Winning Varieties Part 2

Yesterday we started a talk about a recent Hort convention roundtable discussion on finding winning varieties of apples. Kate Evans with WSU-Tree Fruit Research & Extension Center runs a much more structured breeding program.

EVANS: The breeding program that I run currently at WSU is all about improving quality and breeding new, improved varieties that have consistent good quality not only at harvest but all the way through the storage period as well. We've a key really to increase consumption and therefore increase profitability so it's really vital that the sort of varieties that we're selecting are long storing and really that they maintain the quality that they have.

Evans says they get a lot of questions about how they choose the things they do out of so many different seedlings.

EVANS: Really it's all about choosing something that's outstanding, that's better the rest of the things that we are looking at. We do a lot of testing of our material in different sites, different ground conditions. We test against other standard varieties so that we can choose and select the ones that are better than the rest, those that really stand out.

That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.