in biodiversity in this country.

And if you think about biodiversity, what we're talking about is the real richness of different plant and animal species spread throughout our state from the mountains to the coast.

And over the years, Alabama has really concentrated and done a great job on a few agricultural crops.

We're excellent at cotton and soybeans and peanuts, we do a great job.

We've had wonderful breeders that have made all kinds of crop improvements over the year.

More recently, we have partnered with HudsonAlpha and there are experts in plant genomics, working with our scientists.

And what we're trying to do is to say with all this biodiversity, couldn't we look at some other potential agricultural crops, things like barley, things like hops, things like black beans.

If we could figure out a way to make those commercially viable, that would be a great benefit to Alabama, great benefit to our consumers to be able to buy and deal with local crops.

But it's a great opportunity for us to partner and look at the diversity of our State and then diversify our agricultural enterprises.

I think most of you know agriculture is about $80 billion industry in our State.

And so it'd be really great to improve the economic stability of our State and also provide greater opportunities for our consumers.

So this is a great opportunity for us.

- When you think about plant breeding program at Auburn university, we have developed new varieties and new plants to benefit not only farmers, but also homeowners and even golf course owners.

We have released a new fruit and vegetable varieties over time.

We've released new cotton varieties and new soybean varieties over time.

And we've even released a peanut variety, very recently.

One famous fruit variety, or vegetable variety, we released many years ago, it was called the Atkinson tomato.

And that was released in the 1960s and was named for Auburn's first assistant football coach of that famous 1892 team, who was also a professor of botany and the head of the department, Department of Biology.

- In another life, I would have been a historian because that's how I view a lot of what my research is.

It helps to think about plants in the context of time.

The first green thing evolved maybe a billion years ago, the first plants moved on to land about 500,000 years ago.

The first flower evolved maybe 130 million years ago.

We discovered the double helix structure of DNA in 1950s, we are now able to think all across the tree of life and ask these questions about how plants have changed over time.

And in the context of agriculture, humans only started farming 10,000 years ago.

It's a blink of an eye relative to how long plants have been on this planet.

So our key goal is to use genetics and genomics to ask these questions about how plants have been able to over the last 1 billion years, evolve, adapt, and change over time to a planet that is constantly changing as well.

And now using agricultural genomics, we get to look at all this diversity that already exists on our planet.

And we get to identify are there certain plants that provide interesting benefits that we can use in agricultural crops?

Auburn University has world-class plant breeders.

People who can look at plants and understand the challenges that are being posed to farmers, who have an impossible task to grow these plants.

So what we're doing now is our ability to connect Auburn plant biologists, Auburn agronomists, Auburn plant pathologists.

With all these incredible genomic resources here at HudsonAlpha, now we're able to not just look at a plant and understand differences and to make these matchmaking connections that is plant breeding.

Now we're able to dig in to the genome of plants and we're able to ask what are the genes that actually control these traits?

What are the genes that make one plant better than another in a field?

And once we can identify those genes, can we do something with them?

- I co-direct the Genome Sequencing Center here, the genome center was established at Stanford University and we moved the genome center here when we moved to Huntsville, we sequence genomes.

We started off sequencing the human genome as part of the human genome project.

And these days we sequence mainly plant genomes.

We specialize in De Novo Sequencing.

That means sequencing genomes for the first time, you can think of it like a jigsaw puzzle.

De Novo genomes means you have no picture to go from, you have no edge pieces, you just have a lot of pieces of DNA that you need to put together into a cohesive genome that represents the genome of the organism.

The idea that we have is to use plant genomics to improve agriculture in the State of Alabama so that we can plan ahead, we can use genomics to enable the decisions that are made, the decisions that are made of what crops to grow.

The decisions that are made into what crops will do best in this climate and this ecosystem so that we can really help to make agriculture more sustainable, both for the, in terms of the plants and in terms of the farmers who have to grow these plants.

- Our goal from the farming side in Alabama is to take the things that we're doing right now where we're helping farmers everywhere in the US and the world by developing these infrastructures to understand how plants function in their environment.

And these are used to be able to accelerate breeding for new crop plants.

And the idea being that we want to be able to select on the genetics the differences between plants and underlying genetics and then combine them to make better plants that are more resistant to, for example, fungal pathogens that are coming in to this growing environment in this country, or plants that use less fertilizer and less inputs, for example, water, to be able to produce the same outputs as what we're doing now.

