The Snyder blackberry, the possible match to Sonja Johanson’s Bethel, Maine, variety, is first on a list of over 350 rare, place-based New England foods compiled by a working group called RAFT, short for Renewing America’s Food Traditions. Like Sonja, I often consult RAFT publications to learn about regional New England foods. Every year my search for new flavors and plants that thrive in this relatively cool, wet climate sends me on a treasure hunt, and RAFT’s listings of rare and endangered varieties help guide me. Nevertheless, identifying and tracking down these foods is a tremendous challenge. Web searches turn up little. Instant gratification this is not. Many of the listed RAFT foods aren’t available commercially, and like the Blake apple some may have disappeared from cultivation. Where would one locate a “functionally extinct” Souhegan raspberry? How about highly obscure Evelyn persimmons or Slaybaugh Special peaches? It’s hard to know even where to begin.
The now defunct RAFT alliance was a collaborative effort of several like-minded organizations, including, among others, the Seed Savers Exchange, Slow Food, and the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. Conservation biologist Gary Nabhan, the author of more than twenty books on ethnobotany, seed saving, and local foods, and the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” award, led the way. He developed the alliance, arranged funding, organized research groups around the country, and published the results. I was fortunate to participate in one of his workshops in Vermont in the summer of 2007. For several hours we met with roughly twenty farmers, fishermen, foragers, conservationists, historians, and chefs to share knowledge about regional foodways. It was a little like Ben Watson’s Ark of Taste meeting, minus the hands-on eating and drinking.
One food that came up during this Vermont meeting particularly intrigued me, and would come to have an indirect but profound effect on the way I view biodiversity. This was George IV, a peach that traces its history back to 1821 in New York City, and that is widely considered to be one of the oldest named peach varieties in the country. Despite its rich pedigree, however, George IV is now largely forgotten. The variety is slightly less obscure than many foods on the RAFT lists—a couple of nurseries even carry it commercially—but nevertheless it’s rarely grown. After the meeting I remember wondering what happened to it, why a peach beloved by many would fall out of favor and disappear. Some of the answers I’ve found have helped change my thinking about heritage foods of all kinds, as well as contemporary plant breeding.
When I started growing food twenty years ago, reading about gardening gave me the impression that on one side lay heritage varieties, a collection of names from the past, and on the other were their modern counterparts. Heritage foods were essentially unchanging and fixed, the product of forgotten eras, while plant breeding had broken from the past. As I’ve learned more about old plant varieties and modern breeding, however, many of these assumptions have been turned on their heads. A closer look has opened the door to a freer, more dynamic and flexible way of seeing plants and agriculture.
A year and a half after our Vermont RAFT meeting, in the winter of 2009, I sit down at my computer to research fruit trees and come across an online description of the George IV peach. “Melting, juicy, aromatic, richly flavored flesh. One of the three best white-fleshed peaches of all time,” reads the website of a small, independent mail-order nursery. It quotes Andrew Jackson Downing, celebrated landscape designer and nineteenth-century horticultural authority. “Remarkable rich luscious flavor,” he wrote, “no garden should be without it.” Downing knew his fruit trees, and as far as I know had no commercial stake in the sale of this variety. I’m reminded at once of the RAFT meeting, and decide it’s time to order a tree. Who could resist such a peach?
A few months later, however, I stumble across a piece of directly contradictory information. In 1917 the New York Agricultural Experiment Station, located on the grounds of today’s Cornell and USDA’s facilities in Geneva, New York, published a large-format, illustrated guide called The Peaches of New York. The book’s frontispiece includes a full-page portrait of Andrew Jackson Downing, and it cites him frequently throughout. But flip to the George IV description on page 218, and you’ll find this: “Once one of the mainstays of American peach growing, George IV is now of but historical interest. [This peach] is not worth planting now and is illustrated and described in The Peaches of New York only that fruit growers may note progress in the development of peaches … We doubt if it now deserves to be recommended on any list of fruits.”
Why? Because the New York Experiment Station researchers disliked peaches that dripped aromatic juice down their chins? Did Victorian writing about luscious fruit flesh embarrass them? Maybe 1917 marked a high point of American fruit growing, a plateau from which they could look down and sneer at the best of an earlier generation? I find this puzzling, a mystery, and set out to learn more.
The history of George IV is better documented than most fruits, but still elusive. The Peaches of New York acknowledges that it’s been confused with many others over the years, most often another type called Morris Red. According to the text, however, “the variety rapidly grew in favor and within a few years was everywhere grown in eastern America.” So George IV was widely recognized and commonly available, known to a broad public. Commercial plantings remained in Europe as late as 1917, where it continued to be popular. Apparently Europeans wouldn’t have known good peaches if they’d hit them on the head.
George IV originated from a chance seedling in the backyard of a man named Gill on Broad Street in New York City in 1821. I assume trees bearing the name would have been bud-grafted from that point forward, as most peaches are today. Bud-grafting involves inserting a newly formed bud, taken from a desirable variety, into the bark of a young seedling, creating a tree with fruit identical to its bud-donor parent. It seems to me that, unlike vegetables, which can change over time depending on their handling, Downing’s George IV peaches would have been genetically identical to those grown at the Geneva Experiment Station. It shouldn’t matter that Downing died in the explosion of a steamer sixty-five years before the publication of The Peaches of New York. He lived in Newburgh, New York, where he would have had many opportunities to taste and know this fruit. Since his home was less than three hundred miles from the experiment station in Geneva, variations in climate probably wouldn’t account for such widely differing opinions. So, are my assumptions correct?
