really? Yeah. And I think that's, we've demonstrated it in a rabbit opsis. We haven't published it yet, but it's, you can make

Vance Crowe [01:21:47] Green plants, you can finally make them be the green energy that we've always,

Kevin Folta [01:21:51] I I think we can do some very big things that'll be coming. This

Vance Crowe [01:21:54] Is so, you know, I'm making a joke about something that I think of a lot, which is I don't understand how agriculture didn't grab the moniker of being green energy or green, you know, the greenest thing of all. Sure. 'cause literally you are taking biodegradable factories. You're, you know, they, they're grabbing sunlight and putting it into batteries and then handing it over and the rest of the plant just goes back into the ground and re constitutes and you can grow it again. The green industry is named after agriculture. So why is agriculture not seen as the great savior of energy and how much better we've ever been? And instead is what looks to me to be the scapegoat of, of people being concerned about climate.

Kevin Folta [01:22:42] Yeah. That's a little branding problem, isn't it? I mean it's it is, it is, it is literally built on absorbing the stuff that we produce from our cars, from us. Carbon dioxide is fixed in plants and you know,

Vance Crowe [01:22:56] What does that mean? Meaning

Kevin Folta [01:22:57] That, so car carbon dioxide is taken from the atmosphere and assimilated into other structures, molecules that we can use like sugars and, and starches and, and cellulose things that form the structure of the plant as well as the metabolites we eat. And so how do you, if we, it is a very, it's, it's literally a green energy. It's using solar power to do it and a little bit of water, a little bit of nutrient. And you can take sun's energy and remove carbon from the environment. Make it into something we want. Yeah. We've got a big branding problem. We need to rethink this.

Vance Crowe [01:23:32] I mean, I think that part of it's a branding problem and I think part of it goes to what we were talking before about politics and tribes. And I think it is right now really easy for people in the city to believe that the people in the countryside that are growing things hate the environment or don't care about it. And, and they're, you know, poisoning things and they're just not as sophisticated as us living in the city. And you see that happening when, when they make assumptions that all these terrible things are like the amount of energy required to grow the crops that we're doing, the per calorie has got to be down so much more than it was before. 'cause we're so much more productive. Well,

Kevin Folta [01:24:14] The genetics have gone through the roof, right. And all this change with Haber Bosch when we're able to produce nitrogen fertilizers and then the genetics improved. The hybrid corn went from 1520 bushels of an acre back in the 1910s to twenties to now hundreds of per acre. And if you really press it, you can get a lot more than that. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:24:32] Well, so do you think that that prompts farmers to be in cautious with their use of nitrogen?

Kevin Folta [01:24:38] No, I think farmers have a, well, I, I shouldn't say that. We do know of examples that I'm aware of where that's the case in certain horticultural crops. And I don't have to throw anybody under the bus here, but you can go and demonstrate, look, if you use a little less nitrogen, your yields go up and they'll say, yeah, but that's not the way my dad did it. And so we are fighting inertia in these industries and I won't just paint it as all rosy and, and progressive. There is a lot of inertia there.

Vance Crowe [01:25:05] But even that, even the stuff that we call inertia, my experience with, so I have a buddy that's a physicist, Nick Cek, and he worked on some nitrogen projects for the climate corporation at Monsanto. He no longer works for him, but, but he talked about there is a lot about nitrogen that we just don't know, like as far as how it bonds to the soil and how it does, how it, how, how, how deep it goes and what impact does that have on root development. And I guess my only point is, I'm glad to hear you say that there are good actors and bad actors because there are, right,

Kevin Folta [01:25:44] Right,

Vance Crowe [01:25:44] Right. Like there, there are people that are out there misusing it and there are people that have literally

Kevin Folta [01:25:50] No

Vance Crowe [01:25:50] Interest at all in doing the right thing for the environment, but they're doing the right thing for their pocketbook or they're doing the right thing for the number of times they can go out in their tractor. And for anybody to be like, well you should be doing it for the environment. Like Yeah, but there's, you shouldn't fly on a plane then if that's the case. And you should give up all your things before you start telling the farmers what they should do. Yeah,

Kevin Folta [01:26:11] You're exactly right. But the cool part is, is that when we really start to put in science and we start to understand the economic realities of farmers, we oftentimes find that the economic sustainability and the environmental sustainability align that if we can use the best technologies such as variable rate applications, a huge one, you can survey a field from a satellite and see which crops are stressed from too little or too much whatever. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:26:37] That's right. And

Kevin Folta [01:26:38] Then you can set your variable rate spreader to buy GPS apply less stuff here and more stuff here as dictated by plant health and feedback that we had from data. And so as farming becomes more data driven, I think you'll see pro 'cause it costs farmers money to apply this stuff. Right,

Vance Crowe [01:26:55] Right.

