Green Options

There is an old saying in the fresh produce industry: “Produce is purchased based on appearance, not by taste.”  This is unfortunately often true.  People buy their fruit and vegetables based on how fresh and blemish-free they look.  They don’t normally have the chance to do taste comparisons.  The reality is that lots of fruits and vegetables look better than they taste.

Fortunately, there have been some produce improvements that break through this “appearance” paradigm.  I’ll describe just four examples that are favorite of mine and about which I have some background information (don’t worry, no-one is paying me to promote these).

The Golden Pineapple

It used to be that buying a fresh pineapple was a high risk investment.  They were fairly expensive and much of the time they were so acidic that you would burn the roof of your mouth.  The Pineapple Research Institute in Hawaii developed a much sweeter, lower acid hybrid called 73-114, but for years it could never be commercialized because it couldn’t be successfully shipped to the US from either Central America or Hawaii.  Finally, the fruit company, Del Monte and the post-harvest technology company FMC figured out a a way for it to make it to US markets.  They found a particular food-safe wax that changed the gas exchange (CO2, water, oxygen…) such that the fruit could stay alive during shipping.  Del Monte launched this as “Del Monte Gold” in 1997.  Since then many companies have introduced “Golden Pineapples” and pineapple consumption has been rising ever since.

The chart above shows the historical average yields for wheat and corn in the US.  Note that until the 1930s the relative yields of the crops were similar and were not changing.  After that time yields of both crops began to rise steadily, but corn yields have grown at a much faster pace.  What explains this difference?

There are several interacting factors behind this, and they work together to create the “orphan” status of wheat as a crop.  Corn is a hybrid crop which enhances its yield and the ease of increasing its yield through breeding.  Wheat is harder to hybridize so it isn’t practical except for extremely high yielding wheat areas like Northern Europe.  Instead, US wheat is largely a “saved seed crop” meaning that the grower can simply save back some of the grain and replant it rather than needing to buy new hybrid seed each year.  That system is workable, particularly if the grower periodically buys some “certified seed” to have a purer stand and to take advantage of breeding improvements.  The down-side of a “saved seed crop” is that there is not a very big private seed industry to invest in the crop.  Most of the breeding is done by University and USDA breeder supported by tax dollars and there is a small private industry as well.  As I said in the previous post, these breeders have done a remarkable job with the resources they have, but in an increasingly ag-unaware society, that support is never generous.

I’m doing a series of posts about why wheat has been an orphan crop.  Today I want to talk about UG99 Stem Rust.

In 1999 a new strain of Stem Rust, a severe wheat disease, emerged in Uganda.  It was named UG99, and since then it has spread to other wheat growing areas in Africa and Asia but is expected to spread further.  It is a serious threat to the global human food supply because it causes severe yield losses.

There have been many great articles, blog postings and websites about this important plant disease, so today I will talk about how I think this situation will play out.

I’ll wager that the worst potential from this disease will NOT actually occur. This is not a casual wager - the health or even survival of millions of poor people around the world is at stake.  Some of my wheat breeder friends might not like me to say this (because they legitimately need more funding), but my bet is is still that the breeders will prevail against all odds (and get little credit for it).

I base that qualified optimism on having seen what a remarkable group of scientists called “plant breeders” have been able to achieve in the past.  I’m even more encouraged knowing that they have access to some new tools based on biotechnology.