 I'd also like to mention our P.I. on this project and Grant, Dr. Burton Johnson. Burton works in alternative crops at the Department of Plant Sciences at NDSU, and he couldn't be here today because he's teaching his class. So we're going to talk about a perennial flax project we've been working on for the past three or four years, and we're heading toward the end of the project. We've got quite a lot of data to share with you today, and so let's get into it. Why would you want to grow perennial crops? Anyone in here grow a perennial crop? Raise your hand if you grow like alfalfa, something like that. But then we have lots of research in the last maybe 20 years has gone into developing perennial crops that are more than forages. They're harvested for grain or oil seeds. Has anyone in here grown kernza? A couple people have. Okay, well you guys probably know more about this than everyone else does, but why would you want to, why did you grow kernza? Yeah, yeah, and so that's one big reason. People are interested in the ecosystem services that you can get from having those living roots in the soil for a number of successive years, and those would be things like carbon sequestration, protection from soil erosion, and some crops may also offer some pollinator services. The flax that we are working with does to some extent, it offers some flexibility for farmers. You guys have your crunch seasons in the spring when you're planting and the fall when you're harvesting, and because this crop is in place for a number of years, it offers some operational flexibility for farmers. It also may give farmers an opportunity to make some income off of marginal land. We're probably not going to replace millions of acres of corn and soybeans with perennial flax, but it could offer that flexibility and then with respect to perennial flax in particular, there's already a market for this seed because it's very similar to the seed of annual flax in that it has a very similar omega-3 fatty acid profile, which we all know is a healthy, heart-healthy compound to consume, and also there's a lot of food processors that are looking for ingredients that have a sustainable, organic, or regenerative tag on them so that they can assure their consumers that they are working to protect the environment and do good in the environment. So those are some reasons, but some challenges associated with perennial crops and particularly the perennial flax that we just started working with are, number one, just unknowns about how to grow this stuff. Really basic stuff like seeding rate, row spacing, when you plant it, how you harvest it, when you harvest it, and there's really no published recommendations for the perennial flax. And then also perennial flax, like annual flax, is a weekly competitive plant. It doesn't form a heavy canopy and so it has struggles competing against weeds. We were interested in using a nonchemical approach for a number of reasons. One is there aren't any herbicides labeled for use in perennial flax and also we felt that the major growers and buyers of perennial flax would likely be interested in organic management. And then again, there's really little information about the weed management. So, we embarked on a number of studies that focused on agronomic management and weed management. We took sort of an adaptive management approach whereby we cycled through a lot of ideas really quickly and that means that we failed a lot. I always tell my grad students, don't be afraid of failing. That's probably the most valuable experience. Why? Because you learn something. So, don't be afraid of failure. In 2020, we started off spring planting the flax. We had intended to plant some in the fall in 2019, but for weather reasons, that didn't work out. So, our first time sowing it was in the spring of 2020. And we had a couple of studies in Comstock, Minnesota, and Carrington, or Dakota. And both of those studies didn't work out. Then we moved on to trying some ideas with just basic agronomy and also using flaming to control weeds in 2021. And then in 2022, we kind of just settled on cultivation as a way to keep the weeds down. And we were looking just to document what the yield of the flax would be. And so, these were our initial attempts. And the failures were because at the Minnesota site, we did have emergence, but right away, we got some heavy rains that buried the seedlings that kind of washed the soil off the top of the planting ridges into the furrows where the little tiny plants were trying to establish. And then we replanted it, and we had another rainstorm that caused a crust on the clay soil. And I'll show you a picture of that in a minute. And that inhibited the emergence of the perennial flax. So that site failed. And then at the Carrington site, the emergence and establishment was very poor, possibly due to some drought problems. And maybe we're thinking planting depth issues. That's one of the things we've identified as a really critical factor in these success. And so here's a couple shots of the crusting at the Comstock site and the struggle that these little seedlings, the seeds are tiny, and so the seedlings are very small and they just couldn't break through that crust at Comstock in 2020. And so then in the fall of 2020, we moved on to trying some fall seeded and dormant seeded studies that we established at Comstock and then at Absaraka. We were planning to go to Carrington, but COVID was causing us some problems. And so we ended up at the site in Absaraka. And both of these sites, by the way, are certified organic. So we were using organic management practices throughout this study. And we planted a