Kevin Folta [01:26:56] So if you can apply less, get more bang for your buck and do that by using technology as your interface, then that's a win-win. And we're seeing a lot more of that than we used to.

Vance Crowe [01:27:07] Really?

Kevin Folta [01:27:08] Oh yeah. Tons of that

Vance Crowe [01:27:09] In in in just the use of the, of the technology. Oh

Kevin Folta [01:27:12] Yeah. I mean it's, it's off the rails. See,

Vance Crowe [01:27:14] It's so hard for me see, because I saw this, I saw this technology being used, I saw it in cabs because I was working for Monsanto, we were selling the technology, but I never really had a sense for how many people actually used it or if it just happened to be that the only farmers I ever saw were at conferences where, where they were the top of the mountain. You know, I don't know. But are people really using this technology as much as enough to make a difference?

Kevin Folta [01:27:40] Oh, this is much more in Florida with strawberry farmers. They use something called agro climate. You can look, go to agro climate.org. It used to be that farmers in order to protect the crop, would spray fungicide on a very regimen basis. Every so often you would spray, you would spray, you would spray just because you did prophylactic spraying. Now what they figured out was you only had fungal outbreaks that were hazardous to plants after certain weather patterns. You had to have the Venn diagram of heat and humidity and weather events kind of converge in order to have that happen. So now what they do is when heat, humidity and other stuff converge, the farmer gets a text that says Apply today. And it's that technology that cut application of certain fungicides by 60 to 80%.

Vance Crowe [01:28:25] Wow.

Kevin Folta [01:28:25] And that's huge. That's a huge win for the farmer that now doesn't have that expense of labor, fuel and product to apply. And also the environmental impacts of having to spray something when you don't need it. So this is a win-win. And, and you're only going to see more of that going forward.

Vance Crowe [01:28:41] So speaking of going forward, mi the microbiome is talked about all the time and it seems like that will be, or is the most important thing hype? Is the microbiome way over hyped? Or is it legit? Should, is it worth the money dumping into it or is it all fools gold

Kevin Folta [01:29:00] Somewhere in between?

Vance Crowe [01:29:01] Yeah,

Kevin Folta [01:29:02] You know, and, and I think there will be cases where we can show very strong correlations between microbiomes and you know, we talk about, don't

Vance Crowe [01:29:07] You describe a little bit about what the microbiome is with soil?

Kevin Folta [01:29:10] Well soil, okay. So soil is a very complicated thing and, and it's very rich in living organisms that a teaspoon of soil has more organisms than the he planet earth. You know, in terms of, well it is the planet earth.

Vance Crowe [01:29:22] Yeah, I was gonna say, how does that work?

Kevin Folta [01:29:23] Can't do that more than people on planet earth maybe, you know, whatever. It's billions of stuff in a tablespoon of soil. And the composition there dictates quite a bit about the fertility and, and health of that soil. And what they're learning now is that different associations of bacteria with roots of plants, we've known this for a long time, have profound consequences in the plant's. Health, resistance to disease, sometimes ability to fix nitrogen, that kind of thing. And so understanding the soil bacteria and then being able to manipulate that does seem to be a place where it looks like we'll be able to have some breakthroughs, including colonizing plants colonizing a seed with the bacteria that as that plant develops, may fix at nitro atmospheric nitrogen to fertilize the seed. So you wouldn't have to apply nitrogen anymore, which means you're not having to apply nitrogen and have all the runoff. You don't have to make it, which takes carbon to do through Haber Bosch. You would have the plant basically fertilize itself from bacteria that are now resident. And that looks like something that's very realistic in the next 10 years.

