Zachary Lippman has four fishing poles in his office, along with a metal detector his wife gave him for his birthday and some eighteenth-century coins from back when Cold Spring Harbor, New York used to be a whaling port.

“I’m big into fishing,” he says. That comes as no surprise. He’s an explorer, a collector, a seeker of things hidden. He casts at the old whaling harbor, some 30 feet away from his lab. There, he has devoted the last nine years to understanding how plants develop. The goal: growing more food for a hungry world.

Lippman’s interest in plants began when he was 13 years old, at a job on a 15-acre vegetable farm on Connecticut’s coast, where he worked for five years. “For me, the real fascination was that you take seeds – these little, dry nothings – and put them in the ground, give them a little bit of care, and in three or four months, you have all this free food,” says Lippman. “To me that was ‘wow.’ That’s amazing.”

At Cornell University, where he studied plant breeding and genetics, he realized that genetics “was the way to go.” By better understanding the secrets of plant development, Lippman thought, he could tap into new ways to make crops produce more flowers, food, and seeds.

He chose to work with the tomato plant because of the remarkable diversity in the number of vines on each plant and flowers on each vine. Tomatoes were an understudied plant in science, he says, ripe for discovery.

Lippman went searching for the key to tomato diversity in 2008, and by 2015, he found it – in a dome of cells at the tip of each shoot. He discovered a timing mechanism that precisely controls the rate at which stem cells mature and determines when, where, and how many flowers are made on a plant.

His team found that flowering diversity could be fine-tuned by changing doses of flowering hormones – compounds plants make to reproduce. The finding added another dial to precisely control how many flowers are made on a tomato vine. He has also shown that gene editing in the lab can fine-tune the flowering system even further – beyond what nature can do. With the technique, which can be applied to any crop, scientists could potentially create a whole new continuum of diversity for traits such as plant size and the ratio of plant size to the number of shoots and flowers. “This opens the door to doing things that nature hasn’t gotten around to doing,” he says.

Lippman knows a thing or two about nature. He likes going out to the tomato field in the evenings, especially during the middle of growing season. “It’s one of the most peaceful places you can be,” he says. It’s also where he connects the basic to the applied – genetics in the lab to the actual genetics that happen in the field.

Other days, you can find Lippman with his metal detector, scouring the campus. “There’s a hidden world just beneath the surface,” he says. “Each time you find something, you are unearthing a piece of history. It gives you a sense of who was here before us and where we are going.”