couple of different rates, six and four times the recommended rate. And we tried a few different row spacings, 15 versus 30 inches. And we looked at a single seeding depth, which we targeted at about 18 to a quarter inch. And that's really shallow. So it's hard to achieve that kind of shallow seeding. One thing that might help is like annual flax, the Lewis flax, which is a native flax plant, a native perennial flax plant. The seeds exude a mucilaginous substance. It's kind of like a glue. And it will glue those seeds in place. That's also a property just as a little aside. Did anyone know that you can use flax seed instead of eggs? Eggs are really expensive right now. So you can use flax seed instead of eggs to do baking. And then it's largely because of that mucilaginous substance that helps to glue those seeds in place. So here's some pictures of what happened. We saw Absaraka in March of 2021, that the seedlings, we were very surprised about this, but the seedlings in our plantings, you can see one right here, they were starting to emerge when they were still frost on the ground. And then by May 2021, the seeding looked like this. And you can see that's a very nice healthy row of flax seedlings, fairly dense. So we had a pretty dense population. I think it's likely those high seeding rates are maybe a little too high. But we wanted to make sure that we got something. So we up those rates. This is the Comstock site. It shows the fall planting that was done in September. And so there were some flax emerging that overwintered. And then this is what it looked like in the spring. And then it did grow green up and end up surviving. And you see another nice row of perennial flax seedlings taking hold there. And then these pictures just follow the progression of these stands. These are again at Comstock. This was May of the next year. The plants are in their second year. They're becoming a little more bushy. It's kind of a sub shrub, the perennial flax. And then this is 7-11, 2021. Plants are getting a little bit bigger. You can see this was the Comstock site. We had quite a big problem with yellow foxtail. That was one of our biggest problems at that site. And then here is some more pictures of the seedlings emerging. And at Comstock, you can see the little seedlings just starting to emerge. And then some more plants coming up. And then a comparison of the fall seeded. So these were seeded in September. And they emerged in the fall. These were dormant seeded. And so the seed just sat in the soil, waiting to grow. And both of these seedings we feel are more effective than the spring seedings because this time of year, we don't get, usually don't get these torrential rainstorms. It's pretty dry. You're heading into winter. And then if you get any precipitation, it's probably going to be snow, which is beneficial. And we also did plant at Comstock, we planted these seedlings into an oat crop, which was also beneficial because that oat canopy helps to trap some of the snow, especially for the fall seeded plants to help them overwinter a little bit. And we don't think that the success of those dormant seedings has anything to do with stratification period or coal treatment. It's more about the rain planting it at a time when you are going to avoid these very damaging rains that will wash out these tiny seedlings. So they're able to, well, the fall, the early fall, the September planted plants get their roots down that fall. And then the dormant seeded, they start growing in March. And so both of them have some established roots by the time you start getting those pouring rains in April, May, and into June. So this last year at Comstock, again, it shows a more established stand of perennial flax. And Brent said it was the most beautiful stand of perennial flax he ever saw. He has been working with this crop longer than I have. He played around with it even in his grad school days back at the University of Minnesota. And then this is what it looks like in bloom. So some of the things we tried, I mentioned that weeds were quite a problem at both sites. And one of the things we, my grad student wanted to try this, we tried doing some propane waiting on the Absuraka site during spring of 2021. So the flax had just emerged. It was pretty fragile. There's some indication in the literature that flax might be somewhat fire resistant, but I think that's probably referring to older, more established plants. So we tried some flaming treatments with a commercial flamer. And this is what happened. So here's our nice healthy stand. We pretty much just burnt it to a crisp. And it did kill some annual weeds. But we had a very substantial perennial weed problem at this site, didn't touch those at all. And then we had a flush of annual weeds that came up right after the flaming. And so that was largely ineffective. Here's some numbers that show the damage. We had two different types of flaming treatments. One was a little bit more spread out. And that was this inner row, the flame spread out more into the rows. Whereas this broadcast, in spite of the name of it, tended to keep the flame more in a row. So you can see that there's a little bit better response. This is the number of flax plants that survived. So in the control, we've got over about 125 plants per meter squared. And then for this broadcast treatment, you've got about 40 to 50 surviving. So there were some survivors in this broadcast treatment, but we felt like the damage was too great. And the weed control benefit was too little to really pursue it. So we decided not to do this treatment at Comstock. Yeah, I think we sort of shifted between too dry and too