Vance Crowe [01:30:34] And so that's you actually, you, you landed right where I was gonna ask you, which is you think this is realistic, you know, there's a lot of promise with things like the microbiome or the, the microbiota like it, there's a lot of, like, we think it's controlling depression and all of these other things, but then again, it becomes like a scapegoat. Instead of putting all of your fears on it, you're putting all of your hopes on it. So how much, how much hope should people be putting on the microbiome?

Kevin Folta [01:31:03] I don't, I would be, I would never put hope on too many things like that because it's one part of a complicated situation, right? It's, it's a multi, all of these, many of these diseases especially, or you know, disorders, things like autism especially where people have said, well, it's a, it's part of the microbiome gut access with the brain. It's, it's, it may be a contributing factor or maybe a predisposition or something that enhances a genetic or environmental combination or who knows. But I don't know that there's any silver bullets here at this point. What I would say is that if we had this conversation in 2009, we would not say the word crisper unless it was referring to a drawer in our refrigerator. Right? We wouldn't talk about gene editing. All of all of the things that we're doing now that are accelerating the lead edge of biology are all discoveries in the last six, seven years, 5, 6, 7 years. And it goes at, at a, at a massive, massive rapid pace. So I think we're gonna see profound change in agriculture. I think we're gonna see profound change in medicine and the discoveries that are happening at a breakneck pace. The question now is are we going to be moving as fast as to be able to use them with the correct wisdom to use them properly? And I think that's gonna be our big challenge.

Vance Crowe [01:32:18] Yeah. That may be the challenge of what we've started talking about with, Hey, you're gonna start throwing wrenches in here. You know, there's a, there's a famous phrase, beware of unearned wisdom, right? Where, where you've discovered something but you didn't discover it because you Yeah. You just stumbled upon it. Right? And it kind of sounds like that's what what you're talking about. But if there's one person on the earth that has a lot of earned wisdom about the subject of communicating complicated science, like your wrench example, it's you and you've been through the, the fire of having things go wrong and, and, and well, so let's, let me just kind of set the scene. Is it, you wanna talk about this for a little bit? Yeah.

Kevin Folta [01:33:05] Okay, sure, sure, sure.

Vance Crowe [01:33:06] So, so for anybody that doesn't know Kevin is somewhat of a controversial figure. In fact, I, when I announced this morning that I was gonna be interviewing you, I got some pokes from people that said, you know what, what's going on Kevin? I thought he quit Twitter and I thought he quit this. But this is the end of a story that's actually much, much longer. You and I met five or six years ago and you were one of the only scientists that would get any coverage at all about explaining complex science like GMOs or pesticides or what farmers were doing. And in fact, either right before or right after we met you were on the Joe Rogan experience, you know, the, the pinnacle of podcasts. Even then it was a big deal and now it's an even bigger deal. And now you've come all the way to people, you winning the cast award, the, the, the communicators in agriculture, science and technology. And, and now things have happened along the way. What do you think you've learned along your rough path where things were going really well? And then you find yourself on the front page of the New York Times being pointed out where they're trying to make the case that you're, you've done something nefarious,

Kevin Folta [01:34:22] You can't quit. And I think you have to keep your focus of why are you doing what you're doing? And, you know, it would be, it would be easy to quit so many times. But when we talk about the, those situations in Africa and seeing it firsthand and knowing of solutions that can happen here and sitting at a time and place in history where we have an opportunity to create an engine to do tremendously good things for people. And I said it yesterday to, to a class of med school students, we don't lack from us from innovation, we've got plenty of innovation. It doesn't get to application because we don't have good communication. And so for me it's, it's about you have to be fearless and tireless and take this on and keep going. I almost quit so many times, especially after that New York Times article that was life changing. It destroyed relationships. It is some simple as getting me kicked off of a local bike club to threats and hassle, taking my name off my office, people breaking into my office, having to have security present at the university. My boss having to have conversations with the FBI domestic terrorism task force when I was giving a talk at another university. That, and then if you go on Google, Google images and put my name in, you won't stop laughing or crying because it's horrible. And,

Vance Crowe [01:35:48] And I mean it got it. It was bad and like, yeah. And so there are places out there people could go look it up and on, on the name that you have. And I guess one of the things, 'cause we only have a limited amount of time before my recording actually runs out, but what do you think you learned along this way? What is the earned wisdom that you have now having gone through the, the, the ecstasy of being at the top of the world to, to being thrown all the way to the bottom and all the other things that have happened? What's the earned wisdom that you have now to impart?

