 Hi, my name is Rich Horsley. I'm the department head of plant sciences and the barley breeder here at the university. I was asked today to talk about a couple things. I thought, you know, field day, let's do it a little different in this virtual field day. So our backdrop here today is the barley and malt lab of Dr. Paul Schwartz on the campus of NDSU, something that you wouldn't see on a field day. And I was asked to talk about craft beer and what we're doing for developing varieties for craft beer. So I thought this was really a good place to talk from. Well, Dr. Schwartz and I, we both started here around 1988. And our job when we were hired was to develop malt barley varieties for the large commercial brewers. Basically, we were developing barley for Ann Hauser-Busch, Miller Brewing, and Strow Brewing at the time. And when you think about barley, barley's market is quite different than any other crop out there in the state. When a farmer sells corn or soybeans or wheat, they take it to the elevator and they just put all the corn that just got delivered with all the other corn in the elevator. It all just gets commingled. Barley's quite differently. When a farmer takes malt barley to the elevator, the first question they're going to get is, what variety is that? Because each of the varieties is going to get segregated differently. And the reason that happens is that each barley variety has its own characteristics for malt quality and brewing quality. It might impact a little bit of the flavor. So when a large brewer makes a beer, they know exactly what barley varieties are in their beer and on what fractions. And so since variety is so important, when we develop varieties for those large commercial brewers, they tell us exactly what that quality has to be. It has to be this protein level. It has to have this level of enzymes. And the enzymes, for example, alpha amylase and beta amylase. If you don't meet those exact specs, that variety will never get used by the industry. So when we were developing for the large malt companies and the large brewing companies, we had some really nice looking varieties that stood well, yielded well, had nice disease packages, but they just didn't quite have the quality specs that those large commercial brewers needed. Those enzymes I talked about, why are those enzymes so important? Well, those large commercial brewers have a little bit of corn or a little bit of rice in their beers. And so they need those enzymes from the malt to break down the corn or rice. So that's why enzyme quality is very important. About a dozen years ago, we started talking more with the craft brewers. And they were coming to us and telling us, you know, those varieties you are developing for the large commercial brewer, they don't work for us. They have all these high levels of enzyme. And the proteins are too high. It just doesn't work. Don't you have anything that'll work for us? And we talked and had conversations. And they said, basically, it came down to they wanted lower enzymes and lower protein. And I was telling, well, the stuff you want sounds like the stuff we used to throw out, because it just didn't meet the specs of those large brewers. And so that's become a lot of fun to work with these craft brewers and the craft molsters, because it really gives us an opportunity to develop some materials that they wouldn't have been available to the farmers otherwise if it wasn't for this craft sector. And this craft sector, if you think about it, is grown and grown and grown. And it's now about 13 and 1 half percent of the market share of beer. And so that effort that we're doing in craft beer has really grown and become quite important to us. So as we've been doing this on the craft side for beer, I had a thought for myself as, well, if we can do this in barley, can't you do this in wheat? Can't you do this in other crops? Is it true for other crops? And so we started talking with chefs and people that on the wheat side talked with Dan Barber. He was at the Carrington Field Day about three years ago, a chef out in New York, chef and owner of Blue Hill, New York, and Blue Hill at Stone Barn. And we started talking about the wheat we're developing here at NDSU, and we're very proud of our wheat because it's known as the Cadillac of Wheats, very high quality, high protein, very strong wheats when it comes to bread making ability. And so Dan was saying, well, send us some of the wheat and we'll test it in our kitchens at the restaurant. He has a bakery, he has his own mill, and we sent them Glen because Glen is what NDSU and wheat is really well known for. So we sent the variety Glen there. And they came back and said, oh, this is way too strong. This isn't going to work for us. So I was thinking, well, maybe this is just like the craft beer industry is maybe the artisans need that, don't need all of that strength and stability and enzymes and so forth that we give to the large commercial brewers. So we sent them Faller and Prosper next and we kept hearing the same thing. No, it's still too strong. Do you have anything else? And so the answer was, can we identify wheats at NDSU that work in the artisan market? Just like we did with barley, and the answer was yes. And so it makes us a lot more exciting for us as breeders. We can not only develop for our large commercial brewers and we still do that. I mean, that's our main focus. But at the same time, we do have these other markets that are available on the craft side and artisan side. And we've expanded that work first from barley, then we're looking at wheat, and now we're expanding it to potato and dry bean. So it's been a lot of fun here to be a breeder at NDSU and to work with all of the sectors in the industry out there in the food industry. One question that comes up when you start working with the craft side and the local side is what about organic? And so on campus a few years ago, you go back six years ago, we had no organic land on campus. And so one of the things we've been doing is transitioning over some of our plot land. And we now have about 12 acres on campus that's certified organic. So that gives us the ability at NDSU to have organic research at three different sites across the state, here in Fargo, Dickinson, and at Carrington. And you really have to thank Steve's winger at Carrington for what he has done and really gonna bring an organic into the realm into a lot of people's attention here at NDSU. So everybody thinks that it's for organic only what we're doing, but really, I think of it more as local foods. That local food can be organic, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. The consumer just wants to know where's my food coming from? And the artisan wants to know can I make good products from these quality ingredients? So that's just a little update of what we're doing at NDSU and what we're doing on the breeding side. So one thing I wanted to finish up with you today and we'll go take another walk in a minute is a lot of people wonder, well, do you still have that old seed around? You said you were throwing outlines that didn't have the quite the right quality for that large brewer or for that large baker. So I wanna show you how we can archive seed. And when we get questions about, well, do you have this kind of trait and this kind of trait, a lot of times we do, we keep all that seed in our seed storage areas. So I'll show you that. Well, this is our second stop on the barley tours talking about cereals in general. And it's a room that you don't typically see here on the NDSU campus. This is one of our seed storage rooms. We won't spend too much time in here because it's cold. We keep these rooms, we try to keep them around 50 degrees and one to keep the germination of these seeds still viable for maybe up to 20 years sometimes. And also it helps keep the bugs down. A lot of times we get questions on, when I was working with Dan, he goes, are you working any culinary barleys, any hull-less barleys? And I said, well, we really haven't worked on any of that since 1999, I think was the last time we did any work with that hull-less barley. And he said, oh, that's too bad because you don't, you know, you may not have any left. I go, oh yeah, we archive everything. And if you look to this room, you'll see stuff from 2004, 1999, and earlier through the whole room. So we do archive a lot of material and it's really important to be able to come back in here as a breeder and find traits or characteristics that maybe you didn't think you needed 20 years ago, but now there's a purpose for them or demand for them. And one of those, a good example, would be the hull-less barley, that naked barley. Another example on the wheat side, you know, we've been working so hard to develop those strong wheats, like the Glen types, that we didn't necessarily bring forward some of those weaker ones that might work for the artisan market. So our wheat breeder, Andrew Green, was able to go back into his seed storage and pull out some of that material. So these seed archives are just, you can't tell the value of what these rooms really mean to us and our ability to come back. And you don't have to save a lot of seed. There's maybe 100 grams in these packets. But all you need is one seed and you can blow that up into 100 and then on and on. So it's an invaluable source. You don't see it, but we do have a lot of this on our NDSU campus.