A little more research turns up other marginally relevant but entertaining information. King George IV was known as a glutton and a hedonist. He was soft and round, extravagant, lazy, but bright and devoted to the arts. Is that why Gill commemorated his 1821 coronation by naming a peach after him? The Times of London wrote after King George’s death that “there never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased king. What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow?” It also wrote he’d always prefer “a girl and a bottle to politics and a sermon.” Exactly the sort of pleasure you’d want from a good peach.
In early June 2009 I take time to look over my own trees. It’s hard to admit with the promise of the season ahead of me, but no one really lusts after a Maine peach. As Maine’s Fedco Trees nursery catalog gamely writes about Reliance, generally considered one of the hardiest northern varieties, “Flavor usually considered fair, but those who grow it in Maine love it.” Even when trees survive winter ice and cold, and blossoms escape spring frosts to form new fruit, cold summers can hold back its sweetness. I’m managing several peach trees, ranging in age from three to about ten years. They’re mostly Madisons and Red Havens, only one Reliance, and they taste pretty good. But love? Maybe our relationship will deepen over time.
It’s a bright, sunny day, a break from this year’s heavy rain, and the air is crisp and refreshing. I’ve come to the garden to thin fruit and avoid repeating last season’s excess production. Last year a surplus of young peaches on my trees forced me to prop branches with spare strapping lumber. They couldn’t hold themselves up under the weight of so much fruit, and without support the branches slowly sagged and broke to the ground. It was disturbing to watch the trees deconstruct themselves, like chickens that can’t stand because of overbreeding or racehorses performing at the limit of their long, delicate legs.
This year I remove most of the newly formed peaches on the youngest trees, and nearly half those on the older trees, and try to look on the bright side. Overproduction not only damages trees, it leads to smaller and less flavorful fruit. Removing excess peaches allows the tree to put more energy into those that remain. Nevertheless, every dropped peach feels like a lost opportunity, and I watch them fall wistfully. What’s the point of all this fruitfulness and fertility if you have to pick it off and throw it on the ground? Reluctantly I sacrifice the little ones so the rest will grow large and sweet.
Later in the morning I return to the computer to discover a strange coincidence—an offhand reference to George IV. The note is a request from Jenny Trotter at the Slow Food office to Ark of Taste committee chair Ben Watson in New Hampshire, asking him to “tell the George IV peach story” during a panel we’ll share at the New York Botanical Garden in August. What story? Already there are such sharply differing opinions; will Ben shine new light on this mystery?
It turns out Ben plans to nominate George IV to the Ark of Taste in the fall. He’s eaten it, and in his opinion objections in The Peaches of New York have nothing to do with quality. He tells us the flavor is very good. The fruit is a little on the small size—that could be part of the problem—and by 1917 there’d been plenty of advances that improved rival peach lines. Politics may have played a role, too: Did some experiment station plant breeder have it in for this old-time peach?
The Peaches of New York generally seems evenhanded and fair, though. Its editors point out the good and bad even with varieties they condemn, like the Heath Cling. In the case of that old variety, although “antiquity constitutes about its only claim to recognition” (it was “unquestionably the oldest named American Peach now under cultivation”), nevertheless they considered it “the best of all peaches to preserve or pickle whole.” Pickled peaches! Sounds like a good use for Maine fruit. The book describes another variety, Gold Drop, as “doubtfully worth planting in New York as a peach of commerce,” due its small size, “but should find a place in every home orchard” for its appearance and distinctive flavor. Doesn’t George IV deserve as much?
Ben brings nurseryman and historian Tom Burford into the conversation, and at first his response to my questions bewilders me. He’d always assumed that flavor variability for many old peaches is explained not by soil or climate, but because of “the brutal fact” that they were often propagated from seeds rather than grafted. Tom’s grandfather grew varieties like Oldmixon Cling from seed. He writes that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in addition to grafting, “there were millions upon millions of pits planted” for direct propagation of peaches.
How can this be? Tom’s comments throw all my assumptions about named varieties out the window. If the fruit isn’t grafted, how can there be a true line? Apples grown from seeds, for example, show all kinds of traits distinct from their parents. I respond to Ben, saying this is an entirely different way of thinking about plant selection and breeding from my own—much more malleable—and it’s hard then to understand what defines a named peach. Trees we know as George IV have the genes of Gill’s original seedling, but might also have any number of other variations, depending on cross-pollination?
And then it hits me. As Ben and Tom know, peaches don’t require a second variety for pollination; they’re largely self-fertile. Unlike most apples, which need another variety to set fruit and therefore create a hybrid every time a flower is pollinated, peaches are unlikely to cross. A chance seedling like the one Gill found in 1821 would generally come true to type from seed. The line would largely stabilize, but variations would emerge over time through occasional crossing with other varieties. Like a hall of mirrors it would be impossible to track these changes without genetic testing. Growing conditions and climate could amplify even minor differences—when spring frosts damage early-blooming trees, for example—providing a reasonable explanation for the variety of opinion.
I’ve since learned that even grafted fruit may change over time, because chance mutations within trees can alter their genetics. What we know as a McIntosh apple, for example, may differ somewhat from older plantings, or those descended from another tree the next town over. When breeders release new fruit today, sometimes they go to great lengths to control propagation and preserve desired traits, licensing only approved nurseries to sell patented fruit. Whether Downing’s peaches were grafted or pit-propagated, therefore, we can’t know how closely they matched those at the experiment station, or how either would compare with the George IV peach that I’ve ordered this season for my own garden (which will need three or four years to begin bearing fruit).