wet throughout this whole, I mean, that's a theme these days, I think. But this just shows the weed response. And you can see that there really wasn't any impact. This is the total weed count and the various treatments. And there wasn't really a big impact on weed density. That was about two weeks after we flamed it. And so then in the fall, we wanted to try a more targeted approach where we just used a hand flamer to flame some of the winter annuals that were coming up. And so we tried that in a few plots. And this is the outcome of that, which again wasn't very exciting. This is before the flaming. You can see this is flak stands. So we were interested in documenting the damage to the flax plants. And there wasn't any difference going into the little study. And then after we flamed it, we measured again in May of 2022. And this graph is just showing that the flax density didn't differ between these treatments. So that more targeted flaming didn't harm those flax plants. And I think if we could get our machinery more fine tuned to deliver a more sort of targeted flame that wouldn't be right on the flax plants, that they might survive. And so that's it for flaming then in 2022. We just moved on to managing with cultivation, interrow cultivation. That's something that we found worked well enough. We wanted to just preserve what stands we had left so that we could get some yield. And we swathed the perennial flax. One of the issues with it, and I know this is an issue in curns too, is because the plant is perennial, it's not drying down and snesting the way an annual crop is when it's going to seed. And so you're contending with having to combine something that's still very green. And so we swathed the flax and left it in windrows, tried to let it dry out a bit. We swathed it when the first bulls, which are the seed capsules, were just starting to shatter. And we felt that there were some losses due to shattering. Perhaps about 50% of the seed ended up on the soil. So we had a mean yield of 60 kilograms per hectare. Some plots approached 100. Some of the factors that might have been affecting yield are the weed pressure that was substantial at the Comstock site, mostly yellow foxtail, and then maybe some fertility issues. We put down a little bit of chicken manure fertilizer in 2022, but because that needs some time to decompose and mineralize, we probably didn't get too much benefit from that. That's something that we would want to look into in the future is what are the optimal fertilizer rates for this crop. Compared to annual flax, the yield isn't very impressive. Annual flax yield is about 1,200 kilograms per hectare. So we have some progress to make, and Brent's going to talk about that. Something else that might up the yield a bit would be that we think that there may be some potential to cut this twice in one year. And so that's where we're at with the yield, and we are hoping to keep working on that to improve it. And these are just some numbers. This is the yield on the x-axis, all of our different treatments, which consisted of different row spacings and different seeding rates. So we had the 6x rate, the 4x rate, and then we had 30 intros and 15 intros. And you can see all these little a's, those denote that there were no statistical differences between these yields. So the different row spacings and densities didn't seem to make an impact. We saw that the density of the flax plants in 2022 had more or less normalized across all the treatments and at both sites to about 18 plants per meter. And one final thing we tried, which I think has some promise, is we seeded some lower rates of the flax, 1x and 2x rates, within some different rates of winter wheat in the fall of 2021. At Comstock and Absuraka, and this is kind of an overview of the site, you can see the winter wheat stands. They were quite prolific. They were very good at suppressing annual weeds. The flax didn't establish as well at Absuraka. I suspect it's a planting depth issue. The soil there is quite light. Literature about annual flax suggests that seed bed preparation is an issue that you might want to consider to firm up that seed bed so that you can achieve a quarter inch seeding depth. But at Comstock where we have a more clay less fluffy light soil, the flax established pretty well in the winter wheat. And so we think that has some promise. Here's some pictures of that. On this side you can see the winter wheat stands and then the flax is growing in there and then this is the weedy area. And so without the winter wheat, you're just going to have a proliferation of weeds. And then in here we can see our little rows of flax. You can see two rows of flax emerging in the stubble. That's the cut stubble after they harvested that winter wheat. So this would be a nice system, an intercropping system. You would be able to get some yield from a grain crop like winter wheat or possibly rye is another one we're thinking about winter rye. And then you would also be able to grow your stand of perennial flax. And so just a few of the challenges we faced at Absoraka, we had a less impressive result. We didn't have time to prep our field. It was full of perennial problems, red clover, white clover, perennial ryegrass from a previous study. Strawberries, curly dock, dandelion, canithistle, perennial south thistle, it goes on and on. We didn't have time to prep that site thoroughly, and so it was a real weedy mess. And then coupled with that, the site is kind of on a low spot, has poor drainage, and that prevented us from doing timely weed control in those plants. We could not get equipment into that field. The soil was like soup