In Winter's Kitchen. Beth Dooley
America’s favorite, Honeycrisp appeals to those who previously claimed they didn’t like apples at all, preferring sweeter fruit brethren such as peaches or pears.
Honeycrisp, as with all university-bred apples, was a patented apple. Anyone who paid the U of M’s royalty fee of about a dollar per tree could plant a Honeycrisp. The problem is that since anyone could, everyone did. The huge orchards in Washington, Oregon, and Michigan grew great quantities of fruit and shipped it back into Minnesota, selling it at prices below what smaller Minnesota orchards could bear. This raised questions over whether the breeding program had strayed from its mission. Why wasn’t the U of M breeding more apples suited to this particular region with flavors unique to this particular place? Apples like those Haralsons?
The Honeycrisp earned the University of Minnesota more than $10 million in royalties before the patent expired in 2008. The Association of University Technology Managers named the Honeycrisp one of twenty-five innovations that changed the world, akin to Google and the V-chip.
Honeycrisp’s biggest grower in Minnesota is Pepin Heights, whose owner, Dennis Courtier, is the apple’s biggest advocate and defender. The Honeycrisp is a “persnickety apple,” and Courtier claims that because it is not an easy fruit to grow, large orchards, especially those on the West Coast, are producing substandard Honeycrisps that are hurting this variety’s image. Courtier contends that the Honeycrisp may become the next Red Delicious.
Bedford shared Courtier’s concerns about the fruit’s quality as well as the fate of the U of M’s research in volatile economic times. When the state cut $4 billion from its budget in 2008, the U of M’s apple-breeding program was slashed by two-thirds. So Bedford decided that new apples would be patented, licensed, and released as “managed varieties,” a concept introduced by Australia’s state-run apple-breeding program with its Pink Lady apples.
The U of M entered an arrangement with a consortium founded by Courtier—named the Next Big Thing—responsible for growing and marketing the U of M’s new fruit. Interested growers are required to apply to the consortium for permission to grow the new U of M varieties and, if accepted, follow strict guidelines for cultivating and selling them.
The SweeTango and Zestar!, released as “club apples,” are available only to those growers approved by the Next Big Thing for the wholesale market. Forty-five growers, mostly from Washington, Michigan, and Nova Scotia, were admitted to the “club” along with Pepin Heights, the only Minnesota grower. Club members pay royalties on both trees and fruit. Under the plan, Minnesota growers not approved by the Next Big Thing are restricted to planting three thousand trees (at first it was one thousand) and are permitted to sell apples at farmers’ markets, farm stands, and local grocery stores, but not via wholesalers.
Angered by exclusion from the “club,” a group of Minnesota and Wisconsin growers filed a lawsuit arguing that SweeTango and Zestar! were created with public funds just like the twenty-six varieties of apples before them, and that the University of Minnesota, a land-grant institution, was not fulfilling its mission of passing along agricultural advances to state farmers. The growers claimed the University of Minnesota had become their largest competitor and cited examples of Michigan-grown SweeTango apples, labeled “local” and placed alongside Minnesota fruit. The U of M countered that the “managed-varieties” arrangement ensures quality and maximizes revenue for ongoing research. It reasoned that it could license apples just like any other product created in a university lab.
Subsequently, regional growers created the Midwest Apple Improvement Association. Its mission is to support research and breeding of cold-hardy Minnesota apples and distribute them to a variety of wholesale and retail outlets. MAIA’s recently released EverCrisp apple tree is available to any grower willing to pay the association’s yearly dues.
Hoch Orchard, Minnesota’s largest organic apple grower, wasn’t party to the lawsuit against the Next Big Thing, but owner Harry Hoch is vocal about his objections to the “club arrangement.” “The university may inadvertently play a role in destroying the Minnesota wholesale apple industry because most of the SweeTango crop will not be grown here, but will be shipped thousands of miles back into our state. This cuts state growers from their own markets. We should be resourcing and growing more fruit that’s sold ‘near place.’”
Hoch Orchard is located near the Mississippi River Bluffs, not far from Pepin Heights. Harry is an intense, burly man with a full beard, and his wife and business partner, Jackie, is the kind of woman who can drive a tractor all day and then spend hours in the kitchen, chatting and rolling pie dough. Though their farm had been in the family since the early 1950s, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that Jackie, Harry, and their two daughters moved back on the land and began to work in the orchard full time. They left behind off-farm work in the city, Jackie in medical technology and Harry in the University of Minnesota’s Horticultural Research Center.
In our region, growing organic apples for market is extraordinarily difficult because of fungus and pests. Harry’s educational background and research work has proven instrumental in Hoch Orchards’ success. In fact, Harry wrote the book (literally) on Integrated Pest Management (IPM) for Upper Midwest orchard keepers. Thanks to his laborious IPM practices, Hoch Orchard uses no chemicals on its fruit. And he and Jackie are helping like-minded orchardists to do the same.
Hoch grows some Honeycrisp and SweeTango, but the rest of his orchard is devoted to over fifty different varieties, a mix of older and newer apples that naturally resist pests, disease, and fungus. Take the Duchess apple, planted by early pioneer farmers, which makes a fabulous pie, or the Viking, an older summer variety, especially sweet-tart and mild. The new generation of apples bred by the University of Minnesota all flourish without fungicides and pesticides: Pristine, a tangy, incredibly crisp dessert apple with a texture so delicate that it’s graded and polished by hand; William’s Pride, a resilient apple with a spicy edge. Hoch Orchard is proving that the newest apples, bred to grow organically, are economically viable, environmentally responsible, and delicious.
The orchard benefits from the Mississippi’s convection breezes, which rise to warm the fruit on cold nights and cool them on hot summer days. In August, the cycle of temperatures, coupled with the natural ethylene released from so much fruit, helps them sweeten and turn red. Hoch’s nine thousand trees, on more than twenty-five acres of land, flourish without dangerous pesticides, fertilizers, or fungicides. Hoch ripens the apples naturally, without plant growth regulators or ripening agents. The apples are cleaned and packed on the farm, without application of wax, food-grade shellac, or any post-harvest pesticides. Eagles soar above the trees, carried on the big river’s winds. Hoch, thousands of miles away from the West Coast’s commercial orchards, has redefined this iconic fruit.
West Coast growers in Oregon and California manage up to one thousand trees per acre on as many as thirty thousand acres of land. This provides efficiencies in pruning, spraying, and harvesting, but it creates huge challenges as well. As with humans, diseases, pests, and fungus spread rapidly among close neighbors, especially when they are genetically identical. As a result, farmers rely on fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides that employ such toxins as AZM and Phosmet. The Environmental Working Group (EWG), a public health advocacy group, recently named conventional, commercially grown apples as one of the most contaminated fruits grown in the US. To reduce the use of these toxins, plant geneticists created GMO Red Delicious apples using transgenic technologies to code in genetic resistance to diseases, fungus, and pests. The first field trials of GMO apples were conducted in 1992 in the US, Great Britain, and New Zealand. But there’s no proof that these trees are any better than those nature has provided, and the encoded resistance is beginning to break down so that even more chemicals must be applied to resist disease and blight.
Last year, the Next Big Thing growers produced more than half a billion SweeTango apples. Recently, the NBT joined with twelve fruit marketers from eleven countries and five continents in a global consortium called IFORED. Currently SweeTango apples are sold in all fifty states and in Canada, and perhaps soon they’ll be grown and sold throughout