Still, this changes everything. It’s a vision into a world much less fussy and defined than our own, where plants were propagated, named, and exchanged freely, and allowed to cross, evolve, and adapt to local conditions. It’s a far cry from contemporary fields filled with hybridized, patented varieties, or large-scale seed monocultures tested for consistency and trueness to type. Over the past couple of seasons I’ve been learning this same lesson by working with vegetables like Tall Telephone peas, but sorting through contradictions behind George IV takes everything a step farther. Even grafted fruit isn’t necessarily consistent from tree to tree. So what do any of the names on the RAFT list really mean?
As a collector of heritage foods I’ve often felt torn between maintaining lines as close to their present form as possible, and engaging creatively with them. What happens by accident is one thing, but few growers deliberately take the latter approach, juggling selection for new traits with genetic preservation. And yet this is exactly how these plants were grown historically. Actively pursuing novelty and breeding new lines is very much within the traditional spirit of these foods. In other words, as much as we need to conserve a wide range of genetic traits to maintain a healthy, stable agricultural system, if we don’t equally embrace heritage foods as raw materials to develop, then we lose touch with something vital. How can I discover the right balance between preserving the past and looking ahead to the future?
Soon after my conversations with Jenny Trotter and Ben Watson, Slow Food asks me to join their Ark of Taste committee, and requests a food nomination for its annual meeting at the Black Trumpet Bistro in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in September. They suggest Maine’s Boothby’s Blonde cucumber, so I start researching its history. By late summer a few phone calls lead to a retired agronomist living in Bangor, Maine, who certifies organic farms for MOFGA. His name is Charles Boothby, and he’s directly descended from the Maine family that gave this yellow cucumber its name. “I never saw a green cucumber until I left home as an adult,” his sister, Willie Irish, told me when I reached her a few days before. Imagine knowing cucumbers only through the family garden! What a contrast with the schoolkids who visit farm fields around Portland, many of whom wouldn’t recognize a cucumber of any color growing on the vine.
Cucumbers have never been especially interesting to me—at best they’re a vehicle for salt and vinegar, or something to add crunch to a sandwich—but Boothby’s Blonde is something of an exception. Its pleasing greenish flesh doesn’t turn bitter as the fruits mature, and its pale skin deepens over time to an attractive shade of lemon yellow. Although it has a few disease problems, it yields well and the fruits are a good, consistent midrange size. Thanks to its pleasant, mild flavor and interesting regional history, Boothby’s Blonde has become increasingly available at Maine farmers’ markets.
The nomination form for the Ark of Taste requires background notes, so Charles Boothby provides additional historical information. Seed catalogs typically write that this cucumber originated in Livermore, a town in south-central rural Maine half an hour north of the city of Lewiston, where it was grown for generations in his family. Stories like these become established fact through repetition. One source copies another, until it becomes difficult if not impossible to sort truth from fiction. Charles largely confirms Boothby’s Blonde’s lineage, but tells me his aunt and grandmother brought the cucumber with them from the nearby town of Wayne, where it was commonly grown.
His uncle Leslie turned it over to a breeder. How long ago? “Twenty, thirty years, at least,” he tells me. Nevertheless their cucumber didn’t make it into commercial seed catalogs until 1994, and during our tour of the Scatterseed Project in July, Will Bonsall tells me it was he who introduced Boothby’s to the trade, through Fedco Seeds. Since these modest beginnings in the mid-1990s, every year more seed companies have picked it up, and Slow Food has been working with farmers and chefs to promote it with taste events around New England.
Cucumbers are ancient vegetables that date back thousands of years in North Africa, India, and Asia. A variety unique to Maine might seem a little incongruous for a food enjoyed by Egyptian pharaohs, but this vegetable was widely distributed historically around the world. The English grew cucumbers in the Middle Ages, and by 1494 Columbus had introduced cucumbers to the island of Hispaniola (occupied by present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). American colonists grew them in their gardens, even on Maine’s frontier, and shared seeds with native peoples like the Mandan and Abenaki. A rich history, to be sure, but there’s no easy way to trace the stories of foods so freely traded—our knowledge of varieties growing in isolated places like Wayne and Livermore is extremely limited, their origins quickly fading into obscurity.
If the history of these plants is murky, so, too, is our understanding of how they were grown and what constitutes a named line. An open-pollinated cucumber (a category that includes all heirloom and some modern varieties, as opposed to hybrids) is inherently somewhat unstable in terms of its genetics. We might look back and imagine a named variety like Boothby’s had the same kind of defined character as a hybrid, and find instead that, despite its long history in this region, it remains something of a work in progress. Saved over many generations, Boothby’s Blonde has gradually adapted to this place while maintaining some frustrating limitations and inconsistencies. The variety is susceptible to powdery mildew, for example, a disease common in Maine. In this genetic variability, however, also lies its promise.
Researching Boothby’s background brings me full-circle to some of the same questions raised by the George IV peach. If our goal is to preserve the past, how do we deal with unstable lines and natural variation? When planting trees or saving vegetable seeds, to what extent should we acknowledge and accept change, even work with it? It seems safe to say that the first rule of garden biodiversity is to avoid throwing out the old, the tried-and-true, but it’s equally important to continue to evolve and explore, to embrace natural changes in the plants we choose to grow.