And so in the past 12 years or so, we have built most of the research infrastructures for the majority of crop plants here in the world, including things like soybean for example, and cotton, and a little bit of corn, but not an enormous amount of corn, sorghum, for example is another crop that we've done a lot of work on.

And what we've been trying to do is take these techniques and that have just really come along with the ability for us to rapidly read enormous amounts of DNA sequence and extract information that can be directly inserted into the crop breeding pipelines.

When you're talking about trying to optimize food production, it's incredibly important that if we wanna produce food that is lower cost and more yield per acre, for example, in a given crop that we understand and control the amount of inputs going in there.

And the best way that we can do that is by understanding the underlying genetics of how that plant responds to its environment, because we can go in then and create what will essentially be super plants relative to what we have now, where they are more tolerant of changing conditions in climate, water use efficiency, nitrogen use efficiency from the fertilizer perspective.

And then that allows us to come out with new plants, which are, the next generation of plants, which are highly much more efficient and optimized for their environment.

- A lot of these crops have huge genomes and because the gnomes are big and they're unwieldy, it was very difficult to actually really study them in detail, but with the sequencing technologies, we now have a way of building the entire genome and using computational methods to look and see where all the genes are and annotate all these genes.

Annotation just means assigning the gene structure and the gene function using computational methods.

And then you can also design your experiments, to try and figure out, let's say, for example, this plant resistant to drought?

This plant is not.

And so you can design an experiment to try and understand which genes may be are involved in drought resistance, right?

The genomics will do that, but it'll also give you a whole lot of answers.

So you'll get a bunch of genes that could possibly be involved in this process.

So the next step is going to be either you use something like genetics, where you make controlled crosses and then you watch the progeny and see if they actually are resistant or not.

And then try and dwindle down the set, or you can use the new tools like gene editing to actually go in and say, I think that gene is involved in this process, is it?

So if I remove that gene function, does that actually disrupt what I'm looking for?

Right, and so it actually enhances knowledge pretty quickly.

Genomics actually allows you to tailor crops, whether it's food crops or energy crops or whatever crop, it allows you to tailor crops to be adapted for a particular area, a particular zone.

And it hasn't, it's been used a lot recently, but not enough.

And so we've got all the expertise here and the collaboration is required to actually do this for Alabama, I think, so that's our dream.

- My lab primarily is looking at breeding for disease resistance.

We also look at yield and fiber quality, but disease resistance is sort of a niche area that would benefit the growers because most companies aren't looking at that.

The major diseases that we have are those foliar diseases, right now we have a new a virus in Alabama that we're working hard to address to make sure that it doesn't impact the growers.

They also deal with the nematodes or Fusarium wilt is another one that's spotty within the State.

Pairing up with HudsonAlpha, what that does is if I'm able to find a line or variety that looks very well in the field that shows some resistance to whichever disease we're working with, HudsonAlpha can turn around and basically analyze the genomics.

And the genomics is basically the entire set of DNA.

And then from that information, we can turn around and look at specific genes that regulate that resistance and that resistance can be put into other plants as well or other varieties.

Target spot is a foliar pathogen that is found in both cotton and soybeans.

Soybeans has resistance.

And one of the things that I'm trying to do is understand the mechanism of resistance for the soybean, target spot in soybeans.

And once we understand that mechanism, see if we can turn around and apply it to cotton.

And that's something that HudsonAlpha, potentially could help us with in terms of if we identify some genes over here, if anything similar this production pathways, we can address in cotton as well.

- And basically, what we do is we look at the DNA of peanuts and we find pieces of that DNA that actually we can use to select for traits that are beneficial for growers.

And so that includes things like the size of the peanut, how well the peanut shells.

So how well that peanut can be taken out of his shell mechanically without it splitting or being damaged, how well that peanut might do when a tropical storm comes in and floods all of the fields, how well that peanut might do, if it doesn't rain for many months when it's trying to develop and mature.

And so when I first started working in peanut, there was not a genome sequence for the cultivated peanut.

There was an effort by the peanut industry to fund that peanut genome sequence, and through that work, that's where I started interacting with faculty here at HudsonAlpha.

And we started looking at that peanut genome sequence and identifying pieces of DNA that we could select for and help the breeders select for disease resistance.

From the farmer's stand point I will say I can know from my breeding standpoint they are the two major challenges.

