Q&A: Meet the UW-Madison Professor Who Developed a New Vegetable
Photo courtesy of Irwin Goldman
Professor Irwin Goldman has been teaching plant breeding, genetics and horticulture at UW-Madison for over 30 years. Goldman and hundreds of his students have developed a variety of beets, carrots and onions in the Goldman Lab, the only public-sector program that breeds table beets. In 2018, after about 20 years of breeding, Goldman’s Badger Flame Beet was released to the public. The variety is far from what you might expect from a beet – it’s mild in flavor and can be eaten raw like jicama. Goldman spoke with us about his experience as a plant geneticist and how he came to develop the new veg.
How would you describe the Badger Flame Beet?
It’s very mild and sweet. Because consumers talked about the fact that they found beets to have a taste of dirt, we wanted to bring something that had low levels of that flavor. It also has a beautiful red and yellow interior – we wanted to make something very attractive. It’s shaped like a sweet potato. I’ve come to really like that shape in the kitchen because it’s easier to work with and easier to cut. You can eat it raw – it’s mild enough and sweet enough that you can eat it like a sweet, crunchy root vegetable, which is different from your traditional beet.
Could you share a bit about how your career in horticulture unfolded?
I am a plant breeder by training – that’s what I studied in school. And I got a job here at Madison, where my predecessor [Warren Gabelman], who started in his work right after World War Two, developed hybrid vegetables of carrots, onions and beets. Today we have many hybrids, but in 1950, there weren’t any. He was one of the first people in the world to develop a program to make hybrids of those three crops.
When I came to Madison in the early ’90s, there was a wealth of germplasm, a wealth of seeds and material that he had developed over a long, successful career. And so I continued on with those three crops.
Why do you think it’s important to have a better understanding of what we grow and eat?
The more we, as consumers, know about how our food gets to us, how it’s bred, how it’s grown, what its origin is – all of that contributes to a better food system. It is really hard for the average gardener or consumer to get that information. How do you find out who bred this tomato or grew this tomato? It’s an opaque system.
One of the best things that a gardener can do is start saving seeds. As a gardener, if you’re growing tomatoes [for example], you can take some of them and let them sit for a while fermenting, and then harvest the seeds. Use a strainer to get the seeds out and grow those seeds. The next year, you could begin selecting types that you like. You could pick a fruit that you like, and you could propagate it. You could trade seeds with your neighbor. It starts to take on a different dimension rather than buying the seeds. Those are some of the practices that just get you a little closer to the food.
Photo courtesy of Irwin Goldman
Besides the Badger Flame Beet, what other work have you and your students have done?
We’ve created a bunch of beet varieties. I think we’ve released six of them in the last few years. They’re in the various stages of being tested by companies. We have another one called the Badger Spark; we have one called Blushing Not Bashful; we have one called Moving Targets; we have one called Snow Globe. And then we have a few others that are in development. These are ones that we have released in the last few years that are now with seed companies who are trialing them and testing them and seeing if they want to sell them. We’ve got a bunch that we hope will make their way out and see the light of day. We’ve developed some carrots as well that are in the testing stages.
Plant breeding is never really finished. It’s like evolution, in that the genetics keeps improving. So each year, we try to make the populations better. I hope that by 2030, I’ve got Badger Flame [Beet] improved, a “Badger Flame 2.0.”
Photo courtesy of Irwin Goldman
How long does it take to develop a new variety?
Plant breeding doesn’t go by leaps and bounds, but instead, it’s a slow, painstaking, iterative process. I call it the slowest of the performing arts.
I would say it’s [at least] an eight year process to make something new, probably more like 10 to 12. And that’s partly because with a crop like carrot or beet or onion, it takes one full calendar year to go through just one cycle of breeding. Even that is sped up because all three of those are biennials, but because I have a greenhouse in a field, I can cram them into one calendar year. Even speeding it up like that, it still could take 10 years to make a new thing.
I’ve been at it for 32 years here. If I’m lucky enough to work 40 years, I might, start to finish, only make four things. It’s really quite a commitment of time. What’s beautiful for me is to be part of the seasonal cycle of these plants. I have all these wonderful years where I’m growing from seed to root, and then I’m growing from the root seed, and I’m repeating that cycle, and I’m part of the rhythm of that, which is a joy.