until the end of July, basically. So we had some troubles there. Here's a shot of the perennial weed pressure in the flax. You can see that's quite substantial, and it definitely impacted the yield quite a bit. Soil compaction could have been another issue at that site. In August 2021, we did an aggressive chisel plowing of the area around the study, and it dredged up big slabs of, it looked like concrete. So it's possible that that soil condition wasn't the best for establishing the perennial flax. And I think it's one general principle of organic production in general, but especially if you're planting a perennial that you hope to reduce tillage in, you want to make sure you're planting into a clean field in very good condition. You wouldn't want to plant it on a weedy site. It was a COVID casualty, that's what I call it. At Comstock, really the biggest problem was a heavy yellow foxtail problem, which we managed via mowing. We did some sickle bar mowing, that's my grad student, Zachary running the sickle bar mower, and we also did some in a row tillage to try to keep a handle on that yellow foxtail. Some of the things to take away from our experiences, one, we know now that the seeding depth needs to be between 18 and a quarter inch. Fall or dormant seeding works better. The yield didn't differ so much between these different row spacings and densities. I think it's likely that we don't need as high a rate as a 6X rate, that maybe a 1 or 2X rate would be sufficient because we did really have good emergence with the fall and dormant seeded plants. And again, preparation of your site is going to be key. And so we're hoping to move ahead with this work. There's a lot of questions that still remain to be answered, including how can we better integrate the flax with intercrops? What kind of soil fertility do you need? I don't think you want to load it with nitrogen because that's going to really favor the weeds, and I don't know that it favors the crop as much as the weeds. Quantifying the soil health impact, how is the flax affecting carbon sequestration, the soil microbiome, and things like that. More emphasis on weed management tactics besides tillage would be really helpful, evaluating the pollinator services that you can get from this crop, evaluating how long will these stands remain productive. That's a problem with kernza. It starts to drop off after three or four years, and we'll probably see the same thing in flax. So how do we integrate the flax into an existing cropping sequence is another question. And so that's about it for me. Brent, you can come on up and take over. We started doing the breeding stuff just a little bit later than the agronomic stuff. The reason for that is very important. I grew up as a farm kid. Context matters. When you do breeding trials, you need to make sure that you're growing it in an environment that's similar to how a producer would grow it. And we answered into this with no real knowledge of how we should even plant it. And as Greta laid out, we made some mistakes along the way, so it's a good thing that we didn't start with breeding first and then fail there after a lot of effort. And instead, you know, limited our agronomic failures to start with, tried to figure out a system that worked. And interestingly, you know, what I take away from what Greta has been talking about is that whatever the common paradigm is for growing annual flax with perennial flax, you kind of do the opposite. You plant a fall seeding or a dormant seeding. Dormant seeding is excellent. If you can get in there very early in the spring, if you have a dry spring and can get in there where the heavy rainstorms come in, that could also be good. But it needs about a two-week period where there's very little on the way of heavy rain disturbance. Heavy rain is kind of a bad thing for the perennials. So we just got to keep that in mind. There's actually quite a bit of time in that period to be able to do sowing. So from my perspective, that looks like a good management system just staying with the fall or early spring seeded. But yeah, I want to talk to you a little bit about breeding progress. Rich here would love for me to take him out someday to show him the hundreds of plots we have of all the different pre-varieties of Lewis flax we have. But because we've been figuring out these really practical questions on agronomy first, we don't have those yet. But that doesn't mean that we haven't been doing work. We have been doing some work. We've been doing most of our work actually on what we call spaced plants. So we'll actually grow single individuals and we'll study single individuals for their traits and I'm going to go over some of those data today. So I will promise you this. Some of my slides are going to have visuals that are a little abstract. I'm going to walk you through it. The reason why we do abstractions is because we have to bring together a whole lot of data into one nice neat package to be able to interpret it. And I'm going to walk you through this. This one's probably one of the easier ones. So actually what this is, is just all of the different fatty acids that are in the oil. So you know your omega-3 fats, your omega-6 fats, your saturated fats, all of that kind of just in bar platform. It totals up to 1,000 grams per kilogram. That's 100% of the oil. And what we see across the diversity of the Lewis flax is that it looks a lot like the annual flax. That dark blue, that's your omega-3s. That's your alpha-linolenic acid. It's very important for human health. Omega-3s are not a fat that we can make within our own bodies ourselves. The only way we get them is by consuming