Kevin Folta [01:36:23] Yeah, I think the most important part is what

Vance Crowe [01:36:27] Do you, what do you think you, what do you wish you would've done differently earlier?

Kevin Folta [01:36:31] Yeah. I, I think being more aggressively transparent, meaning throwing every single card on the table in ways that everybody could see it and not make any inference. Not allow them to control my story and be more visible with that. And be more active in explaining what things actually are, rather than turning it over to someone with ill intent to say what they think it is. I would like to, I should have started a scientist to defense fund, legal defense fund. There's a lot of things that should have been done. I

Vance Crowe [01:37:11] Don't, I I am I don't think you should have been more transparent. I like, I think that that is, I think that's a weird expectation that people had of you or of anybody else to, to say like,

Kevin Folta [01:37:25] We

Vance Crowe [01:37:26] Want you to disclose every every aspect of your life. And if we find something that is not exposed, then we're going to, we're going to, we're gonna do it and we're gonna frame it in such a way that's bad for you. If your answer is, well, then I should have done more. The only thing that that would be is you're playing a game that, that that they set up all the rules and then you happen to play it well enough that they couldn't get you. That doesn't seem right.

Kevin Folta [01:37:51] No, you're right. I mean, they all, they would've found something no matter what. And that's what they're doing still today. They continually take more and more of my stuff. I have more transparency than anybody and, and that you can get my emails just by asking for them. And

Vance Crowe [01:38:06] So, so then I guess I would ask, what is the change that either you, you wish you would've made earlier? What's the one you have to make now?

Kevin Folta [01:38:14] Yeah, that's really, I think you have to decide where you want to be. And I think back then I didn't know, you know, I was a semi relevant scientist in a few relatively irrelevant areas and I was good at what I did there and I could have stayed there and done that. But I wanted to venture into this idea of communicating the science. 'cause I had a knack for it and thought that I could help move the needle on the innovations we wanted to reach people that I believe in and I really do feel can help people. And I didn't know what I, what I needed to do to get there. I just did it without maybe a goal and a plan. And I think that if I would've been more strategic about this, I wouldn't have allowed others to get me that way.

Vance Crowe [01:38:57] Yeah. I mean, I mean, candidly, and you and I have always been close and I've told you what I've thought all along. I I, I assume that's what you do with me. I, I think that there is a very, very fine line between confidence and arrogance. And I know that before I met you, it's, it's weird, right? Like you have these heroes, these people you see online, you see on Twitter, you see them give talks. You, I saw you on Joe Rogan and then you and I met down in Yuma, Arizona and you were an actual person. And I, you think even I had the experience of being like, oh my gosh, this person that I've heard of that is this amazing person is, is a real person. And I got to see what you were doing on the inside as as being brave, right? You would stand up in places where I certainly wasn't going to, but on some level, do you think there was a time when you were maybe taking on projects or programs or positions that was foolhardy? Oh

Kevin Folta [01:39:59] Yeah. I think that there was a little bit of cockiness to it quite often. And I think I was often abrasive. I would come off as you, you know, telling people, you know, you idiot. I can't believe you would say that. I mean, there was a lot of those instances and there was a communications fail like horribly. But it was kind of like, I knew a lot about this. I, I mean, I was really an expert's expert. I know this stuff inside and out. I've studied it my whole life, literally.

Vance Crowe [01:40:25] Yeah, no, I mean I, I've met everybody in the, in the science communication world, there's nobody that comes anywhere close to your ability to explain things. No doubt about that.

Kevin Folta [01:40:34] Well, and I understand this stuff so well, but the problem was, is that I was come taking that mantle of as a science fist and just, you know, knocking people out with it. I wasn't taking, I, and that goes back to what we were saying about listening and trying to change the way people feel. I was able to give people more facts and more information and that made me come off as extremely arrogant at times. And I would never want to be seen that way 'cause that's not the way I am.