Old standbys like Boothby’s Blonde have evolved through selection, chance pollination, and experimentation. Every seed saver makes fundamental decisions that determine the future of the line, like whether to discard mutations or preserve new traits that appear in the field. Should one save seeds from that cucumber with the lighter color, or throw away the fruits? What to keep, and what to abandon? Select too few plants and cucumbers will “run down” and become inbred, but keep too many with divergent traits and the population can become large and unrecognizable as a single variety after a few generations.
When we look at plants this way, quickly a few artificial distinctions begin to blur. The old isn’t better simply because it’s stood the test of time, and the new isn’t necessarily different in kind or quality simply because it came from a modern breeding program. The closer you look, the more the boundaries between old and new can become murky and indistinct. Everything depends on the underlying philosophy and goals of the seed saver and the plant breeder. The story of Boothby’s Blonde, past and present, is a textbook example.
At Cornell University breeders working to improve vegetable production for organic growers have increased resistance to powdery mildew in Boothby’s Blonde. Should we call their intentional crosses “new” cucumbers, or revised takes on old favorites? If by accident a patch of Boothby’s in a grower’s field were to pick up stray pollen from another variety with better disease resistance, they might continue to list it as the same variety. But if breeders were to perform the identical cross, the result would be a new line. What’s the difference?
Some of Cornell’s breeding work is connected to a project called the Organic Seed Partnership, a network of universities, nonprofits, government agencies, growers, and seed companies that was launched in 2005. The OSP’s purpose is to “create a robust national network of organic vegetable breeders working with each other and regional growers to benefit the organic community.” It does this with “improved vegetable varieties that are adapted to organic systems combined with disease resistance, nutritional and flavor quality, and contemporary productivity traits crucial to modern markets.” That about says it all.
Plant breeder Michael Glos, the contact person for farmers participating in the OSP effort, is coincidentally one of the two Cornell researchers working on improvements to the Boothby’s Blonde cucumber. His multiyear project to breed disease resistance into Boothby’s has included collaboration with more than a dozen conventional and organic farmers, as well as other Cornell researchers and breeders working under program director Dr. Molly Jahn. From this collaboration has come several promising new cucumber varieties. Some closely resemble the original, while others show entirely new traits and tastes. In my opinion, Cornell’s work with the OSP falls squarely within the spirit of traditional plant breeding, embracing the best of the past while looking ahead to the future.
Plant breeding conducted by researchers like Michael Glos takes seed saving in gardens like mine to its next logical step. He and others at Cornell are developing what my friend Jim Gerritsen— Maine potato farmer, seedsman, and activist—calls “heirlooms of the future.” Jim participates in Organic Seed Partnership breeding projects and leads a related project called the Organic Seed Alliance. He knows everyone in the field, so one day in the early fall of 2009 I call him for a reference. He puts me in touch with the Cornell office. “Sure, I’d be happy to show you around,” Michael Glos tells me over the phone a few days later. He’s willing to talk about his organic breeding work, the Organic Seed Partnership, and Boothby’s Blonde cucumbers. We set a time to meet two days after my tour of the USDA collections in Geneva, New York.
A couple of weeks later, in October, I leave Karla to her thesis work in Syracuse and drive south through low hills and open fields along Highway 81 toward Ithaca and Cornell. The highway follows dead-flat farmland between narrow ridgelines that run on a roughly north–south axis, the product of glacial retreat eleven thousand years ago. Amid spells of heavy rain, I drive slowly through the fog and mist that have settled deep into the valleys. Sovereignty and independence are on my mind as I pass the Onondaga Nation a few miles from downtown Syracuse. The Onondagas are one of the five tribes of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy. They trace their land jurisdiction to a 1794 treaty with the US government that acknowledged their right to an independent homeland. Nothing more than a highway sign distinguishes their territory from any other rural highway exit, but their continued (and determined) existence as an independent nation has resonance for me.
That’s in part because the Onondaga helped formulate one of the guiding principles of the modern environmental movement. The Great Law of the Haudenosaunee taught land stewardship and governance with an eye to future generations and long-term stability. “In every deliberation,” the law states, “we must consider the impact on the seventh generation … even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine.” What a wonderful qualification—doesn’t it belong on the label of Seventh Generation brand paper towels?
Who speaks for this kind of long-term public welfare in food and agriculture these days? Along with a nationwide decline of public-spirited breeding programs like Cornell’s, funding for agricultural research focusing on areas other than major production centers like California’s Central Valley has become increasingly scarce. As farms become marginalized, technology and research dollars move elsewhere, adding to the pressure on independent regional producers. Relying too much on large commercial interests to determine breeding priorities leads to a vicious circle. The return on breeding a cucumber with resistance to powdery mildew, for example—a disease prevalent in New England fields—is negligible when most cucumbers are grown in places where the problem is relatively rare.
Driving near Syracuse by old barns, abandoned locks from the Erie Canal, and dilapidated Greek Revival farmhouses, I think of the invisible hand of Onondaga farming. Agriculture here dates back hundreds of years. Many of these fields once supported diverse native crops of corn, squash, and dry beans, the sophisticated polyculture known as the Three Sisters. Beans fix nitrogen in the soil to help meet fertility needs; broad-leaved squash suppresses weeds and retains soil moisture; and corn creates a natural trellis enabling beans to climb into the sunlight. Three Sisters plantings are a mutually beneficial, elegant cropping system. They’re so well adapted to this land and climate that they can sustain soil fertility for decades without additional inputs (though eventually the Onondaga allowed tired land to revert to forest to restore its fertility). These plants also have the added benefit of nutritional balance for a complete diet.