Number one is the water availability That means the water source.

So they will go into how we breed the peanut variety for the drought tolerance.

and then another challenge for the peanut is the like peanut disease.

You know most important disease they are leaf spot and also like white mold cause the farmer to control mainly now is the use of fungicide.

to control leaf spot.

So that is the bigger investment for the peanut.

So far we use the conventional breeding program, conventional breeding methodolgy You find two super like I say complimental variety and make the crosses so make the crosses to bring with the super corrector in one variety.

Then from there we go into breeding to make the selection and finally release the variety and nowadays because of that process it's kind of slow.

Usually take about 10 to 12 years in the closest to release a new variety.

By the use of the new technology like biotechnology like genomics research going on we can use molecular breeding.

What that means is we use some of the marker during genomic selection.

We are going to use the selector plan, the super elite plant in the field we can select it in the lab.

and then we use that we can speed up and also if you talk about it more we have a new gene editing tool that is widely used in the biology area by the and that we have not used yet in the peanut breeding programs, that's like a potential tool we can use for that.

With HudsonAlpha they had an advantage with genomic research that institute for the human research and also the plant genomic research.

From their side they have very solid infrastructure to do the genomic to identify the gene the tree that we want and then they will develop a molecular marker so they can go in to do all the screening Very fortunately we have a cooperation agreement with HudsonAlpha and we're working together as a team to speed up the breeding program and we will deliver the final product to the farmer with the drought tolerance with the disease resistance with the high yield and other good traits for our farmer.

- Well, the biggest contribution in recent years has been the peanut breeding program, where it's very critical at this point in time to bring some new germplasm into the marketplace.

I've been here 40 years.

We were in the third generation of peanut varieties over that timeframe, and we really need to take the next step up as far as higher yields, we need better grades and better disease resistance.

And the current program at Auburn that's managed by Dr. Charles Chen has all of those goals in mind as well as looking for drought resistance.

And about 80% of Alabama's peanut acreage traditionally has been dry land.

So here in the Southeast, you're always seven days away from a drought.

So that's a very critical trait to bring into play so that our varieties can span short dry spells and still maintain their productivity.

One of the things that's occurred over the, for example, 40 years that I've been here is our yields, average yields have gone up from just under a ton per acre, 2000 pounds, to now there are about 3,600 pounds per acre, and we actually need to be in the low 4,000 pound range.

So we need that step up in order to maintain our profitability and Alabama's place is a world producer of high quality peanuts.

We don't need to be putting a lot of expensive inputs into the crops.

So we need to have varieties that are efficient as far as nitrogen use.

We don't want to use a lot of other fertilizers on them.

We would like to have disease resistance, maybe some tolerance to insects that might be able to be brought into some of these lines.

And that goes, that holds for peanuts, cotton, soybeans, and any other crops that we breed.

We need to bring these traits in order to lower the cost of production, increase farm efficiency, and maybe not only yields, but also to maintain a profit margin for the growers.

- The challenges I faced in Alabama growing peanuts would be, number one would be the weather.

We have drought, which is always a problem.

And then also you can have too much rainfall, especially during harvest time, which is what we've been experiencing recently.

- This is my 45th peanut crop.

But now that's the years that I've actually been financially involved in it.

I was actually raised on a peanut farm, so I've never known anything but raising peanuts.

Well, the weather is always the biggest challenge for us, and the finances is always a problem, too.

We have to try to consistently make money and to do that, we have to have high yields.

To get high yields, you have to use all the tools that are out there, whether it's the GPS technology, or whether it's the newest pesticides or the newest crop rotation, whatever, we have to use all the tools.

Technology just changes every year.

Not only the electronics part of the technology and the computer-controlled equipment that we run, but the massive equipment that we use to harvest and plant and the way we do our cropping, we do very little tillage now.

We used to do all tillage.

We do very little.

It's really good for the soil.

We use pesticides as needed, but use just as few as we can.

And things have really changed a lot.

We went from mule farming when I was a little boy to two row, to four row, and now we're eight row.

Technology is constantly getting better because we have plants that are engineered to resist these paths that we ordinarily would have to use some kind of pesticide to control.

So if we have a peanut plant that is resistant to white mold or leaf spot, then we do a lot less spraying, and that will increase our yields, it's better for the environment, and long-term, it's just better for our whole industry.

