We just saw this very cool article about Floyd Zaiger. Take a look!
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Source: google.com
Publication date: 10/22/2010
Enjoyed a crisp white peach or a juicy plum this past summer?
Chances are that 85-year-old Floyd Zaiger was behind them in some way, through his disease-resistant root stocks, groundbreaking hybrids or commercial varieties that arrive in East Coast grocery stores unblemished.
“He eats, breathes and sleeps his trees, constantly thinking about their characteristics,” his daughter Leith Gardner said. “For my dad, it’s the love of his life, besides my mother.”
Zaiger’s 140-acre property on the outskirts of the California Central Valley city of Modesto is his laboratory. He and his family develop new varieties the old-fashioned way, by cross-pollinating his acres of leafy breeding stock and selecting for certain traits.
The painstaking process has paid off, with a hybrid plum-apricot he trademarked as the Pluot, and in Zaiger’s international reputation as a premiere developer of stone fruit, which are named for their hard pits.
Despite his age, Zaiger cruises the grove in a golf cart, working on new varieties that will be ready for market in several years.
“The Pluot was game-changing in my mind,” said Tom Gradziel, a pomologist at the University of California, Davis. “The plumcot cross-existed, but he saw potential in the plum’s sweetness and the apricot’s aromatics and crossed it back with the parent tree many times to bring out those characteristics — sweet but no bitter skin.”
Zaiger developed interspecies varieties like the aprium (part apricot and part plum), the peacotum (a hybrid of peach, apricot and plum) and the cherub (a cross between a cherry and a plum).
Gary Van Sickle, president of the California Tree Fruit growers organization, said Zaiger is the most prolific stone fruit breeder in the modern era.
“It takes somebody with vision to understand what the marketplace is going to want in a decade,” Van Sickle said.
What started as a hobby for Zaiger 55 years ago grew into an international business that is still family run. His daughter is the operation’s general manager. One son, Gary, runs the nursery and the other, Grant, tends the mature trees.
On a weekly field tasting tour with growers, Gardner squeezed a wedge of a fruit onto a handheld device that measures sugar in the juice.
Robert Woolley, the owner of Dave Wilson Nursery, plucked a plum from a high, sunny branch and took a bite.
“Whoa! That’s a sugar bomb,” he said. “It’s got everything except size.”
Even though researchers have made breakthroughs in fruit tree genome mapping recently — and despite the company’s name — Zaiger Genetics doesn’t splice genes or manipulate DNA to develop new plants.
It took researchers across the country and Europe 10 years to build a map of the peach genome, Gradziel said. But genomics has its limitations, he said. The field is in its infancy and might never duplicate Zaiger’s work.
“If you look at everything that Zaiger’s developed, none of those would be predictable with these new techniques,” Gradziel said. “Zaiger’s has a huge knowledge base and a huge germplasm to draw from. With linear breeding, we’ll lose his kind of out-of-the-box, creative, artistic, intuitive breeding.”
Zaiger and his staff make repeated and complex crosses in successive generations to make a bridge between two species. Their low-tech methods are painstaking and methodical.
He collects pollen with an eye shadow brush from a tree chosen for its flavor, then brushes it on the flower pistil of another tree chosen for its durability or resistance to disease.
Each of the 150,000 crosses currently in the orchard has a number to trace its lineage back to its great-great-grandparents or longer. Zaiger can track the expression of each characteristic in the progeny.
“The first thing I do when we see a tree with good characteristics and flavor is to open up the book and look at its pedigree,” Zaiger said.
These days, the book is a massive database of crosses.
“This is my bible,” he said, opening a three-ring binder in his office and pointing to the branches of an aprium hybrid’s family tree. “From here to here is six years work.”
From thousands of crosses, Zaiger and his children select a couple hundred to grow in a secondary plot. From those he chooses a few dozen to show off to growers every summer. With their feedback, he introduces a select few new varieties each year.
Each generation of trees takes three years to mature, and it can take decades for a successful variety to return a profit.
“We grew up with it, so we know you can’t be in a hurry,” Gardner said. “There’s always new material coming up the pipeline and we know that the next generation is going to bring new breakthroughs. We rely on the work we did 10 or 12 years ago.”
The Zaigers hold about 280 patents. Their best varieties, like the Pluot, are trademarked. Growers pay a royalty fee of $2.25 per tree, and 15 percent of the sales from their crop to Zaiger and marketers.
The company signed its first international contract in 1962 and now has contracts across Europe as well as New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, Argentina and Chile.