Modern expanses of single-species plantings may appear equally robust, but will our farming approach withstand the test of time? In a New York Times article earlier this summer devoted to the ongoing late blight epidemic, chef and restaurant owner Dan Barber described the danger of “tight coupling” in agricultural uniformity. He explained the tendency of highly orchestrated systems to unravel with unnerving speed. Was he thinking of line cooks as he wrote this? Food industry consolidation allows failures in the system to multiply rapidly and spread widely. Examples of broad breakdowns include recent outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant strains of E. coli bacteria, as well as the spread of late blight from wholesale nurseries to farms throughout New England.
As much as uniformity creates vulnerability, Barber argues that the answer isn’t only to be found in old varieties and a return to forgotten and neglected foods. He writes that it’s time to resurrect regional plant breeding programs: “In our feverish pursuit of what’s old, we can marginalize the development of what could be new.” In his view the disappearance of breeding programs like Cornell’s has two contributing factors: “a food movement wary of science” and “an industrial food chain that eschews differentiation in favor of uniformity.”
Maybe the two are at heart inseparable: The public is mistrustful of scientific research that’s excessively in the service of large-scale, highly specialized production. If that’s the case, researchers at institutions like Cornell suggest a compromise and a way forward. Their focus on regional plant breeding, and especially on participatory programs that enlist farmers and seed companies to address the needs of alternative growers, has the potential to steer contemporary agriculture in new directions. I’m here to look for common ground.
My route into Cornell passes a bewildering array of greenhouses, poultry experiment stations, academic quads, playing fields, and concert halls. At the heart of the campus the road passes Weill Hall, architect Richard Meier’s $162 million, 263,000-square-foot life sciences building, named for its principal donor, financier Sanford Weill. Dedicated last year, Weill Hall is described by the university as one of the most ambitious facilities projects in its history. Open floor plans encourage interdisciplinary collaboration; professors from the Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology mingle with grad students from the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and underground tunnels connect with the Biotechnology and Plant Sciences buildings. Designed as a model of environmental design, this new building earned a gold rating from the US Green Building’s Council of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program (LEED).
A Cornell development website describes their new research facility’s gestalt: “More than 15,000 gleaming white panels cover the outside, announcing confidence and purpose.” Funding for the structure is only a small component of a larger goal, a $650 million investment in biological sciences, described as “the biggest academic initiative in Cornell’s history. At stake are insights into the basic functions of life, as well as breakthroughs for human and animal health, the world’s food supply, the environment, and the ethical and social aspects of science.” Weill Hall is a sort of latter-day cathedral of scientific ambition, a place gunning for the big ideas.
I pass through this part of campus and a few blocks away pull up behind a plant breeding lab. The research facility where Michael Glos works is a world apart. There’s no underground tunnel connecting to nearby bioengineering and genetics departments, or to Weill Hall. This lab is housed in a modest concrete-block building, constructed in the 1960s and originally intended as a temporary structure. Lavish budgets for cutting-edge facilities haven’t reached this part of Cornell, or this discipline. Michael Glos divides his time between plant breeding and running a small, diversified organic farm with his wife, Karma.
Michael and I meet in the parking lot and stop to talk with a field worker cleaning an old combine harvester beside a steel-sided utility barn. The technician is perched on the engine block, using his fingers to remove bits of cornhusk stuck in the housing. The cold summer delayed their harvest, and field corn hasn’t dried down enough to process well. Plants with too much moisture jam in the machine, he tells us. Wooden harvest bins filled with squash line the edge of a nearby lab building. Michael gives me a couple and I slip them in my pocket. They’re like “personal-sized” servings for a new generation, perfect for the microwave. Farm fields, greenhouses, and experimental orchards surround us. This is where science meets the gritty reality of the barnyard.
Cornell publishes an online newsletter called Plant Breeding News, sponsored by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. In an article published six years ago titled “The Future of Plant Breeding,” contributor Jonathan Knight wrote, “All over the world, conventional plant breeding has fallen on hard times, and is seen as the unfashionable older cousin of genetic engineering.” He went on to say that plant breeders are retiring, and are being replaced with molecular geneticists. Government funding for traditional research has “all but dried up” in the United States and Europe, even for conventional breeding programs like the nonprofit International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, where Norman Borlaug launched the Green Revolution in the 1940s and ’50s. For the first time since its founding in 1943 the center has been forced to cut back on breeding trials due to lack of funding. This is surprising to me, particularly because Nobel Prize winner Borlaug was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” on his death last month at the age of ninety-five, with a tribute by Bill Gates.
Michael and I head into the plant breeding building and stop by a small, windowless storage room on the way to his office. It looks like the back room of a retail warehouse, filled with shelving and boxes. Several assistants are cleaning and evaluating squashes, collecting seeds, and recording results. Each squash on the table is similar to the two in my pocket, but with slight variations in size, color, and shape. They look like half-sized butternuts with mottled splashes of green over a dull orange base. Posters on the walls outside advertise recent breeding successes, varieties from Cornell that have entered the seed trade and reached our tables: Harlequin squash, Marketmore cucumbers, Hannah’s Choice melons.