them and they're required for good heart health. So they're very important to the human diet. It's the main reason why flax is marketed in the first place and we can say that the Lewis flax already has basically that taken care of. We don't have to breed for that. That's good news. Then market stuff is pretty well taken care of. Oh, is that compared to, I'm sorry to interrupt. No, it's all right. The annual varieties is part of the Alea content. We looked at a few annual varieties and they were in the low 50s, 50% for alpha-linolenic acid, and this one is, we've seen them as high as 62%, but as low as 45%. It's definitely within the range of what you get with the annuals. Thank you. Absolutely. So to talk about where this is native to, basically the Lewis flax is a North American native. It's one of two flax species that's native to North America. The other one is an annual. It's a low-growing shrub, but this perennial flax is native to western South Dakota and North Dakota, all the way to the Pacific Ocean and then up into Alaska. So you can see in the top right corner here we have little dots which is, I knew I was going to do that. They put these buttons too close together. All these little dots are places that we've collected and yes, we do tend to concentrate into areas that have a little bit more of a kind of a rougher landscape. It tends to be a great place for them to grow. There's very little disturbance. There's no agriculture, which allows native plants to thrive, as you would imagine. So this is what we have right now for different collections. We're up to about 200 different collection sites. The elevation change of where these things grow is amazing. They will grow on the top of mountains. I won't say above the tree line, but pretty close. We've captured a lot of diversity from these places. Our initial studies on space plants have given us a little bit idea of what kind of spread we're getting in terms of traits that are important to farmers, a yield and something that we call indeterminacy. So a determinate plant produces all of its seed at one time and the indeterminate plant produces it over a large span of time during the growing season. And one thing about Lewis Flax is it tends to have more of that tendency. It likes to produce seed over a six-week period. It's just continuously flowering and continuously producing seed. As you can imagine, that doesn't help our shattering problem because you'll have stuff shattering and blooming at the same time. So if you've got a genotype that's like that, you really have to think hard about when you're harvesting, try to optimize that seed yield and it's a hard thing. So our maple grove variety, which is what we were growing for agronomic trials, is right there. We actually had two different plots of it and we had nice consistency between them, but there's definitely material that's less indeterminate. So that would allow us to hone in on that harvest window a little bit better, get less shattering loss. And there's actually another piece about shattering itself and how that's controlled that I'll get to in a minute. The amount of seed yield, huge variability in seed yield. And let's see, where's our maple grove? Our maple grove is like right here, so it's kind of middle of the road, but we definitely have some outliers that are on the high side. And I think we have even better material than this yet. This was done when we were still doing collections. We increased our collections about tenfold since the time of the study. So there's a lot of things that are of interest. This is probably one of my more heady slides, and I apologize for that right now. Basically what we're doing here is we measured all these traits and we projected it on this abstraction. All these red arrows are different traits we measured. The blue ones are actually the characteristics of the collection site. Was it on top of a mountain? What elevation was it? What latitude was it? What longitude was it? What was the type of rainfall it had there? When did it get rainfall? All these different types of characteristics. What was the spread and temperature on average during the day? Was it a narrow spread or a wide spread? It matters, especially in the mountains. You get huge differences in microclimate. And it turns out that there was some relation between collection site characteristics and what traits it has. That's helpful for us as plant breeders because if we're looking for a specific type of traits, when we're going to a new site, we're going to look for those type of characteristics. And we have great data on climate and weather characteristics and actually basically all the places in the world now. So that's helpful. It also tells us something about correlations among the traits. What are we going to be fighting in plant breeding? If you increase seed yield, are all the plants going to fall flat? Is that going to be a problem? Actually, I was surprised to find out that most of the trait correlations are going to work in our favor. I'm really excited about that as a breeder because then I don't have to fight them. One thing that's interesting is more stems per plant increases yield, which kind of makes sense. But it wasn't necessarily a given because they could just produce more seed bowls per step. That's another way it could get around it. But actually, it's an increase in the number of stems that increases yield. With less bowls per step. This also increases harvestability. Why is that? If they have more stems, it turns out that they tend to be more determinant. So they tend to bloom more together. So actually, we get more blooms in a shorter period of