- They AU-17 peanut is developed by Auburn University and Dr. Chen and it's been seven years in the making.

And we're really excited about this new peanut.

It has a lot of resistance to the diseases that we have to deal with.

It shows good drought tolerance, and it shows really good yield and grades.

We're as farmers are really excited about it.

I have about a hundred acres of the AU-17s this year.

They look great and we're looking forward to harvesting them soon.

- In the past, there's not been that great of a market for barley.

Now with the growing brewing industry, with the interest from the brewers, I think the Alabama growers can see that interest and see that barley can be a viable crop, and once they see that, they'll be more interested and more likely to pursue barley as a crop.

Malting barley, in specific, the criteria to be able to sell it is going to be a little bit more stringent than you would have for feed grain barley.

So they're going to have to be a little more careful when it comes to disease.

If you get too much disease in there, they will dock you or even reject the load when you go to sell it.

To successfully grow barley in Alabama, Alabama growers are going to need well adapted varieties, and that's where the variety of trials are going to come in.

We're going to screen quite few different varieties, look at the genetic potential, the yield potential in the study, and we're going to be able to get that data and provide it to growers so they'll know what they're looking at.

This year, we're collaborating with HudsonAlpha for barley variety trials in Alabama.

We're going to conduct the trial at two locations on Auburn.

One, it's going to be at the Tennessee Valley Research and Education Center.

The second is going to be at the E.V.

Smith Plant Breeding Unit, which is here in Tallassee.

Currently the trial is anticipated to have 58 barley varieties.

25 of those varieties came from North Dakota State University.

They put on a regional trial, so 25 varieties will be a copy of their trial.

The other 28 varieties I've been able to acquire from universities and other public, other private entities throughout the country.

- Think about what Auburn Agriculture is really good at, teaching research extension.

We have the experiment station for research.

We have the extension service that is directly connected to producers within the state.

They know the problems that they deal with, they know the challenges that they deal with, and they work directly on applied solutions for them.

And then we have teaching as well, so we're training that next generation of producers.

The next generation is going to carry agriculture forward.

We have those as our strengths.

What we can do with HudsonAlpha is we can leverage their technology that they hold in biotechnology and genomics in order to take our research that is really applied to the state of Alabama, really to the next level.

It's an extremely synergistic effect by combining our two organizations and trying to work more closely together.

And in the other departments is really an understanding of agriculture, an understanding of horticulture and what are the major needs within the state within those areas.

And we saw partnering with HudsonAlpha is a way to leverage our strengths with the strengths of a major organization within the state that's basically in our backyard, that has great resources for genomic research, for biotechnology research as well.

So that's really where the partnership comes from, is leveraging both of our strengths in order to have a really synergistic effect as far as what we both can, and having a more synergistic impact.

A person who's growing soybeans, cotton, peanuts, corn, those are the major crops that we make small incremental changes, impacts to As we try to improve agronomics, we try to improve the germplasm behind those.

But what we need to also be having an impact on is what are the things that we are not great at growing?

How can we enhance those crops?

How can we create more producers within the state by expanding the potential for growing the major crops that are out there?

So it's really about how can we expand major crops, and then how can we also improve in the minor crops that are out there as well?

How can we increase the number of crops that we can grow within Alabama?

If we can produce more crops, we can increase the critical mass of producers out there necessary to actually make a new commodity viable.

So I think that's where HudsonAlpha and Auburn can really be synergistic is in a lot of those minor crops.

So you look at something like barley.

So we don't produce a lot of barley in this state.

It has agronomic issues, it has disease issues as far as producing, as well as we don't have the critical mass of producers as far as processing and the other necessary components to make the economics of producing a crop work.

But if we can grow a crop and get that critical mass of producers out there, then all of a sudden we have something new that we can grow.

The number of farmers can increase that can actually produce that crop, and then we can grow the number of farmers as well.

I think agriculture and specifically crop production is poised for growth within the state if we can develop new crops, new cultivars, we can expand agriculture within the state, and that's where a partnership between Auburn and HudsonAlpha is really critical because we can combine our knowledge of how to grow crops with how to breed, better breed crops and using advanced genomics techniques to do that.

to do that.

- One of our stellar projects is miscanthus, a project that we have with HudsonAlpha and the University of Illinois.

And it's a unique project in the sense that we're trying to identify new crops which can be grown in the state or in the region to create renewable energy for the military and for others uses.