Michael is one of a handful of breeders in this country who focus on organic production. He looks every bit the part of the organic farmer: dressed for field work, suntanned, kept trim by years of hoeing, his long hair tied back in a ponytail. Karla and I bought chorizo sausage from his friendly wife, Karma, at the Ithaca farmers’ market a couple of days ago. Although she generally handles the sales end of the business, the farmers’ market community seems as much Michael’s element as hers. Located in an open pavilion at a former steamboat landing in a park at the tip of Cayuga Lake, it’s filled with products ranging from sweet apple wines to Khmer Angkor Cambodian spicy chicken. The market pavilion is styled after a thirteenth-century European cathedral, arguably the organic farming community’s answer to Cornell’s Weill Hall up the hill.
Michael describes his surprise visiting organic farms ten years ago and seeing some of the plants growers were raising. He often found disease-susceptible varieties that produced poorly and failed to live up to their potential. A squash or cucumber that succumbs early to disease won’t develop full flavor and nutrient content (could this be part of the reason Boothby’s Blonde cucumbers failed to board the Ark of Taste last month?). Growers were forced to choose between conventional varieties bred for the mass market and heirlooms that were all too often run down by years of poor selection and neglect. And yet Cornell had on its shelves improved varieties that weren’t of interest to large growers for minor reasons, like squashes that didn’t develop full color until they were ready to eat. Marketers typically want vegetables that look ripe even when they’re immature in order to boost sales and extend shelf life. Clearly this isn’t in the best interest of the consumer. Here was an opportunity for small-scale, direct-marketing organic producers to leap ahead, by focusing on flavor and high quality.
Michael’s work is classic plant breeding, not far removed from the farm-based breeding that brought us most of the foods we know today. He describes some of his projects as relatively straightforward cross-pollination and selection, such as the development of powdery mildew resistance in Boothby’s Blonde. He crossed Boothby’s with Marketmore, one of Cornell’s resistant varieties, and after several years selected two of the most promising lines for commercial release. He tells me he can’t disclose the names yet, but then quietly lets me in on the secret.
Why has this sort of practical, relatively affordable research become so uncommon? Maybe plant breeders would become fashionable again if Richard Meier designed them a new lab, or Sanford Weill threw some money at organic agriculture? There’s no inherent reason we can’t apply technology to improve regional production, and breed better pest- and disease-resistant crops for the marketplace. Yet most agricultural research goes in other directions, toward products like herbicide-resistant corn and so-called Terminator seeds that can’t reproduce themselves when saved and replanted the following year. Politics and the economics of seed sales rather than ecology and good farming drive too many of these decisions. It’s ironic that as local, organic agriculture enjoys increasing public support, the vast majority of research dollars go elsewhere.
Some technologies can be particularly useful for organic production. A breeding method called marker-assisted selection, for example, can help researchers identify traits genetically and track desirable lines in the field. This may sound like genetic engineering, frightening a public wary of science, but MAS is simply a form of mapping that offers better management of traditional breeding approaches. It’s especially useful when dealing with invisible characteristics like drought tolerance, or looking for multiple traits like disease resistance in fruit of a certain size and color. Lab tests can stand in for laborious and time-consuming trials as breeders assess which crosses are worth saving.
Organic and other “low-external-input” approaches that focus on traits like natural disease resistance often yield as well as or better than conventional farming, but they’re up against a larger reality. Take plant breeding out of the public realm, turn it into a business, and it has to answer to powerful economic interests. The result may or may not also prioritize the needs of farmers and consumers. Cornell’s squashes didn’t fail to enter the seed trade in the 1990s because they yielded poorly or fell short agriculturally, for example, but because they didn’t meet the marketing requirements of seed companies, commercial wholesalers, or supermarkets.
By bringing plant breeders and local growers together, in a sense the Organic Seed Partnership is trying to return to something that’s been nearly forgotten. Historically legions of farmers in this country essentially conducted democratic experiments for free by scattering seedling fruit trees in tiny orchards throughout the countryside, or adapting vegetables like Boothby’s Blonde to pest and diseases pressures. Trial-and-error plant breeding and seed saving, the hallmarks of subsistence growers the world over, have fallen by the wayside in our farm system. The OSP is working to bring that spirit back.
Every year the OSP puts out a call to farmers asking them to share the labor and benefits of plant trials. Growers step forward because the extra work of evaluating new strains can repay their efforts in the future, with access to improved plants. Breeders participate because including farmers and seed companies helps field-test new crosses, and reduces costs for expensive trials. Small seed companies benefit with access to raw material, trained expertise, and crop evaluation data. It’s a win–win all around. This is the message of the Organic Seed Partnership: that in the absence of adequate funding, the burden of selection for plant diversity and regional adaptation depends on broad participation.
History has pushed us in the other direction, however. The trend toward uniformity has been a long time in the making, concentrating innovation into ever fewer and more specialized hands. As John Bunker noted in his book Not Far from the Tree, for example, back in the 1920s extension agents in the Northeast discouraged planting of all but seven of the most commercially acceptable apples. Their goal was to reduce orchard diversity and standardize fruit quality, production, and marketing. For this they chose a few very old apples like Rhode Island Greening and Gravenstein, plus newer discoveries like Wealthy and Golden Delicious. Some were selected for production potential, others for eating quality, but each offered yield and market appeal designed to guarantee consistent profits. A handful of winners would replace the hundreds of varieties then in common use.