Vance Crowe [01:41:01] I think there was also a time, and you tell me if you still feel this way, we may have a difference of opinion on this, but I feel like you took the mantle of being a public university professor as a thing that says, I have more responsibility here, therefore I have to hold myself to some kind of account. And, but that can sometimes be used like a, a like a little bit of a stick. Like how, how can, how can you question my, my integrity, I'm a university professor. I'm a, I'm a I work for you. Well you don't work for me, right? Like, do you see what I'm saying?

Kevin Folta [01:41:41] Yeah, yeah. And I do that and I still believe that though.

Vance Crowe [01:41:44] I mean that's, I think that's where our difference of opinion is. But

Kevin Folta [01:41:47] See, you're the taxpayer that funds my research and you're the taxpayer that funds, you know, you, you granted, you know, you don't live in Florida, but state of Florida pays my salary. You put students in the school in the classrooms where I teach. So I do feel a very strong sense of responsibility to that taxpayer and to that enterprise that allows me to do what I do.

Vance Crowe [01:42:11] I think that maybe, you know, as you're describing it, I think it's that I'm more cynical than you. Yeah. Because I feel like, you know, after I went to the World Bank and I saw what international organizations that, that get paid in the same similar situation, like we are given tax dollars by company, by countries, and then the countries pay into the World Bank and those people pay your salaries, therefore I'm working for you. And I saw people doing crazy stuff there that I didn't want anything to do with. And, and so I don't hold any position in my mind as if you paid by the taxpayer you're paid by. It all comes down to you as an individual. And that the fact that you work for a university holds no sway over me at all.

Kevin Folta [01:42:55] Okay, I'm with ya. So let's just say that the moral act of 1862 that created the land-grant system never was written and I was sitting here, would I feel a commitment to it the same way that's

Vance Crowe [01:43:06] I would, I would. That's it. Okay.

Kevin Folta [01:43:07] And, and maybe it's because it's doing the right thing.

Vance Crowe [01:43:09] Okay.

Kevin Folta [01:43:10] And maybe it's a profound sense of wanting to do the right thing and at least what I feel is the right thing. And so I have to consult my, you know, moral compass and hope that's good. And I stand to be corrected when I'm off. And I have been, I'm corrected all the time. You correct me a lot, you know, and I appreciate that. Well

Vance Crowe [01:43:27] I also think the other thing that people don't understand about you, and that's what I'm really hoping this podcast conversation gives people a feel for, is that you are actually first and foremost an actual, legit, hardcore scientist that is cranking down on research and new ideas and pushing thing, pushing the envelope of what is known in the world. And I think most people came to you through the route of communicator that is saying things and helps us understand. And, and I think most people had no way of understanding how many things you're doing all at once. Like, like you're a, you're a man on fire falling out of a, a building and still writing papers while you're on your way down. Well,

Kevin Folta [01:44:13] And I was a administrator, I was the department chair of the number nine department in the world in what we do in fruits and vegetables, you know, in plant biology. And I did that for five and a half years and was extremely successful in rebuilding a department and hiring new people and you know, mentoring and budgeting and managing and being the resident psychologist. I did that for five and a half years in addition to research and in addition to doing, you know, 50 speaking dates a year. And so yeah, it was, it was people who know me from any and so's so funny is researchers don't know that I go teach science communication workshops.

Vance Crowe [01:44:53] Oh, really? Yeah.

Kevin Folta [01:44:53] They had no idea. And science communication, people don't know that I have a prolific research program and oftentimes people who knew me from university administration didn't know I did anything else. So it was compartmentalizing those different magisterial of what I did that allowed me to, I get a really diverse toolbox, also kept me busy for years. Well

Vance Crowe [01:45:16] Your, your amount of production is something that has at many times in my life set told me I'm not doing enough. I want to be doing more. I want to be getting more done because I saw how much you pack into a day. In fact, you have a podcast yourself that just crossed the 1 million downloads.

Kevin Folta [01:45:34] Yeah. Just crossed 1 million downloads.

Vance Crowe [01:45:36] So talk about your podcast. What do you do on there and how long you've been doing it?

Kevin Folta [01:45:39] It's it, I did it right after Joe Rogan. He was, so many people for years told me I had to do a podcast and I did my first one incognito with the Verne Blathe Tha Power Hour.

