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Fruit breeder seeks next ‘rock star’ apple variety

Research scientist helped make Honeycrisp famous

The Columbian
Published: December 1, 2014, 12:00am

EXCELSIOR, Minn. — On a crisp late fall afternoon, David Bedford plucks an apple from a young tree, chomps into the fruit and chews thoughtfully.

“Perfectly good. Not excellent. Not a wow.” He tosses the apple to the ground, and renders his verdict with spray paint, a stripe of orange down the trunk that tells the orchard crew to take it down. “You’re going to the firewood farm,” he tells the tree.

Bedford, mild-mannered and even-tempered, is ruthless in his quest to produce the next great apple.

“I used to be more benevolent,” he said.

He’d give a merely OK tree a few more years to “get its act together.” But after decades as an apple breeder, Bedford knows what he’s looking for. And this apple isn’t it. If the tree stays, “I’d have to taste that same mediocre apple again next year,” he said. So the tree has to go, to make room for other, more promising varieties at the University of Minnesota’s Horticultural Research Center in Excelsior.

As research scientist for the U’s apple-breeding program, Bedford tastes a lot of apples. About 500 to 600 a day, every day, during peak apple season, until his gums hurt.

“It’s hard on the teeth,” he admitted. Even though he spits out the pulp, the acidic juice inflames his mouth to the point that he has to use special toothpaste and fluoride rinses to “cool things down.”

“There are only so many bites you can tolerate in a day,” he said. “I can do about six hours, then I get sick of them and have to stop. The worst thing is to keep going, like using a tool that’s out of calibration.”

Bedford’s finely honed palate for apples has shaped the choices available at orchards and in grocery stores — in Minnesota, across the country and even across the globe.

“He’s one of the elite breeders for apples in the world,” said grower John Jacobson, whose Pine Tree Apple Orchard in White Bear Lake and Preston, Minn., is a test site. “One of his strengths is his ability to take an apple, bite it and project what’s going to be popular — that texture, that crunch, that juiciness. He’s done a fabulous job being able to put all those characteristics together.”

Bedford doesn’t do the job alone, he’s quick to point out, but as part of a team. He and Jim Luby, the horticultural science professor who directs the U’s fruit-breeding program, have been collaborating on apple selection for three decades. During their partnership, the program has released six new varieties: Honeycrisp; Zestar!; SnowSweet; Minneiska (better known by its brand name, SweeTango); Frostbite and most recently MN55, which has yet to be christened and won’t be available commercially for another several years.

But Bedford is the guy who does the day-to-day cultivating, grafting and cloning and who personally tastes all those mediocre apples in hopes of finding “the next Honeycrisp, or something even better.”

“He’s our front line, making the decisions about what gets thrown out,” said Luby. “And 99 percent gets thrown out.”

Of the surviving 1 percent, Honeycrisp is the program’s rock star. Introduced in 1991, it’s now the sixth largest apple in production in the United States, according to Mark Seetin, director of regulatory and industry affairs for the U.S. Apple Association. Honeycrisp’s rapid rise is “extraordinary,” Seetin said. “It has exploded in the last five years. It’s a doggone good apple.”

The U’s apple operation, one of the nation’s three major breeding programs, is more than a century old, with 27 apple introductions to its credit, but Honeycrisp put it on the map, in Jacobson’s opinion. “When they released Honeycrisp, they hit it out of the park.”

Now Honeycrisp and its follow-up releases are major players in the state’s apple industry, said Charlie Johnson, president of the Minnesota Apple Growers Association and owner of Whistling Well Farm, near Afton. “If it wasn’t for the U’s breeding program, we wouldn’t be in business. The apples they’ve developed are really popular with consumers.” Honeycrisp, for example, “has the taste it’s supposed to have when it’s grown here. Consumers have figured that out and do try to buy from Minnesota growers.”

Bedford, 63, didn’t breed the first Honeycrisp tree; that was done before he came to the U (apple-breeding is a decades-long process). But he and Luby rescued the apple from oblivion.

“Here’s a little-known secret of Honeycrisp: It got thrown away by the original breeder — it had some winter injury,” Bedford said. That first tree was destroyed, but four clones survived. His first taste of the “explosively crisp” fruit left an indelible memory. “I’ve tasted millions of apples, and I can still remember my first Honeycrisp and my first SweeTango.”

Other apples evoke less fond memories. Bedford isn’t shy about trash-talking Red Delicious, the “pathetic” variety he grew up eating in North Carolina.

The big red apples, tough of skin and mealy in texture, dominated the marketplace during his childhood and convinced him he didn’t care for apples. He remembers opening his metal lunchbox to “the overpowering smell of an overripe Red Delicious.” He couldn’t trade it away. “It was the lowest thing on the scale. And the lowest thing on Halloween was getting an apple, a Red Delicious.”

But as a student at Wheaton College in Illinois, where he went to study biology, Bedford had an apple epiphany. A friend brought a bushel of Michigan apples and invited Bedford to try one. “It was crisp. That’s what I never had. Crisp and juicy. I ate half a bushel myself.”

Sampling apples with Bedford is a bit like tasting wine with a sommelier. As he shares each slice, he points out apples that taste like cloves or cherry Lifesavers, fruit with floral notes or earthy, herbal undertones.

He looks for 20 characteristics when sizing up apples, but some traits carry more weight than others. “Our priority is to make an apple that’s a memorable eating experience,” he said. Appearance is secondary. “Texture and flavor are the two most important things.”

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