What’s wrong with this approach? Within a few years the first signs of trouble appeared. One of their selections, Baldwin, would prove disastrous for growers. Baldwin is good for fresh eating, stores well, cooks into excellent sauce, and makes a fine single-variety hard cider. It was a favorite dating back to 1740 in Massachusetts. Despite many good attributes, however, it has a crippling weakness. It isn’t particularly cold-hardy, especially when the trees are stressed by pushing them to produce heavy yields. Several years after farmers began turning land over to the “New England Seven,” one of the hardest winters on record struck. The deep freeze that settled over orchards in 1934 killed roughly two-thirds of all apple trees in Maine, and destroyed most of the Baldwins in New England. This marked the end of regional commercial production for the variety, and dealt a substantial blow to the northern apple industry right in the middle of the Great Depression.
You could argue that Baldwin was simply the wrong selection. That’s true, but part of the beauty of old plantings was the recognition that no single fruit can meet every need, and that every fruit has its strengths and weaknesses. Cold-hardy apples like Duchess of Oldenburg thrive in northern Maine, in places where most varieties can’t survive or produce. Astringent (bittersweet or bittersharp) apples that blend into the best hard ciders aren’t good for fresh eating. Sweet summer apples without acidity taste strange to modern palates, but make excellent sauce and pies. Apples serve many purposes beyond fresh eating. They can be boiled to make sauce, fruit butter, and a molasses-like sweetener; pressed for juice, hard cider, and vinegar; distilled into brandy; dried for long-term storage; baked into pies. Relying on a handful of standardized varieties to deal with every culinary purpose, and to meet endless subtle variations in climate and growing conditions, is a diminished and precarious way to raise food.
After visiting Michael Glos at Cornell, I’m curious to learn whether other public breeding projects use different models, and what the comparative benefits and drawbacks of participatory breeding might be. Take apples, for example. Can we really expect farmers to share the labor and capital-intensive costs of breeding fruit? Investments in manpower and technology pay out over a very long time frame for fruit trees, with no guarantee of success. For every new release, hundreds of thousands of hand-pollinated apple seeds will be germinated, grafted, grown to fruiting size, tested for flavor and productivity, and ultimately discarded.
At the end of my conversation with Charles Boothby, he changed the subject from cucumbers to fruit trees and told me, “I’d trade every old apple variety for Honeycrisp.” As an agronomist he probably didn’t mean this literally, but he’s not alone in his high praise. In 2003 The New York Times called Honeycrisp one of the best eating apples available. Nearly twenty years after its release, the variety remains extremely popular, and for good reason. It’s sweet and tangy, juicy, equally good for fresh eating or cooking. This is a great apple, a contemporary answer to the market’s demand for all-purpose fruit. It’s also highly profitable for growers, often returning twice the price per bushel of other standard varieties.
The University of Minnesota made the original cross that resulted in Honeycrisp in 1960, the year of John F. Kennedy’s election. Thirty-one years and six presidents later, halfway through the term of George H. W. Bush in 1991, it released Honeycrisp to the trade. This puts a fruit breeder’s career in perspective! Twenty-five to thirty years is a typical time span for the development of a new apple, and it hints at the tremendous amount of work involved. It also raises interesting questions about the respective roles of researchers and farmers. Could growers in a cooperative project have this kind of generations-long dedication, without any direct financial reward?
The Minnesota horticulture program that developed Honeycrisp shares common roots and many of the same goals as Cornell. Both trace back to the land grant colleges of the nineteenth century, established in part to teach practical agriculture to regional farmers. They retain a sense of mission to support agriculture in cold northern climates. It’s no surprise that Cornell should pursue participatory farmer breeding, or that Minnesota would release high-quality fruit that prioritizes the needs of farmers and consumers. Minnesota is justifiably proud of its tradition of breeding apples. Many of its releases are among my favorites, like Haralson, Keepsake, Sweet Sixteen, and Chestnut Crab. No Red Delicious there.
And yet fundamental differences distinguish these two programs. To use an analogy from the computer world, if Cornell’s work with Boothby’s Blonde represents “open-source” breeding, Minnesota follows a more proprietary model. Due to the high cost of breeding fruit, maybe it’s inevitable that the University of Minnesota would adopt patenting and licensing techniques more often associated with private agribusiness. During the twenty-year span of Honeycrisp’s patent, from 1988 to 2008, any reproduction, sale, and use depended on approval from the university. Nurserymen couldn’t reproduce trees without acquiring licenses, and growers couldn’t plant them without paying a fee to the school.
In many cases plant patenting can have the effect of dampening research by restricting access to genetic material. In this case, however, it had several advantages:
•In the right hands, plant patenting can prevent, or at least delay, undesirable changes in the fruit, keeping a line from running down through lower-quality mutations.
•Commercial orchardists welcomed Honeycrisp patent protection because it ensured a high level of quality control, and consistency in the marketplace.
•Consumers knew exactly what they were getting when buying Honeycrisp.
•Patenting provided much-needed revenue for a program working in the public interest.
To date Minnesota’s revenue has amounted to over $10 million, divided equally among the school, Honeycrisp’s breeders, and a fund for ongoing projects. This influx of cash has been critical for sustaining the Minnesota horticulture program, particularly since budget shortfalls forced state funding cuts several years ago.
