In the town of Nipomo on the central coast of California, in Bill Waycott's fields, lettuces of the future are taking root. Red-furled or dark-leaved, these rosettes of crunchy goodness might someday make it to a store near you. Waycott is an independent plant breeder, one of the small community of dedicated folks who devote their time and effort to the reproduction of a given plant or plants.
For decades, he's focused mainly on breeding better lettuces, and he spoke to TIME about what could be in America's salad bowls in coming years and just how damaging the recent Cyclospora outbreak, traced to a farm run by greens behemoth Taylor Farms in Mexico, has been for lettuce growers. TIME: How did you intertwine your fate with that of lettuce? Waycott: My introduction to agriculture occurred as a Peace Corps volunteer in India in the ‘70s.
When I came back from that assignment, I wanted to dedicate myself to agriculture. It was the most amazing thing that could ever have happened to me—a California surfer goes to India and learns how to survive in a language, in a culture, in a food system that I had no clue about. Department of Agriculture] and the first year and a half it was a sugar beet breeding project.
When the lettuce position opened up, I jumped on it. We were trying to slow down the process of early flowering in lettuce. You probably know that it doesn't last very long in a garden during warm temperatures.
It goes to seed pretty quickly. But then we had George Bush Senior come across and clear the deck. I was laid off at that point with a lot of my colleagues back in the '90s, and that's when I went to work for a private breeding company.
In your decades of making lettuce better, what’s been the main focus? Well, you know it's 96% water to start with, so you don't have a lot to work with. My focus has been as much as possible on disease resistance—developing lettuces that can stand up to plant diseases that can wipe out a crop—and improved nutrition.
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