Any update on tomato fermintation experiments

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I’m working my way through the “How Microbes Help Local Adaptation” course and in the lesson “Seed Care: Post Harvest Maturation” James White says: “The fermintation process is not a good process because it gets rid of a lot of the microbes.”

In the discussion tab people talked about doing experiments on this with tomatos. This was 2/3 years ago. Anyone here do those experiments and is there an update?

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I spent some time thinking about this while doing chores and here’s are some of those thoughts.

  1. How would I be able to test this myself?

    • I don’t have any fancy scientific equipment to look directly at the endophites and count and classify them.
    • so it would need to be based on comparison of germination and the health of the plants that grow from a batch of seeds that were fermented and a batch that was not.
    • Both batches of seeds would need to be the same in every way except fermentation. So I would think that the best thing to start with would be an inbred heirloom for genetic consistency and plant out hundreds of plants so that I could have a chance at doing reasonable statistics.
    • Hmmm, this isn’t sounding so good.

  2. What have I observed about tomatoes? Could it be that tomatoes are actually adapted to fermentation?

    • A tomato that does not have a human to put and keep it on a trellis will sprawl across the ground and if the fruit is large enough they will lay on the ground and rot, i.e. ferment.
    • Dr. James White mentions in another place that cucurbits are adapted to be eaten by animals. Those seeds are fermented during the process of digestion.
    • Tomatoes have a gelatinous coating around them that is similar to that of cucumber seeds.
    • I have observed personally (and have heard of others observing the same) tomato plants growing out of human waste so at least some seed can be viable after being eaten.
    • So, my hypothesis is that tomatoes and their endophites are adapted to fermentation, however … (see thought #1)

  3. Is this a case of practical human beings pushing a scientist for practical advice when the scientists goal is simply to describe what is?

    • I like to say that “Science is the art of saying, ‘I don’t know’ with greater and greater degrees of accuracy.” Many scientists use lots of “weasel words” like “probable”, “could indicate”, … etc. that “normal humans” tend to tune out or think of as being evasive. I saw plenty of edits in that video “could indicate” that some of these words were “probably” in there :slight_smile: .
    • To be fare to Dr White, the very existence of endophites in plants is a new discovery and this video is at least 4 years old. Should we expect him to give advice that is anything other than extreemly conservitive?

  4. Is it possible that this is technically correct but does not practically cause a problem?

    • We humans have been saving seeds like this for a long time, maybe even longer than Europeans knew that tomatoes existed. It seems to be working just fine.

  5. So what should I do?

    • I don’t know.
    • Get back to work!

Sorry, this was way too long. But I needed to get it out of my head so I can think about other things. And at this point this is just me talking to myself were others can hear me.

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That sounds like a good plan for an experiment. Most tomatoes make a lot of seeds so you could even get the fermented and the non-fermented from the same fruit. In such things the more the better is probably a good rule but I don’t know that hundreds would be necessary. What might be necessary before you could draw any real conclusions is to repeat the experiment for a number of times. Just one or two would probably not be enough.

I often see conclusions drawn and presented as factual but based on a single observation. You can’t even establish correlation from that, let alone a cause and effect. I didn’t really see enough evidence in Dr. White’s presentations to accept his conclusions. They may be sound just not, to me, solidly proven.

I like fermenting my tomato seeds, it keeps them from sticking together and they dry faster, preventing mold. If the endophyte relationship is a real thing, and I suspect it is, I doubt that they are all killed, and like you mentioned, fermentation takes place anyway when a tomato rots on the ground. I think the endophytes might also live or lay dormant in the environment so the relationship might not be dependent just on those left on the seed. If any actually exist inside the seeds they might not be affected by fermentation.

Lots of might be’s and maybe’s because I don’t really know.

My advice would be to just grow your tomatoes however you like and not worry about it.

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I have done some testing and sadly I did not notice any difference at all between the seeds non-fermented, fermented, and collected from a fruit that has fallen to the ground and started to rot there (unwashed) .

In all cases I had 100% or close germination in the first year, and both the seedlings, the mature plants and the yields were similar.

I have considered this hypothesis, under my particular circumstances, a blind alley.

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