Vance Crowe [01:45:50] That was the first one.

Kevin Folta [01:45:51] That was the first one. And I did that because I didn't want to do a podcast as Kevin Fault. I didn't want that spotlight. Mostly because others would say, well, we needed you to review these NSF proposals, and you said you couldn't do it, but you had time to do your stupid podcast. So I did it anonymously and I did it as a satire and a spinoff. The Art Bell show from the 1990s overnight radio. And we know that broke bad, but then I, you

Vance Crowe [01:46:15] Know, most people don't know that. I mean, like, the people in your world know it. Yeah, the people a lot in the farming and ag world. But the other people, they have no idea that you could create as a, as a scientist that normally is working in the office, you're doing all these research papers. You start a podcast after you're on the Joe Rogan experience, but you have an alter ego of a weirdo that you named Verne Blaik,

Kevin Folta [01:46:36] Vern Blaik Science Power.

Vance Crowe [01:46:38] And it's super, super goofy. It's,

Kevin Folta [01:46:40] It's kind of a goofy take on science and it wasn't terribly serious.

Vance Crowe [01:46:43] That's right.

Kevin Folta [01:46:44] But it was really funny because, and you can still hear it online, but the idea was, was to do science communication with a little bit of theatrical and have good si. So instead of it being like the original show, the R Bell Show, which was bad science in a legitimate host making this a legitimate science screwy host. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:47:03] And

Kevin Folta [01:47:03] That got a whistle blown on it. When I asked a journalist if she would be on to talk about her book. And she said, well, I don't understand this. This is a breakdown in transparency. This is, and this was right after the New York Times story on me being a corporate lobbyist. So she used that to throw me under the

Vance Crowe [01:47:18] Books. So, so to clarify, you're running this podcast. You're just kind of having fun. You're having on a bunch of the people that you have relationships with that you've known for a long time. You invited me on it. I knew that you were Vern Blaik and I ended up not doing it. I don't even remember why. But the, the, you then have a New York Times article that comes out, and that's a podcast. We should, we should just do an entire episode on it. But an article comes out about you and then, and then that's really negative that, that portrays you as being, you know, really connected with Monsanto in nefarious ways, which I know is not true. You and I have a friendship developed because I was working at Monsanto and we happen to intersect, we became friends, but that's why we're connected, not not anything else. And then you invite this woman onto your podcast that's a journalist onto the Verne Blaze Power Hour to talk about a story that she's done about, was it bats or cockroaches or something? Well, I,

Kevin Folta [01:48:17] I don't want, well, do I want to throw? No, no,

Vance Crowe [01:48:19] No, that's fine. We

Kevin Folta [01:48:20] Don't have, I don't even wanna talk her area of specialty. And I thought it would be a great topic.

Vance Crowe [01:48:23] It's

Kevin Folta [01:48:24] Kind of funny, you know, and then she said, I don't understand what this is. Why would you do this? This is, I don't understand. She like got so outraged and was like, you know, and then she writes an article about me that says the art original title was, you know, and a Diary of a Monsanto Apologist.

Vance Crowe [01:48:41] That's right.

Kevin Folta [01:48:42] And then after I said to her, that's kind of a stretch for a title, isn't it? The morning it came out, I was really upset. And

Vance Crowe [01:48:49] It was in Buzzfeed, wasn't it? Oh,

Kevin Folta [01:48:50] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:48:50] Yeah. And

Kevin Folta [01:48:51] I wrote on Twitter, I said, why would you call it that? You know, she goes, it was purely to feed off the other article and to throw me under the bus as hard as she could. That's what it was. And, and she said, well, I didn't write the, the headline, I just wrote the story. I said, well, how is that different than me doing a podcast incognito? You know? And so she changed it to, you know, seed money or something. It was, it was really, really uncool. And,

Vance Crowe [01:49:15] And so then from there you flipped over and started doing, talking biotech, talking

Kevin Folta [01:49:19] Biotech. I had to do, do it legit. And I started doing it as, as Kevin Fulta in Talking biotech. And now we're up to 209 episodes, went up yesterday and, and over a million downloads. And it comes out every Saturday morning no matter what.