“Many breeders have successful varieties but Floyd’s contributions have been many and probably surpass everyone else for lifetime achievement,” said Eric Wuhl, director of research and development for Family Tree Farms in Reedley, Calif. “I don’t think a grower could grow from the beginning of the season to the end successfully without having Zaiger trees in the lineup.”
We had an amazing opportunity to join the cast and crew of Bringing it Home with Laura McIntosh out in a California peach, plum and nectarine orchard this summer. Bringing it Home is a show that goes behind the scenes to give viewers an opportunity to learn a little more about the food they purchase, where it comes from, who produces it and how they can prepare it.
What’s unique about the show is that it’s totally mobile! The cast and crew carry the whole operation on two big trucks that go on-location all over California (in this case in the orchards) for each new show. It was pretty cool to see the lights, mic-booms, steady-cams, mobile kitchen, semi trucks, generators, power cords (Basically a full studio) set up around peach, plum and nectarine trees. And all in a few hours - they worked quick!
Take a look at the photos of their mobile set.
The set kitchen was fully functional!
The star herself
The morning segment was more focused on cherries and apricots, but the afternoon they brought on Debbie Shahvar, owner of Buttercup Grill and Bar to prepare her famous peach crisp. The video below shows the actual segment they produced right in front of us!
Friday started out as a typical day. But little did I know it was about to get exciting as I headed out to was another interesting day in the world of California tree fruit! Variety tasting and a rootstock tour were my next adventures as I continue learning about California tree fruit. I had never heard of either variety tasting or rootstock tours, so this was completely new to me.
As I approached the tasting, I noticed my soon-to-be father in law gather in a group. That was the second time I had ran into him in the past two days! I must say, it’s pretty cool that we work in the same industry. As I walked around the tables, plates of fresh peaches, plums and nectarines were displayed on the tables. They were for eating, and I brought an appetite!
Variety tastings are an opportunity for peach, plum and nectarine ‘breeders’ to showcase their new varieties of stone fruit, giving the growers and other industry members the opportunity to savor the latest developments in stone fruit. Breeders grow and analyze sample trees to develop the best quality peach, plum and nectarine varieties that they know will cater to peoples’ taste buds. That’s what it’s all about right- biting into the best stone fruit they’ve ever had? Variety tastings gives the growers knowledge and expands their opportunity to grow new varieties that they know shoppers will enjoy.
Rootstock tours are a different breed, don’t mind the pun. Rootstock tours allow growers to see tree root bases that can accommodate varieties and help the grower to grow the new varieties they would like to plant.
They accompany a variety tasting because they allow industry members to observe the tree’s growth and study their development for growth of new varieties. This rootstock tour was at UC Davis Kearney Agricultural Center. As we hopped on the back of a trailer, we made our way out into the orchards.
So now that you have a brief summary of what variety tastings and rootstock tours are and why they’re important to growing tree fruit, check out the video. And, don’t forget to leave us your thoughts in a comment. We love hearing from our readers.
Organic grower Vern Peterson let us in on some cool info. In the video clip below from PPNTV, Vern describes how growers will actually have to wait 6 years before a stonefruit tree is ready to produce marketable fruit. Each tree has to reach a certain level of maturity to be able to deliver the proper nutrients to developing fruit.
This is what makes stonefruit growers unique compared to row crops like cotton or wheat. Stonefruit growers are in it for the long haul and treat the land and their orchards accordingly. Through good practices, continued research and developing technology, stonefruit growers are careful to keep an ecological balance in their orchards to hopefully ensure many more years of fresh California fruit.
The California tree fruit industry has long had a system in place to trace fruit back to the orchard where it was grown. Identifying the fruit grower and packer starts with information printed on every fruit container. Each box is stamped with a marking that contains a series of numbers. This series includes the date and packer identification number and a grower lot identification marking. Those numbers, along with the information on the box label, can be used to quickly locate the fruit packer. Many packinghouses also stamp separate numbers on the box that identify each individual grower and the specific orchard in which the fruit was grown.
In tests performed on fruit samples taken from retail stores throughout the U.S., it has taken less than 5 minutes to identify the packer, grower and orchard where the fruit was grown. In the unlikely event that fresh peaches, plums or nectarines cause an illness, this traceback system could quickly identify the source. This helps protect consumers and ensures that unaffected growers and packers could continue shipping peaches, plums and nectarines.
Take a look at plum grower Jeff Boldt explain how it all works!