It's a grass that grows anywhere from six to 10 feet tall, or taller, and it produces significant amount of biomass.

And this biomass can, is just sugar, it's just, the plant produces carbohydrate, and that carbohydrates can actually be converted into a fuel by anyone who wish to become a chemical engineer.

And that fuel now can be used for jet fuel or vehicles or any other need for energy.

In the state, there's a tendency for farmers to be, follow a standard cropping system.

Wheat, soybean, cotton, and corn, and some hay for cattle.

But for the most part, most other crops that have very high value and potential values are not necessarily being growing here in our region.

And our work right now is to try to identify a variety of crops which a farmer can put in their portfolio.

We are partnering with HudsonAlpha, Auburn to start this new project to grow barley and to identify high quality barley which can be used by local microbreweries.

And then to follow that we would identify a summer crop that can be grown following a barley like dry beans, which has a great deal of users from the diverse population here we have in the state.

Our job right now is to simply find out how best to grow these crops.

What are the desirable characteristics?

What can we tell a farmer how to plant barley that has an economic value here in this state?

What we're doing right now is interdisciplinary research.

In other words, we here at Auburn A&M University.

We're doing a great deal of field work and understanding of crops, all the characteristic of the crops.

So we collect what we basically call agronomic data, phenotypic data, and those data are then given to someone like HudsonAlpha who can take it and look at it at the micro level, at the microscopic level, meaning that looking at the genetics of these plants, sequencing all the DNA information of the plant.

And then that then cuts down a great deal of time in this and creating new varieties for the farmer to grow.

Because now just by having a DNA sequence of the plant, we can identify with just one piece of leaf of the plant, whether the plant has the desirable characteristic that we need.

We have a diverse set of crops that we're working at least here in Alabama, I mean, I here at our research station.

I mentioned the miscanthus, which is one.

We also, for the past three years, have began to work with industrial hemp for all its potential as a new crop for farmers in the region.

But there are many other crops that often you don't hear about, but we were working with.

We're working with turmeric, which is highly desirable in the supplemental world.

We're working with stevia, and stevia is a sugar substitute to try to understand, to try to help people with diabetes.

We're working with basil.

We working with moringa and several different types of other crops that we have here that graduate students are doing research on, and that can impact smaller farmers for not extremely large acreage, but it can be just someone who owned a few acres of land can grow turmeric for the market, can grow Stevia for the market, and so on.

- Cover crops are crops which are grown when a cash crop is not actively growing to provide some benefit to the soil.

Those benefits can include things like protection from erosion.

So cover crops provide a cover, if you think about it, comparing it to in your garden where you might apply pine straw or mulch to help protect against weeds, and also allow water to be better stored in that soil, we do the same thing with cover crops.

So they are just a tool that our farmers can use to provide some benefits to the soil.

Some other benefits that they may achieve in addition to erosion protection, soil moisture storage, and weed suppression would be, you know, we have some cover crops that are legumes that can provide some sort of nitrogen benefits to the soil because they make their own nitrogen.

We have brassica cover crops that have deep tap roots that we can use to hopefully break up some soil compaction and scavenge for nutrients, which crash crops can later use.

So these are all some of the different ways that we can use cover crops in cash crop rotations in order to provide some benefits to the soil, as well as the following cash crop, Barley can absolutely serve as a cover crop.

Any of our small grains, rye, oat wheat, triticale, barley, those are able to produce a high biomass.

So they produce a of residue that we can later leave on the soil surface to help provide some of those benefits like moisture protection and weed suppression.

You can see this is a cover that was planted almost a year ago, that this was planted.

It was killed prior to planting cotton and we still have some of this residue left on the soil surface that it's going to help provide some of those benefits that we talked about.

I think our farmers have, you know, we've used variety selection as a tool for our cash crop for decades, and depending on your farm, you may select varieties that are more drought resistant.

If you're farming in a dry land system, you may select for certain disease resistance.

If you know, you have disease pressure of a certain pest in your field, we select for high yielding varieties.

So there's all these different traits that we are focused on selecting for for our cash crops, but we haven't had that same focus with our cash crops.

They sometimes are a little bit of an afterthought since they are something that we use to provide long-term benefits as opposed to some of those were short term income sources that we get with our cash crops.

