I guess it’s the season. More apples today, again from both sides of the Atlantic. From Britain, an invitation to Apple Days at East Malling, a celebration which will feature the (troubled?) National Fruit Collection. ((Thanks to Danny for the tip.)) And from the Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune, more news of American apple breeding, featuring David Bedford of the University of Minnesota.
A tale of two apple collections
I’ve already nibbled today’s piece in the Guardian about the UK’s National Fruit Collection at Brogdale, a “typical British story of managerial confusion and government ineptitude,” ((Be sure to read the comments, one of which links to other sources of information on the situation at Brogdale.)) but I couldn’t resist pointing out the contrast with the US apple collection at Geneva in New York, about which I also blogged recently. It does seem like they order these things better across the pond.
Coincidentally, there was also an article today about the diversity of American apples. Here it is in numbers: 2,500 named varieties grown in the country, 100 commercially, 15 accounting for 90% of the harvest.
The dizzying array today might have shocked early Americans. Just a half-dozen wild crab apple varieties awaited British colonists arriving in America in the 17th century. Thousands of hillside orchards soon were planted with the progeny of favored European varieties… like Maiden Blush, Western Beauty, Chenango Strawberry, Roxbury Russet and Westfield Seek No Further.
…“There were some real jewels among them with great flavors, rich with juices and unusual aromas,” said Tom Burford, an author, lecturer, orchard and nursery consultant from Lynchburg, Va. Burford has been dubbed “Professor Apple” for his extensive work rediscovering antique varieties previously believed extinct.
Is there a British “Professor Apple” out there who will save Brogdale? Or maybe the situation is not as bad as the Guardian piece made out? If you know, drop us a line.
Mini-watermelons
I had no idea there was such a thing as a mini-watermelon, let alone a mania about them, as suggested by a piece in FreshPlaza. But apparently, in addition to being easier to carry, they’re also good for you. I haven’t been able to find information on how these nutritious, small-fruited varieties were developed, but it does seem to have been through conventional breeding.
China outbreeds India
A leader in The Hindu asks: “How did China manage to outstrip India in agriculture when the two countries were more or less on a par on most parameters 25 years ago?” It then goes on to list the reasons given by Prof. Huang Jikun, Director of the Centre for Chinese Agricultural Policy, for China’s superior agricultural performance
technological improvements accruing from research and development, investment in rural infrastructure and an increasingly liberalised agricultural policy.
That sounds plausible. But perhaps the most interesting comments were that
the Chinese authorities received and assessed as many as 2,046 applications for the registration of new plant varieties in the five years between 1999 and 2004
while
the number of field crop varieties released by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) actually fell by 50 per cent between 1997 and 2001, despite the fact that there was a sharp and sustained increase in funding for the organisation.
Well, the two statements are not really comparing like with like, but the implied equation of plant breeding output with the overall performance of the agricultural sector is intriguing. I wonder if there’s a worldwide dataset that could be used to test the connection.
Anyway, talking of Indian breeding, there’s an interview in India’s The Statesman with Tamil Nadu Agricultural University vice-chancellor C. Ramasamyan on the effort to improve — and thus revive — traditional rice landraces in that state.
I say kumato
The FreshPlaza piece on the kumato is not very long. But it does manage to squeeze in a lot of interesting information. The kumato is a tomato that ripens from green to dark brown. It is the result of a conventional breeding programme which involved a wild species. And it is just coming up to its first harvest in Australia. This definitely deserved more investigation.
There’s no doubt it looks pretty extraordinary. But the most intriguing thing about the kumato is that the wild species involved in its development may be from the Galapagos.
Now, Lycopersicon cheesmaniae from the Galapagos Islands has been used to breed dark orange tomatoes before, though it does not have a dark brown skin like the kumato. ((This species was actually published as L. cheesmanii, after Evelyn Cheesman, but that was incorrect, as the Latinists among us will know, as Ms Cheesman was a woman and the specific epithet therefore requires a feminine ending.)) Check out this excerpt from an article celebrating the late great tomato geneticist and explorer Prof. Charles M. Rick in 1997, five years before his death:
Rick’s research led him on 15 genetic scavenger hunts to Andean South America, the homeland of the tomato, where he hunted for wild tomato varieties carrying useful genes. Among his discoveries were wild tomatoes growing near the tidelands of the Galapagos Islands, despite salty sprays that would have stunted or killed a domestic tomato plant.
Or again:
An excellent lecturer, Rick was much sought after by universities who valued both his rigorous science and his humor and flair for storytelling. A perennial favorite involved his frustrations in trying to germinate wild tomato seeds collected from the Galapagos Islands. The emerging mystery of how the plants reproduce in the wild was only resolved after the seeds were “processed” by passing through the digestive track of a Galapagos tortoise, resulting in vigorous seedlings.
The kumato should actually be the Kumato©. It was bred by Syngenta, and first released in the UK in about 2004, I think. But the Roguelands Heirloom Vegetable Seeds Company also has 40 different dark brown to black-skinned varieties in its collection, and says black tomato varieties first appeared in the 19th century in Ukraine.