A few months ago we posted a story about Jeff Enos, a California peach, plum and nectarine grower (although he tends to lean a little closer to growing plums than anything else.) We visited Jeff and his two daughters at their farm and brought a camera! We made short clips of Jeff and the girls to help them share their story and give them an opportunity to tell consumers about farming and what it takes to produce a good, wholesome, marketable product.
Here Jeff talks about what it takes to grow stone fruit:
The party’s over and it is almost time for plum trees to crash! After a summer spent sizing up sweet fruit for harvest, plum trees are dropping their leaves and getting ready for a winters rest.Growers measure the hours the tree has spent in weather below 45°. Most of the California varieties need between 700 and 1,000 chill hours before bloom in spring.
Part of what makes the San Joaquin Valley so unique for growing Stonefruit is the cold winters and dense fog layer. While the hot summer sun helps trees pack nutrients and natural sugars into the fruit, our fog layer during the winter helps each tree get the necessary “Chill Hours.” The layer of fog helps keep the valley floor 10°-20° cooler than it would be without.
Below is plum grower Paul Buxman talking about some of the other features of the Valley that help produce great plums.
Parlier, California - Rod Milton is a California peach, plum and nectarine grower in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley. I had the chance to talk with him this summer out in one of his plum orchards. We were working on a video project called PPN TV, a collection of short clips from California growers that is intended to let them share some of their history and family stories.
Over the past few years agriculture and farming have been a larger topic of interest to most Americans. Modern day “Victory Gardens” are popping up in urban areas and the general public just wants to know where their food is coming from. Even the USDA is launching a new program called “Know your Farmer, know your food.” Some are skeptical of the program, some are not, either way the message sounds great.
California growers have grouped together to make these videos to help reconnect with their consumers. They want to share their personalities and prospectives with everyone and would like to hear back as well. There are plenty of opinions, some misguided about agriculture today, why not hear one right from the growers heart. Any comment posted on Plumbelievable, or the video sites with their clips will get back to the growers.
The book titled “The Perfect Fruit: Good Breeding, Bad Seeds, and the Hunt for the Elusive Pluot” is a look into the California stone fruit industry, its breeders, farmers, history and commerce, its controversies and intrigue.
We had a chance to visit with Jeff Enos last week at his farm and packinghouse as he was harvesting the Tulare Giant prune variety. Most of the Tulare Giants were being packed for export to the European and Asian markets, as there is a much larger fresh prune market outside of the United States.
Enos is a third-generation plum grower who resides in Visalia, California, and still lives on the same farm established by his grandfather, Tony, in the late 1940s. The Enos family farm specializes in fresh California plums, Jeff’s favorite variety being the Catalina plum, which he describes as “crisp, juicy and totally refreshing.
Taking a short break from a busy packing line we took a walk through Jeff’s plum orchards and talked about his farm, what it means to him to be a farmer today and his plans for the future. He was upbeat and positive about his season so far, happy that there had been no weather related issues yet. Sometimes late season hailstorms can ruin entire crops. “Plums, although sturdier than nectarines and peaches are still delicate,” Jeff said, “late season hail storms can bruise the skin and sometimes knock the plum right off the tree.” Jeff talked about the care and time it takes to make sure the trees are getting the right amount of water and nutrients, only to be wiped out days before harvest by bad weather. As frustrating as that is, he explained how he tries not to stress out about the things that are out of his control and left to mother nature.
He expressed some of his fears that came along to new potential regulations that could make it difficult for him to stay in business. He hadn’t cited anything specific but just generally what new regulations mean to him. “It’s not that I disagree with any new regulations because most of them mean well, they have good intentions,” Jeff said, “it’s just that in tough economic times it’s difficult for me as a small grower to be able to spend the money it takes to meet those new regulations”
Keeping family in the business, Jeff had his two teenage daughters working alongside him in the packinghouse. Although they had been born into farming, they only have time to work on the farm during their summer break from school. When asked what he would like to see happen to farming in the next ten years, he glanced over to his two daughters, paused and expressed his concern that there are not that many young people getting into farming. Both as a result of lack of interest, and because of the financial barriers a young person must overcome to get into the business. “A bank, especially now, is not going to loan anyone especially a 22 year-old the money it takes to get a farm up and running,” Jeff said, “the start up costs are just too high.”
Jeff wants to see more young people come back to farming and continue what their families have started. “It takes a love and commitment to the land that I am trying to instill in my children with the hope that they will want to farm and continue our family’s farming tradition.”
We captured part of our time with Jeff and his daughters on film and will have more of our time together posted here shortly…stay tuned!