So focusing more on varieties that are going to perform well for our Alabama farmers, I think is something that we need to do, and it's a way that we can partner with HudsonAlpha in order to help develop some new varieties.

So for example, some of the traits that we may select for are early maturing varieties so that we can get a lot of biomass out on the soil prior to termination before our cash crop is planted.

We may select for certain benefits, for example, with our brassicas, those crops that I mentioned that have a deep tap root, selecting for varieties that have good root growth that we can help to break up soil compaction with.

So those are just a couple of examples of traits we may select for, but this is a huge area I think for expansion and for research in order for us to better these tools that farmers use for various benefits.

Some of the advanced tools that HudsonAlpha has the ability to use, they can really just help us increase the speed at which we're able to select varieties and look for traits within certain varieties.

So say for example, we've got a hundred barley varieties planted, and we see certain ones with a certain characteristic that we're looking for, maybe it's good malting quality.

Then we can go in and find those genetic markers that are associated with those traits and that helps us further that breeding process along and select varieties which would be useful to us.

And that that same concept applies to a variety of different crops within, that are important in our state already, and perhaps, for crops that we haven't started to grow yet.

- Some of the issues that Alabama farmers who grow barley and beans is that it's a new crop and it's going to require the experience of a couple of seasons to figure out what the pitfalls are.

As far as timing on growing, timing on harvesting, storage, all of the intricate details of successfully growing and harvesting a crop will require some trial and error throughout the first couple of seasons.

Also the development of the market for barley and black beans in Alabama will take some time to have our expectations on what the demand is.

Also, the expectations of what the supply is for barley and black beans The research being done at Auburn University and HudsonAlpha will benefit farmers by increasing, increasing the performance of genetics within the crops.

And it gives us options on what we can grow, how safely and securely we can grow it, the timing on, depending on what the market structure is for each crop, it give us more options on how to react to those markets.

So the more research, the better on the genetic side of the crops, because each crop requires specific traits to maximize for the end user.

HudsonAlpha gives us exposure and gives us the, gives us the option to try all these new crops like barley and black beans.

With their help and the genetics, also their help in the market research, that allows us to increase our crop diversity.

One benefit of crop diversity, what HudsonAlpha helps out with, is that when you have a diverse option of crops, you can rotate, you can rotate in a better sense.

The benefit of crop rotation is that rotating the crop, you have a natural use, almost like a natural pesticide.

You're changing that micro-culture, you're changing that environment for all the pests, the weeds and insects you deal with, and it helps you use less pesticides throughout the field, which not only helps you save money, but also helps with soil health.

So their research, HudsonAlpha's research helps us do a better job of crop diversity and exploring new crops to grow.

- Phenotyping is the science of characterizing plant traits.

For example, there are morphological plant traits like plant height, stem diameter, leaf angle, and leaf area.

There are also more plant physiological traits like photosynthesis, water and nutrient use, and plant breeders use plant phenotyping to select superior varieties to improve their crops.

And also farmers use plant phenotyping as well.

They basically use it in the form of field scouting.

So they want to assess the crop performance in their field in order to make informed management decisions.

A big bottleneck of today's crop improvement program is that we don't have the resources to phenotype a large amount of different genome types or varieties.

So traditionally these tasks are performed by humans, and these processes are time consuming, labor intensive, prone to human errors, and also ergonomically poor.

And we are developing high throughput automated systems to perform these tasks, which will be more accurate and precise and has less bias.

So in the state of Alabama, peanuts and cottons are the big two economically important crops.

So we are currently focusing on peanuts and cottons.

In terms of peanuts, we are developing a vision system to look at the peanut pods after they are thick, and we're using artificial intelligence to count and estimate the size of the peanut pods.

From that data, we can actually model the peanut yield.

So if we can model the peanut yield, then the plan breeder can basically test the more trials and they will probably accelerate their plant breeding program.

So currently, I'm collaborating with Dr. Charles Chen in the Crop Soil and Environmental Science Department at Auburn.

So I'm helping him to count peanut pods using a computer vision approach and AI solutions.

And also we are teaming up with Dr. Josh Clevenger at HudsonAlpha, and also I am working with Dr. Alex HARK-EHS.

He is also interested in developing some kind of automated system to phenotype buckwheat which is used, can be used for wastewater treatment, and also it's edible.

You can grow it in space.

Yeah, I'm trained as a agricultural engineer.

So I didn't know agriculture a lot before graduate school.