Vance Crowe [01:49:34] It is insane how much you've put out there, how much content you've put out there, how much you've helped students get a chance to, to learn how to do their own podcasting. The one episode that I think, is it Gregor Larson? Yeah. That does the Domesticated Wolves into dogs. Yeah. That was an awesome podcast. Especially the second half when he really starts hammering down on how did, how did we domesticate wolves into dogs? That one blew my mind. Yeah,

Kevin Folta [01:50:02] He did Domestication of Chickens also, which was great. Oh,

Vance Crowe [01:50:05] I haven't heard that one.

Kevin Folta [01:50:06] Yeah. He had domestication of chickens and then I had domestication of cats from another scientist. But we do a lot of talk about domestication of animals and plants. How did it get from the wild to here? I love those stories and I need to do more of them. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:50:20] The, they're amazing. I'm reading a Temple Grandin's book right now. One of them, like, animals Make us Human. Yes. I think is the one it's called. And it's phenomenal how she's talking about how we domesticated these various animals. These are just exceptional stories and they're parts of your everyday life. And that's what I love about your show is that yes, it is scientific, but it's talking about subjects that are all around you that are, that are that, that you think you know a lot about. You think you know what a diabetic is or where insulin comes from. You listen to this and you have your mind blown or, or genetics in general. So,

Kevin Folta [01:50:54] Yeah, no, I had, is it San Antonio Holmes? It is a Super Bowl. MVP contacted me a few weeks ago because his son has sickle cell disease and he is part of a sickle cell foundation. I did a podcast on new remedies for sickle cell anemia, and he wants to know more about it. So I was able to connect him with the relevant people.

Vance Crowe [01:51:14] That is fantastic.

Kevin Folta [01:51:15] So the, the podcast has incredible penetration and the fact that so many people share it and find the content, maybe they don't care about the last episode, but you can go into this lazy Susan of science and pick out something you like. And there's a story in there for everyone. And the, some of the, and it's the guests that are great, by the way, I just ask questions. The guests are so good. And I, and I've just been so blessed to be able to talk to such a great array of wonderful people in that, in, in that series. I absolutely love it.

Vance Crowe [01:51:44] Well, I mean, when you told me you had got a million downloads that nothing could make me happier. And the fact that this all started out, out of the ashes of having a lot of your, your life get burned to the ground. So I'm, I think we should wrap it up here. Let's go hang out some more before you have to take off to go to Mizzou. But thank you so much for coming by the studios, man. I love talking with you.

Kevin Folta [01:52:07] Absolute best. You're the best. Thank you so much. Thanks,

Vance Crowe [01:52:09] Kevin. Well, that's gonna do it for this week's interview with Dr. Kevin Folta. We didn't mention it, but he is a prolific user of social media. So he's on Twitter, Instagram, and he has a Facebook page. I hope you will go check him out and also go check out the Talking Biotech podcast. It's an excellent podcast. I would say I've probably listened to about 40% of the episodes. There's almost always something in each one of the episodes that makes me say, oh, now I understand the world a little bit better. And I find myself saying, well, actually at parties when I, when the subject of one of his podcasts comes up. So if you like this interview, I hope you will come back on Wednesdays, consider subscribing here. You know that on Fridays I do an episode of what we call as the crow flies, where I talk about a communication strategy, philosophy or tactic that can help you become a tangibly better communicator. If you're interested in this and you wanna learn more, you can always check out my website, Vance Crowe dot com to learn more, or just hop over to Twitter, find me there, and have some interactions. One of my favorite things to do is to get a DM from a listener that says, Hey, I heard this particular episode. It meant a lot to me, and I just wanted to let you know. So either let me know about a podcast interview that particularly struck you, or if you don't wanna reach out to me, do me an even bigger favor, which is consider sending an episode that makes you think of a friend, send it to somebody that you care about, get them to check out this podcast because maybe it'll be one that they fall in love with and they wanna listen to, and they can become a part of this community that we are building every single week.

Vance Crowe [01:53:50] The numbers go up on Facebook. I see way more interactions on Twitter and our subscriptions are going up, up, up. We just had our 10000th download earlier this week, and I'm really excited about that and getting up to the next milestone, which I guess is probably a hundred thousand. So we'll be back on Friday for an as the Crow Flies episode and Wednesday with another interview. Thanks so much for joining me.