B.C.’s apple industry is in Crisis. a re new apple B reeds ... · PDF fileI ask Hampson, who has dedicated 16 ... by Anne Casselman // photography by Adam Blasberg B.C.’s apple

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  • February 2012 BCBusiness 53

    he paring knives cut into the flesh swiftly. Chrrrack. Crunch crunch crunch. The hallway of the open work area on the second floor of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canadas Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre (PARC) in Summerland fills with the sound of chewing as the tasters contem-plate what has just met their taste buds.

    Pass or fail? asks Cheryl Hampson, apple-breeding research scientist. Apple 8S 54 60 sits in a green plastic crate awaiting sentence. I say unless its got bigger flavour, with that appearance its not going anywhere, comments research technician Darrell-Lee McKenzie. She drags the crate of brown-hued apples to join the compost pile. I ask Hampson, who has dedicated 16 years of her career to breeding the perfect apple, what makes for a winner. Thats entirely in the tongue of the beholder, the petite middle-aged scientist answers before breaking into a trill of laughter.

    Its early winter here in Summerland and a biting wind makes Lake Oka-nagan look more like Loch Ness. The only relic of the warm summer sun that bathes these slopes is the fruit before us. Armed with knife and spittoon, the pre-tasting panel is mercilessly thinning the pack. Of the 21 crates of apple vari-eties before us, only six will go on to blind taste tests that evaluate their skin toughness, crispiness, juiciness, sweetness, sourness and flavour intensity.

    testthetaste

    by Anne Casselman // photography by Adam Blasberg

    B.C.s apple industry is in Crisis. are new apple Breeds the solution? a team of sCientists are sCramBling to invent the perfeCt apple

    T

    of

    52 BCBusiness February 2012

    Okanagan Tree Fruit Cooperative packing house, Oliver, B.C.

  • bcbusinessonline.ca February 2012 BCBusiness 55

    million), many in the business believe adopting new varieties is the only way for-ward. I dont think we can really compete head on head with Washington state, says Jim Campbell, industry specialist with the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture. We have to do something different . . . get out of the old rut, try something new.

    New apples that taste better, are easier to grow and store longer can offer growers a competitive and financial edge. What youre offering the grower is an opportu-

    nity to realize more net return per acre, whether its a return per pound to him or by better production or a better pack-out, says Ken Haddrell, operations manager at the Okanagan Plant Improvement Corp., known in the industry by its acronym, PICO. (Haddrell and Hampson are married, making them the closest thing to a power couple in the apple world.)

    PICO, which got started in 1993 with funding from the federal government and the B.C. Tree Fruit Growers Association,

    anne casselman (leFt)54 BCBusiness February 2012

    To make it, a new apple has to be the best apple youve ever eaten. Literally. Because we are trying to beat whats out there, to get a new apple on the market it has to be pretty darn good, says McK-enzie. When apple researchers reel off potential apple flaws, its like listening to your girlfriend damn all her online dating prospects. Theyre too fat. Their colouring is off. They have too many freckles. They have a calcium deficiency that leaves black splotches on their skin. And you know all bets are off when they leave a bad after-taste in your mouth. To be fair, these hor-ticulturalists taste apples for two to four hours a day throughout the winter months. (One retired PARC employee boasts that he has tasted over a million apples in his life.) So its not just that their palates are jaded. Their tooth enamel is starting to erode and their stomach acid is spiking.

    Outside the walls of PARC, B.C.s apple industry is in deep crisis as its growers continue to bleed money. In the past three years, apple growers on average have failed to make their costs of produc-

    tion. In the past year, on average, growers pocketed 17.2 cents a pound for apples that cost them 22.5 cents a pound to grow. Small wonder that apple trees are being replaced by cherries and wine grapes. At one point, 20,000 acres of apples carpeted the Oka-nagan. That numbers down to 8,500 today and continues to shrink.

    One does not have to be an economist to realize that that situation is simply not sustainable and so weve got to find a way to turn this around, says Joe Sardinha, president of the B.C. Fruit Growers Associ-ation. The stakes are considerable. Apples are Canadas largest fruit crop in terms of tonnage, and its second most valuable agricultural crop. B.C. alone grows over a billion apples each year and apple growing in B.C.s Interior contributes around $720 million to the economy annually.

