The Perfect Fruit Page 12

  The Zaigers now had an interspecific seedling that was one-quarter apricot, one-quarter plum, and one-half almond. Hoping to combine the plum’s tolerance for alkaline soil with some base strength and disease resistance, Floyd used the pollen from the interspecific on a classic peach rootstock called Nemaguard. From that cross, the Zaigers grew thousands of seedlings until, after some years, they finally selected out Viking. It was compatible with both almonds and peaches. It helped produce a strong, large, and consistent set of fruit on the tree. It did relatively well in marginal soils. And when a strong wind came blowing through the orchard, its deep root system kept it firmly anchored to the ground.

  The Viking story sounded like many other varietal histories, which always started with someone noticing something unfamiliar in a familiar setting. Something had been one way, and then it was another way. I was walking through the orchard one day when I noticed a little fuzz on some plums. In the neat narrative of Floyd’s story, it sounded as if Viking had been planned all along, destined. As if all he had to do was show up. But at each step there was a new choice. Some people wouldn’t have noticed the blireiana fruit. Some people wouldn’t have bothered germinating the pits. Some people wouldn’t have babied the seedlings, or used the pollen on an almond tree. Some people wouldn’t have crossed the next hybrid with peach. It was like the stories couples tell about how they’ve ended up together. The telling makes it sound inevitable, but it’s always anything but.

  In the beginning, all of the interspecifics were sterile, like Citation and Viking. Many interspecifics had what’s called a fasciated (or flat) pistil. Or they had no pistil and all pollen. Or they had no pollen. What ever the condition, the flowers wouldn’t set fruit. With plums and apricots, this is a notorious problem. (Writing about his plumcots in a book chapter entitled “Accomplishing the Impossible,” Luther Burbank noted that one of his first plumcots “did not have a stamen on the whole tree.”) But Floyd knew it could happen because Burbank had done it and because he’d seen that the bees could do it. Maybe on one out of every hundred thousand trees, he’d find an interspecific that was the doing of the bees. And so when he had enough volume of these interspecific seedlings, some of them did start fruiting, and that gave him avenues to take off down to see if he could create a new fruit.

  Back in his office, Floyd knelt beside a small bookcase and pulled out a gigantic black binder from a row of gigantic black binders. Above the bookcase, I noticed a piece of computer paper tacked to the wood-paneled wall. In dot matrix Courier was a quote: “Having brilliant ideas is easy. Just have a lot of ideas and throw away most of them.” It was attributed to Linus Pauling, the so-called Father of Molecular Biology (who won his first Nobel Prize, in chemistry, in 1954 as Zaiger was just starting out with azaleas). For a fruit breeder, those words are gospel. Having a lot of ideas won’t guarantee a brilliant one, but the greater the diversity of desirable traits you have in your gene pool and the more crosses you make, the better the odds are that you’ll come away with something worth keeping.

  Floyd had found what he was looking for in the binder, which held years’ worth of notes about the crosses they’d made. These particular notes were on plum-apricot crosses the Zaigers made in the late 1970s. Floyd ran his index finger down a column on the right side of the page. “Okay, look at this. ‘Very poor growth.’ ‘Very poor growth.’ ‘No growth.’ ” He flipped a page. “ ‘All died.’ ‘All died.’ ‘All died.’ And that’s down the whole page. This is that F1 sterility.” Then, he turned an inch or two of pages to scan near the back of the binder. “But sooner or later, you found some that had good growth. Keep in mind this is years and years of going up and down the rows and finding almost all dead trees. But finally, you get to a year where you start to see”—his finger skipped down the page—“‘Good growth.’ ‘Good growth.’ ‘Good growth.’ ” Once the Zaigers got enough of this good growth, they were able to keep crossing these first-generation plumcots back to a plum or an apricot. That’s when they started to see a few with some interesting fruit.

