experience their delights and disappointments, a privilege and a curse. I seem to grow older and younger at once, as the child I was, the mother I used to be, and the grandmother I hope to become collapse together.
In the late 1950s, when small orchards and regional markets began to give way to huge West Coast growers and supermarket chains, the range of apple varieties shrank. By the 1970s the selection of apples in most supermarkets was limited to the McIntosh, Red Delicious, and Golden Delicious. Apple breeders were aiming to create durable, long-lasting, and attractive fruit that grew quickly and was easy to pick. But beautiful-looking apples often taste terrible. Price, not quality, was a determining factor as growers and grocers engaged in a race to see who could produce the largest yields and the lowest prices. In just a few decades, the commercial apple industry had turned this once delicious, portable, healthful snack into a bland product no one wanted. The ubiquitous, insipid Red Delicious gave all apples a bad rap.
In the early 1980s the sudden popularity of Granny Smith (England), Fuji (Japan), and Braeburn (New Zealand) apples proved that shoppers would pay more for a less-than-perfect apple if it tasted good. That’s when the apple-breeding program at the University of Minnesota began work on the Honeycrisp apple. Like Apple’s Macintosh computer, the U of M’s Honeycrisp upset the industry’s cart. Growing and selling apples would never be the same.
The U of M’s apple-breeding program is the nation’s oldest and largest. Funded by the Hatch Act of 1887, which provided research and development money to land-grant universities for the promotion of agriculture, by the early 1970s the program had released twenty-seven new varieties of apples—including Beacon, Haralson, and Prairie Spy—beloved by Minnesotans for their range of flavor and cooking qualities, but unknown in the rest of the country.
On its thirty-acre parcel of rolling hillside—about thirty miles west of Minneapolis, near the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum—the U of M’s research orchard is planted with over twenty thousand apple trees. To make apple crosses, pollen from one promising variety is swabbed onto the stamen of another, and then the flowers are bagged to keep out pollen from other trees.
The apple that grows on the branch will be true to the mother tree’s DNA, the seeds will contain equal parts of both parents’ genes, and every seed is distinct. The idea is to combine the best characteristics of both parents into trees that produce apples with a unique identity. Then the budding trees are grafted onto rootstock the next summer so that in about five years there will be new varieties that may become the next big apple. The successful results are then grown out for several years in a test orchard that replicates commercial conditions.
Dr. David Bedford, a U of M senior research fellow, credits the Honeycrisp’s success to its especially sweet flavor and extraordinarily crisp texture; its unusually big cells retain excess moisture and contribute to crunch. Now ranked 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.