    One school of thought is to breed our way out of the mess, since newer, better apple varieties can be more profitable. The Ambrosia apple, a flagship B.C. breed, is a price leader. This year, growers got exactly a quarter for each pound of Ambrosias grown. They pocket 36.1 cents a pound for the top earner, Pink Lady. But Macintosh, Red Delicious, Granny Smith, Spartan, Fuji and Golden Delicious, which make up 44.5 per cent of B.C.s apple crop, lost growers money. The Spartan, PARCs first success as the only apple breed produced from a formal scientific breeding program at the time, is yesterdays news. Growers get a measly 12.4 cents a pound for it. Even Galas, the yellow labs of apples, cost grow-ers a penny a pound to grow.

    Whether Hampsons varieties will offer salvation for an industry headed deep into the red, thanks to a strong Canadian dollar and competitors in Washington that have economies of scale working for them, is a multi-million-dollar question. With Wash-ington state eclipsing B.C.s apple produc-tion by a factor of 30 (we grow four million 40-pound cartons a year. Theyre at 120

    TesTed TO The COre: Apples are sliced, cored

    and judged for taste and appearance (below);

    Cheryl hampson and Ken haddrell, power couple of the apple industry (right)

    in order for an apple to even meet the consumer, it has to be disease- and pest-resistant, and able to handle the rigours of a changing climate. it must taste fresh months after picking and go on to survive navigating the packing house. it must travel, stack and sell well

  • bcbusinessonline.ca February 2012 BCBusiness 57

    PARCs 90 hectares of orchard are home to a rotating population of 30,000 new apple varieties (which is to say that apple varieties outnumber Summerland citizens five to one). Each year Hampson and her colleagues patrol the rows of apples, high-grading about 800 to be evaluated by the pre-tasting panel. Each row of apple siblings is a dizzying farrago of colours: red, orange, carmen, pink, maroon, purple, pale yellow, lemon yellow, rust. They come speckled, striped, solid, blotchy, freckled, squat, ribbed, heart-shaped. There are apples that taste like pink lemonade, apples that taste of dirty sock (that one in particular trauma-

    tized McKenzie; she never looks at a pur-plish apple with white lenticels the same since). Everything that an apple ever could be, it probably is somewhere on-site.

    The odds of finding a winner are slim. Its estimated that one plant in 60,000 to 100,000 is good enough to make it. Theyre like people, says Hampson, whose jollity is often punctuated by a peal of laughter. I havent run across one yet thats flawless.

    To visit a fruit-packing house, where 50,000 apples are sorted to within an inch of their lives every hour, is to take the romance out of eating an apple. We take the fruit from the orchard and put it into a box so that it can get to our customer, Cam Stewart, assistant plant manager at the Okanagan Tree Fruit Cooperative packing house in Oliver, shouts over the din. We make sure that all the bad apples along the way are removed.

    What this looks like is a several-hun-dred-metre-long apple obstacle course. Each apple is washed, bathed, plucked, rolled, brushed, photographed 10 times digitally from all angles, herded into a flute of water, hoovered, stored, waxed and stickered. The end result is boxes of apples categorized into as many as 27 different groups of size and quality.

    This might sound like overkill, but the

    56 BCBusiness February 2012

    safeguards the intellectual property rights of plant-breeders, and licenses and com-mercializes B.C.-developed fruit varieties. It returns a percentage of its fruit royal-ties to the receiver general for Canada and reinvests any other profits (if any) into the Okanagan fruit growing industry.

    In order for an apple to even meet the consumer, it has to be disease- and pest-resistant, and able to handle the rigours of a changing climate. It must taste fresh months after picking and go on to sur-vive navigating the packing house. It must travel, stack and sell well.

    The thing is, some people believe that Hampson has already bred the holy grail of apples, the Aurora. Its pale green coun-tenance belies a burst of juicy flesh, whose sapidity is graced with lychee and elder-flower notes. Its got enough crunch to last from the first bite to your back teeth. The internal qualities of this apple, the taste, the pressure, the storage capability are second to none, says Rob Smith, founder of Berry-Mobile Fruit Distribution Inc. in Vancouver. Put against any apple in a blind taste test, its never been beat. What went wrong? Well, for starters, upon meeting the Aurora, the head of PARC at the time had a better name for it: I wish I were red.

    In 1981, researchers at PARC crossed two red apples, Splendour and Gala. It was a good piece of matchmaking. Twenty years later, and their progenys stars are still rising. The Nicola, just entering the market, came o