But once I got into it, it's really exciting because there are tons of opportunities in this in terms of using technology to revolutionize agriculture.

So down the road in the future, I think we're going to have a lot of robots, drones, and satellites to look at the crops at the same time, and they are going to basically outperform farmers.

They are going to learn how to grow the crops the best way.

And there's lots of job opportunities in those industries, so that's basically the Agriculture 4.0.

- So some of the challenges that we've got with locally grown ingredients is, there's great examples of hops that we can use.

There are a few examples of hops that are locally grown that we've been able to use, and some additional adjuncts, like some berries or muscadines that we can add to it, but we're lacking that backbone of the beer, which is the malt.

So it'd be really nice to have a completely locally presented beer with local ingredients and malts, the last key that we need to really have a Alabama beer end to end.

Currently, the barley that we get for our beer is grown in the Midwest of the United States, and then it goes to a malting company that creates the different roasts, the different character of the malt.

And then we buy it from a wholesaler, bring it in, and create the beer from that.

If farmers start growing a barley in the state of Alabama, there will be a large demand for it.

Craft brewers are an expression of the local culture, and just to be able to present that beer end to end would be a great addition to what we already have in the state.

The research from HudsonAlpha and other organizations like Auburn University, just bringing that, applying the science so we could grow the barley in the winter months.

I think it's going to be a huge benefit to the farmers, but it's also going to be a huge benefit to the breweries as well, just to get that malt so that we can have it.

It's the last key piece that we need to have that end to end classic Alabama beer.

So this is our single malt whiskey, which is our flagship whiskey.

This was definitely my baby.

I trained in Scotland to make single malts, and this is an American single malt, which we're real excited to be part of that as a growing category in United States.

And we love the idea that we're making it in Alabama.

It's our home and we're really glad that we're making it here.

And we just anything we can do to put more Alabama into this bottle, we want to do that.

And if we can put Alabama grain in the bottle to make the whiskey, then that's what we want to do.

I think Alabama's distilling future is very bright.

Craft distilling in general is growing pretty heavily throughout the state, throughout the country, really, and following similar trends to craft brewing.

People estimate a 10-year lag in that, but definitely growing, and the interest in it's growing definitely in the state of Alabama too.

Trial and error is definitely a big part of the learning process.

We estimate we spent probably the first two years of the six years we've been open really perfecting our processes and getting it, all our products just how we want it.

And that's, I mean, we're always trying to improve it still, the various products, and we're adding products here and there.

We distill a single malt whiskey.

It was kind of our flagship starting off.

We do our Elizabeth Vodka, Hugh Wesley's Gin, Gene's Spiced Rum, Spurgeon's Aged Rum, and we just now launched our Purveyor series, which is a double-wood bourbon and a double wood rye.

And then we were waiting on the labels, which is always slacking, and then we're launching our agave spirit, which is tequila that we're not allowed to call tequila because it's not made in Mexico.

So we call it Agave spirit.

The idea of growing barley in Alabama is huge to us because in everything we do, we try to use as much local agriculture as possible.

And right now you can't really get malted barley grown in Alabama because it's just not commonly grown in Alabama.

So personally, I was very excited about the process or the opportunity potentially to get Alabama grown barley, to put them our product.

I mean, it's an Alabama single malt.

So how cool would it be that everything, right now, we smoke our grain, our barley with local peach and pecan wood to give it some more local terroir, but we just think the idea that be able to take all the way from the ground, not just from grain to glass, but from ground to glass would be incredible to have that all in Alabama.

The biggest advantage for using Alabama grown grains would be, number one, just to have your money where your mouth is when you're talking about supporting local and being a local product.

But the marketing value of that is huge.

As long you can maintain the same quality in your product, which I can't imagine we wouldn't be able to, being able to say it's truly a 100% Alabama grown would be just a huge thing in the marketing side of selling the product, even outside of Alabama.

One of the big challenges with locally grown ingredients is just making sure that it's available to you at all times.

And then the second challenge really would be, you know, pricing.

Obviously, it local, so it's done on a smaller scale, so there's going to be some higher pricing.

Typically, I think the marketing value of using local ingredients outweighs that, provided it's within a certain range.

- At Everbloom Health, we provide kidney friendly food made with whole grain barley, made with rolled barley so it looks just like rolled oats, but it's barley rather than oats and offer certain benefits for people that follow a certain kidney diets.