time if we have more stems. And interestingly enough, the higher oil content is right in line with increasing omega-3 content. So the most marketable product from this is going to be the correlations work together for that. And interestingly enough, Greta, this is interesting. If you increase the oil content of it, it tends to be associated with reduced rust incense. So our most resistant material is also our highest oil material. Because we had a pretty sustainable. And microenvironment, as most of you know, that have dealt with rust in other crops, the microenvironment matters. So in those sites that you grow up where you're going to have more of that rust instance, it's good to have that knowledge. And it's something, obviously, that we can breed for. And there's quite a bit of variation in resistance. As far as winter hardiness of seedlings, this is the thing that is the biggest concern for me. This has been described by NRCS as being a weak perennial, meaning that it can't overwinter very well. But I have a whole lot of data that suggests that that was just an assumption they made, and it's actually not realistic. Well, maybe I should say it's context-dependent. Anyways, while I would say the perennial flax is pretty good at overwintering, it needs to be great in this type of environment. So I had a graduate student that did a study of this. What we used as prior data to inform how we're going to do freezing tests is we were looking at 30-year data here in Fargo for soil temperatures. And we found that over the last 30 years, the coldest that the soil temperature has gotten at 10 centimeters, so about this far deep under soil, is about 5 Fahrenheit. So that was going to be like our low-test temperature. So we actually took several varieties of these plants, 45 of them, actually, that we've done from collecting all of the landscape. We froze them at various different temperatures, the 15 Fahrenheit, 10 Fahrenheit, and then our real test of the 5 Fahrenheit. And interestingly enough, I thought that this was going to kill everything, and it didn't. We actually had quite a few survivors. You can kind of see it there. I mean, they're little plants. It was meant to be a seedling trial, because that's when they're the most tender. And you can still see that there's plants there. So the big question is, was that freezing damage consistent? Could genotype describe most of that variation? And the answer is, yeah, it did. And what was even more interesting is even at that very low temperature, we had varieties that had no depth. We had four of them. And they came from very interesting places. One was in Intermountain Valley in Colorado that was associated with three different species of cactus. This one at Kenosha Pass was about 11,000 feet up. We have one from Alaska. I think it's in the Anchorage area. This one from Vernon Cole Campground in North Dakota, which most of you know about. When we did these collections, by the way, we had permits, just so you know. All right. Don't go out and collect your own germplasm, please. You could ask me for some seed potentially. So anyway, we found actually that there was, this cumulative hazard is what the freezing data is. And there's no correlation, really, with elevation, latitude, and longitude. The reason is because you can get a lot of variation in weather conditions in the mountains in Intermountain Valley. So that's why we didn't see that correlation. But we did see an excellent correlation with freezing tolerance and regrowth. So the more freeze tolerant ones regroup faster. Good things to see. And a better way of showing that is these are growth curves. So this is the actual height of the plants in centimeters. The warmer the line, so the yellow color is our warmest temperature. The purples are coldest temperature. A really freeze tolerant variety from that Kenosha Pass one, you basically see all those lines kind of overlap each other, which means that it was unfazed, basically, by the cold. Our maple grove, which is the variety that Greta was testing, you can actually see that it died here at the low temperature. And there was a big spread in damage among the different temperatures. So that's not something we want. We want to see something more like this, where it's going to be unfazed by temperatures in the Northland. Got just a couple more slides here. I just want to talk a little bit about the genome. I know that this is probably not something that most of you care about a lot, because it's going to allow us to take data from annual flax. We've got centuries of breeding data on annual flax. We've got great information on where traits map to on the genomes. So if we have a good map of Lewis flax, then we could probably relate something from annual flax information to Lewis flax. It helps us to kind of shortcut all the learning curve as breeders. And this really abstract thing. It's pretty. But it tells us a lot, too. Each one of these little strands, these little hairs here, is a gene. This is the annual flax genome, the Canadian sequence. This is our Lewis flax genome. And this is an unrelated yellow flax. There's yellow flower flax, too. I don't know if you knew that. But that's more distantly related. But what I'm mostly concerned about here is this one, our Lewis flax, and our annual flax here. And you can see that the genes from one can be easily found on the other. And they stay kind of in roughly the same order, because they're really closely related. It's just that one's perennial and one's annual. So this is actually going to be really helpful for me as a breeder, because I think it's somewhere on chromosome 5. Right there. I think it's