 Hi, I'm Brent Holke. I'm a research geneticist with the USDA here in Fargo. I'm also a professor in the plant sciences department here at NDSU. I'm talking to you today about perennial flax and what we're doing with this new and up-and-coming crop. Perennial flax, as it would suggest, is a lot like annual flax, except it's perennial, meaning it comes back every year without needing to be replanted. The really unique thing about perennial flax is that unlike annual flax, it's native to North Dakota and actually a lot of the Great Plains. So we can actually capture different varieties of perennial flax just from going out of the landscape and collecting it. One thing it does have in common with annual flax, though, is it's high in omega-3 fatty acids in the seed oil, which is a health food supplement. It's something you've probably heard about in the news as being important for heart health. It also, your doctor may have recommended that you go on fish oil supplements or omega-3 fatty acid supplements, and flax is a very good source of those omega-3 fats for that purpose. So I've actually been working kind of on the sidelines on perennial flax as a breeding goal for quite some time. I'm a breeder by trade, but in recent years I've started working with Burton Johnson, Greta Grammig, who are two professors in the plant sciences department, as well as Steve Zwinger from the Carrington Research and Extension Center, to look more at the agronomic side of things. And recently we obtained North Central Sare Research Grant, Research and Education Grant, to start looking at the agronomic aspects of this and also use that knowledge to improve the breeding program that we have started on perennial flax. The whole purpose of our grant is basically three things. One is to determine some parameters for proper agronomic growing of the crop on farmers' land. Simple things like how far apart do you place the rows? Do you put them on 30-inch rows? Do you put them on 12-inch rows? Also, what kind of rate do you seed them at? And getting a better idea of how much seed you should be putting down per acre. Also, when's the best time to plant it? Because it's a perennial, you could plant it in the spring or you could plant it in the fall in anticipation for a crop the next year. So those are the type of things that we're looking at. Also, from a weeds perspective, which is the area that Greta Grammig is concentrating on, we're looking at how we could grow it optimally in an organic setting where herbicides aren't an option. Are there other intercrops we could bring in in order to enhance weed control and to live in ground cover? Perhaps perennial grass species or legumes that could provide nitrogen or added cover to the soil because perennial flax, like annual flax, doesn't have much of a ground cover component. Maybe some other intercrops could bring that aspect in. And the third thing, the thing that I find most exciting is, again, I wanted to see if any of this knowledge we're getting from the agronomic science side could add some knowledge to our breeding programs, look at other traits that we've neglected so far. And right now, we're actually in my perennial flax breeding nursery. It's here at the Lee and Noreen Thomas Farm, otherwise known as Doubting Thomas Farms North of Moorhead. And we have a bit of my collection of perennial flax behind us. A lot of it is re-growing after having been cut after its first flowering for the year. So it's quite short yet. I have added a few pictures to the slides here to give you an idea of what an older plant would look like as it blooms. The seed heads look very similar to annual flax and the plant looks very similar in a lot of ways, except it does have this tendency to be able to regrow and produce year after year. One of the things that we've learned so far in this study, which is now in its first year, is an important breeding goal is enhancing seed vigor. When we started growing this on an on-farm setting, we noticed that in some cases, under some circumstances, seedling vigor is a little bit lacking. So this is going to become one of our breeding goals, is to try to enhance that. And that was the result of some of this agronomic work we're working on. Another thing that we need to look at is how to optimize seeding depth to enhance germination and especially when conditions get hard. When we're talking about pounding rains and crusting a heavy clay soil, is there anything we can do on just the way that we seed the crop to enhance tolerance of that at the early seeding stage? Because the most important thing for getting a perennial established is the seed and getting the seed to germinate equally and reliably to set up a nice stand for years to come. So at this point, we're still very early in our studies. There isn't a lot of results yet. We're learning a lot about that the early stages of developing plots, developing fields of perennial flax. As we get those established and we start taking more and more data on yield and ground cover and weed control, we hope to share that with you on some of the YouTube feeds that our lab is putting out. I have some YouTube videos already on perennial flax available on my website hulkeylab.org that's h-u-l-k-e lab.org and hopefully you can learn more about it there.