12/14/06 Growing fruit into the future

Growing fruit into the future. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. One way to look at the future of growing fruit may be from the inside out. Jim McFerson with the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission says that one possibility may be nanotechnology and he says, that's pretty hard to think about. MCFERSON: It's measured in nanometers. Well how big is that? One fifty-thousands the width of a human hair or the normal office paper is around 100-thousand nanometer thick, I mean it's too small for me to think; I can't even understand how small that is. But DNA is about 2 nanometers wide. Okay so DNA is about the nanometer level. That's the nano world. That's what we're talking about now is this level of smallness which is really hard to figure out but people are actually working on this. McFerson is referring to extremely small machines or robots that can attack problems from inside the plants. He imagines that in the relatively near future this may be a viable technology. MCFERSON: Now if we knew a little about the plumbing in Gala, and we were able to adjust that plumbing through either knowing about it or sending in little, tiny mini-bots maybe no one in here would have stem end splitting. Wouldn't that be a good thing? Or lenticel breakdown. So there are opportunities to think about what nanotechnology could do to explain what is happening under the surface in the interior of those apples. Tomorrow, more on the future of fruit growing. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.