right there is a single gene for shattering resistance. And I can trace that back to where it is on the Lewis genome. So it's easy for me to breed for it now. It's excellent stuff. Anyways, going forward with breeding in conclusion, we have one variety now, if you want to call it that. Meet the ochre for a lot of traits. Even wild germ plasms are better than this thing for a lot of things. So for a lot of traits. So I think that we have some really promising stuff coming down the pipe. Many promising plant collections. There's some great or determinate growth. There's actually one I didn't talk about that I think might be fully determinate, but we're going to test it this summer. And we're going to find out that'll be something for another talk another time. Freezing tolerance actually isn't a breeding issue. We have plenty of stuff to take care of that. So we shouldn't have to worry about overwintering nearly as much. Plant trait correlations are working in our favor, and the flax genomes are going to be very helpful for us to... I just want to point out that all of this information is a good amount. So if you go to ncrsare.com or .org, I think it is, you can actually look up our project report, and the project would be reported under this lnc19 underscore 424. And we do a pretty good job of putting graphics in our reports. There's a lot of pictures of things that we've tried and outlines of how things work. So highly recommend looking at that. Leaving it open for questions now, just want to acknowledge all the people that have been a part of this. So anything we got. All right, sir. My mother grew as an ornamental plant in her garden, radio flax. Would that be... I'm sure it's still grown by a few people. Would that be the variety of Lewis? It might be. So the only widely available Lewis seed is this maple grove. And a lot of the wildflower mixes would have that if it indeed contains Lewis flax. There is a plant that looks a lot like Lewis flax that actually is from Europe. It's called Linnum paren, or perennial flax. European perennial flax. That one looks just like Lewis flax, but not Lewis flax. The difference between them is the Lewis flax, the one that's native to here, will self-pollinate. So it'll produce seed from its own pollen. The one from Europe requires basically a female and a male plant. So if you only have one of them, it will never produce seed. Okay, so it's probably Lewis, though. Also, Lewis tends to have like this kind of blue-green foliage where the paren type tends to be more true dark green. Also, my wife is from Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan's a large producer of flax. They're like number one or number two in the world usually. They've been from the last five years. And they have a variety over there that's white flower, and it's a perennial flax. And if you know any bottom, I actually read wrong whatever. I guess it's the wrong type. I brought the seed back with me just a few years ago. So we know a lot about that, actually. The white flower flaxes are in with the blue species. And sometimes even there's quite a bit of variation within a species. Russia has some of the greatest diversity in wild flaxes of anywhere in the world. And part of it is because they're a huge land mass. And that's kind of like the center of where flaxes came from. So it doesn't surprise me at all to hear that. They have, I think there's probably at least 10 different types of perennial flax that are from there. I actually have some good friends over there that unfortunately are estranged because of the current political climate we're in. I at one time almost did a plant collection trip to Russia with them. With the Russian authorities on plant collection to try to get some of that diversity. But it never happened. Yeah, that's a longer story. Oh, that's a great question. I don't have a lot of solid data on how it deals with community. But I will tell you this. After observing it in all kinds of different habitats, it definitely has preferences for community. It does not want to be in thick grasses. It doesn't want to be with highly competitive things. Yeah. It loves short grass prairie. And short grass prairie that maybe has a little bit of a gravely attention to it. We see it a lot with prickly pear cactus in Montana and Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota. Yeah. There's such variance. It is variable. There's stuff that isn't cold tolerant. But it's confined to more southern areas typically. The low valleys of mountains in the south. So like Nevada, Utah, that type of thing. Southern Utah. There are definitely types of loose flax that aren't cold tolerant. But there's a lot of things that are. There's a lot of varieties that are. Sir. Yeah. I think we need to address the shattering thing. And then we'll make it cheaper for you. Well, like annual flax, it tends to be pretty fibrous stemmed. I mean, it's been used in the past for its fiber qualities. The annual flax. And I think there may be some record that some Native American communities may have used the loose flax fiber. It has a lot of that same characteristic as annual flax does for kind of being known for its fiber and fiber length. Yeah. So potentially this could be, if you got a long stemmed loose flax variety, you could probably do something with it in terms of linen production. It's a really interesting idea. And I work a little bit with some people that are hemp farmers or hemp geneticists. And the commonalities between what they're trying to do with fiber length and hemp and what we're thinking about potentially as being maybe an alternative market for the loose flax is interesting.