Our company has always been focused on trying to help kidney patients.

Particularly we've been focused on people with dialysis.

Dialysis is a life saving treatment for people that have chronic kidney disease, but at the same time, it can be quite a challenge for patients just on a daily basis.

For example, trying to find foods that fit within the recommended kidney diet is not always trivial.

You go to the grocery store and you see labels on foods that say heart healthy or other things, but there's very few labels to say how kidney friendly.

So it's quite a challenge for patients to follow their diet.

We recognize that.

On a personal note, I've always granola, and one day, just at work, kind of stumbled upon the fact that you can actually roll barley.

Didn't even know you could roll barley.

So it was kind of like an A-ha light bulb type of moment.

And so what we did is we put this together as a side project saying, well, can we make a kidney friendly food with rolled barley, and long story short out came rolled barley granola.

- I think this place is wonderful.

It's a little bit different from a traditional university.

We have an absolutely dedicated education group led by an alum, and we have been working with them to kind of bring more focus to what we call agriscience.

You know, if we just take a look around us, we're surrounded by things that came from plants, and we can't survive without them.

It's not just food.

It's the buildings we're in, it's, you know, climate, everything.

And so, I think it's important, right, from an early age to get, just open children's eyes to the fact that plants exist, plants are essential for them, and they're exciting.

And I think Neil's group does a fantastic job of doing that at different age groups, and I'm hoping you would get a chance to talk to him later.

So from our side, on the lab side, we've got high school students who've gone through some of Neil's courses, so Neil has a program called Labs where, you know, students train to do some molecule biology at high school.

And then we had a couple of students then, after they finished Labs, come and work in the lab.

And one of them has actually just graduated, she's going to UAH, and she's going to stay on in the lab as an undergraduate intern so that she actually gets that mentoring all the way from, you know, just starting out, and then she slowly builds her confidence up in any kind of lab science.

I mean, a lot of what we do really can be applied to any organism in any field, right?

So we study DNA, we study genes.

And so at a certain level, it's not just plant biology, but anything.

And so I think it's an opportunity for students to kind of go through that whole process, from just training as a student and getting excited about a subject all the way into becoming a young adult who has the confidence to go out there and say, you know, I like this kind of science and I'm going to help, you know, help people with the science.

- The Education Outreach program at HudsonAlpha has a number of different pieces that all really build around how we prepare students for tomorrow's agriculture.

And that really is geared towards how do we create a more literate society that understands what ag really means, and then how do we build the ag workforce?

And let's break that down a little bit.

Most of today's public has no understanding of what goes on in an agriculture setting.

They think they understand that farming is somebody on a tractor out by themselves, and then sell them their produce at a market.

Today's field of ag is so much more dynamic, so much more exciting, the tractor drives itself.

And the way that genomics can now shape how we know what to plant, where to plant, and how to feed the world, students don't have any grasp of that.

So we build a set of programs that go in classrooms around the state through our partnership with the Department of Education about ag and about understanding biology concepts through ag.

We train teachers, biology teachers, on ways to talk about ag with their students as it relates to genomics.

We run programs here at the Institute, field trips, summer camps that excite kids about the world of ag and help them understand how you go from farm to table.

The public does not have a good sense of the way that science and ag complement and interact and how ag has a set of challenges that science can begin to try to solve, which then gets incorporated back into the world of ag.

That's so much of what goes on here at HudsonAlpha, is trying to solve the challenges of feeding a continually growing population when we have less and less farmable land, and we have to do that when the conditions in which our crops are growing are changing in an incredibly dynamic manner.

Science can provide those answers for the world of ag.

HudsonAlpha doesn't do any of our education programs in a vacuum.

We always are looking for the most appropriate partners, whether that's the partners that are providing us the content that we need for education programs or the partners that can help us send the content back out.

For example, I lead a project right now across the state, looking at how we broaden participation in people stepping into agriscience careers.

And it's a partnership with Alabama A&M and Tuskegee and Auburn, which are all three of the schools in Alabama that offer agriscience programs for undergraduates and graduates.

But it also connects in with groups like 4H and FFA, which are looking at today's agriscience and how do you excite and engage kids around that?

And the goal is that all of us have some piece of the puzzle, but we've all been operating individually, and if we can think about how we operate as a network and as an ecosystem to strengthen the ag science pipeline, then everybody benefits.