The need to recoup costs also explains some of the hyped-up marketing behind this apple. Trade organizations, websites, and a dedicated Wikipedia page heap lavish praise on Honeycrisp, and a 2006 vote of the Minnesota state legislature designated it their official state fruit (take that, Keepsake and Haralson!). Honeycrisp was “the best, most exciting apple we’ve ever introduced,” according to Minnesota horticulture professor Jim Luby. “Explosively crisp!” writes their website. Even the name Honeycrisp has the ring of an advertising slogan to me, and it’s easy to feel nostalgic for others that hold something back, particularly if they hint at a rich history: Rhode Island Greening, Northern Spy, Roxbury Russet, or even the humble Baldwin. Honeycrisp sounds like something you might order at the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru, or the name of a breakfast cereal. Not quite worthy of a high-quality new fruit, but never mind …
Public-minded programs at Cornell and Minnesota need to find innovative ways to stay afloat in challenging financial times. As appealing as Cornell’s open-source sharing may be, there are advantages as well in Minnesota’s willingness to borrow strategies from the business world. And yet we need to guard against complacency. By creating commercial incentives to market new fruit aggressively, patenting can work against diversity and overshadow other deserving fruit. Is Honeycrisp really the perfect apple that can supplant all others? Older Minnesota releases like Sweet Sixteen are also outstanding, deserving a place at the table. Would Charles Boothby really trade every ancient Gravenstein and Ashmead’s Kernel for this relatively new release?
The Baldwin’s story should give us pause. Narrowing the range of fruits in the field has risks, today as much as in the past. According to an Integrated Pest Management bulletin sponsored by Cornell University, West Virginia University, the USDA, and the National Science Foundation, “Over the last decade, consumer and market demands have forced major changes in horticultural practices” for orchard fruits. When it comes to a highly contagious and damaging disease like fireblight, for example, these changes have “not only increased chances for infection but the level of damage/infection likely to occur.” What are the implications for Honeycrisp?
Fireblight is a particular concern here in the Northeast. This is a bacterial infection that infects numerous plants, and it shares hosts ranging from raspberries to hawthorns to roses. Epidemics are hard to predict. When temperature and humidity conditions are right the disease can erupt with great speed, destroying blossoms, leaves, and branches. Although frequent antibiotic spraying offers preventive control for conventional growers, applications are expensive, and bacteria can evolve in turn. Planting resistant varieties and following good horticultural practices, like burning infected vegetation and diversifying plantings, is the best line of defense. High-density orchards planted on dwarf rootstocks, which are bred to bear fruit quickly, substantially increase the risk of fireblight, as does the planting of susceptible varieties. According to the report these include such popular cultivars as Gala, Fuji, Jonagold, and Braeburn. And Honeycrisp.
That roster sounds like my entire supermarket apple aisle, Red and Golden Delicious aside. Other reports are mixed on the subject of Honeycrisp’s vulnerability, giving it ratings from good to mediocre. The University of Minnesota itself takes the middle ground, saying Honeycrisp’s resistance to fireblight “depends on age, rootstock and disease pressure. Vigorous young trees on susceptible rootstock may show serious infection in severe fireblight years. Older trees under normal conditions show moderate to good resistance.” So we only really need to worry about susceptibility during a disease outbreak. Hmmm.
It’s the same old story. Planting too much of any one thing, whether in an organic vegetable field or apple orchard, brings greater vulnerability to pests and disease. When every apple is susceptible to a devastating disease like fireblight, the entire orchard puts itself at risk. Whatever our approach to breeding new plants, therefore, maintaining diversity counts. The time has passed for thinking any one variety can supplant all others. We need the old, the new, and the ever-changing to maintain a healthy agricultural system.
A few last notes about Honeycrisp raise some tantalizing questions about the distinction between modern varieties and heirlooms. As of this writing Honeycrisp.org, a promotional website sponsored by a group called All About Apples (whose goal is to serve as “the premier Internet site for the apple industry”), continues to describe Honeycrisp as a straightforward cross between two celebrated parents: Macoun and Honeygold. Sounds like traditional plant breeding at its best. Take two varieties with desirable traits, cross them, evaluate the results for several generations, and select a promising new strain. In essence this is exactly what farmers have always done when propagating fruit from seeds, only now the process is carefully managed and controlled in a research setting.
Except, as it turns out, that’s not exactly true. A few years ago DNA tests at the University of Minnesota revealed that Honeycrisp’s real parents are the 1978 release Keepsake and an as yet unidentified tree, probably an unnamed seedling from another experiment. Honeycrisp isn’t related to either of its previously claimed parents (those listed on its patent application). In fact it’s an accidental cross, an heir to the random farm breeding of millennia. Macoun and Honeygold are something more like the respectable middle-aged couple that adopts an abandoned child, and this Minnesota apple is more in the spirit of traditional breeding than anyone ever imagined.
There’s a message in this for people like me, working outside academia. The odds of discovering the next George IV peach, Boothby’s Blonde cucumber, or Honeycrisp apple are long, but you can’t know the potential of a seed until you plant it and taste the results. Whether using high-tech screening like marker-assisted selection, selecting among thousands of crosses in a controlled setting, or growing by trial and error in the field, curiosity counts. A vibrant regional cuisine depends as much on broad participation, on openness to chance discoveries by professionals and enthusiastic amateurs alike, as it does on continued funding for university programs and enlightened breeding projects. If a cross as successful as Honeycrisp can occur by chance, then engagement and effort count.