Winning Varieties

Winning Varieties. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

One of the high points of the annual Hort convention include the many roundtable panel discussions. The first one of the week took a look at Varieties:Finding the Winners. Moderator of the panel was Jeff Cleveringa, WSHA Board President.

CLEVERINGA: We’re going to talk on my left side about things to come and on the right side, how do you pick what is the winners. How do you try to find that group of winners and why do you then pick up an apple and run with it? Because there is a substantial investment made by a company in order to do that so we are really going to deal with the why.

Bill Howell from Topcliffe Farms started things off.

HOWELL: In 1998 there was quite a bit of new innovation coming on on the possible sale of sliced apples. Looking at some of the products coming out they were all white fleshed and I thought it would be kind of cool to have fruit in those packages that was of a different color.

Howell started a breeding program to come up with red fleshed apples.

HOWELL: There were red fleshed apples available from various nurseries around the country and I planted some of those in my Honeycrisp orchard. I planted the seed out, grew the trees and low and behold many years later I was sampling fruit. From that we have a couple of fruit that look very promising.

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