  To cross plums and apricots, the Zaigers at first mimicked a technique that Anderson and others had used. They built small wood-frame-and-wire houses around the plum trees they wanted to pollinate. When the blossoms were at that ideal popcorn stage, they placed branches from several different varieties of apricot inside the house along with a small hive of bees to do the pollinating. You could call it “controlled open pollination.” Having different apricots in there meant that more gene tic material was thrown into the mix, so it helped increase the Zaigers’ chances of getting some viable seedlings. What they didn’t consider at the time was the impossibility of getting a clean record of the resulting hybrids’ genealogy. With bees pulling pollen from four or more different apricot branches, there was no way to know for sure which apricot’s genes were being passed down to which plumcot. But a strict genealogical record of their selections was not what they were after. They were after new varieties of fruit.

  Still, as the Zaigers’ volume of fruit grew, the importance of record-keeping became apparent. Leith, who’d brought some paperwork into the office for Floyd to look over, picked up the conversation. “As we got a couple of generations out, we were looking at all these characteristics, studying them so that we’d have a better-educated guess about what from our gene pool we wanted to use to try to get certain results. There was just too much fruit. You couldn’t keep track of everything.” In 1977, the Zaigers started keeping records on every cross they made and any selections they took from those crosses. Each selection received an alphanumeric code noting where in the field the fruit was and from which generation it was crossed. The code corresponded to a written record that had the tree’s lineage and statistics: its average Brix, its maturity time, its possible pollenizers, and so on. At first, everything was hand-written. Eventually, they moved to computers, but they still keep paper files on everything in card boxes and have a massive binder they’ve named “Andrew” that serves as their indexed black book.

  After they had focused for so long on building up volume, the record keeping allowed them to start working on pedigree. “Now we know how strong the inheritable characteristics are in our parents,” Leith said. “We know which ones to draw on to try to get large size. We know which ones to use to try to get high color. We know which ones to use for low chilling. Well, wait—let me rephrase that: We always think we know which ones will carry large size, higher color, low chilling requirements. We’ve been studying all these characteristics for years, but it is still a numbers game, you know. You’ve still got to throw the dice and see which way you come up. But we just hope we’ve put the odds a little more in our favor.”

  Out in the field, the Zaigers made two other important improvements: They built a large, tented green house for making crosses, and they borrowed a trick from their ornamental nursery business and started planting fruit trees in container tubs. (I remembered seeing that forest of blue tubbed trees for the first time and hearing Leith say, Those are the female parents for our crosses.) With the mother trees in containers, the Zaigers could easily move them around and take the trees to the pollen instead of taking the pollen out to the trees. To pollinate a tree, they moved it into the green house, where, over the course of several days, all the tree’s flowers would be dabbed with pollen. (Previously, they’d had to retrace their steps, hopscotching all over the orchard to make the crosses.) This way, they were able to make a wider range of crosses in less time. They also found that the ideal temperature for making a cross—the most fertile temperature for pollen tube growth—is 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Out in the field, it might get too hot or too cold. But inside the green house, they could set the mood and keep the air at that ideal temperature. Plus, out of the fog and the cold and the rain, the green house was just a nicer place to work.

  By the late 1980s, the Zaigers’ fruit breeding was starting to pay for itself. Over thirty years, the family had expanded its ornamental nursery business to include seve
ral retail outlets, plus wholesale and landscaping divisions. But the success of the white-fleshed peaches and nectarines and the interspecific rootstock had turned the fruit breeding into more than just a hobby. In 1989, the Zaigers sold the ornamental nursery business, just as their work with interspecific fruits was starting to show results.

  Here’s what happened in the first several years after the Zaigers sold their plant nursery to focus on stone fruit: The California plum market tanked, and then the industry self-destructed.

  At the root of the problem was the fact that many of the plums being packed were not particularly great, at least not compared to the older generation of smaller, more delicate plums—the Burmosas, the Santa Rosas, the El Dorados. For years, growers and packers had reported that retailers wanted fruit that was “big, red, and hard,” and so that’s what breeders in California had been working on. (What had made the Zaigers’ Royal Gold peach worth patenting? The fruit was generally larger than the Springtimes. The skin had a higher blush and the yellow flesh was relatively firm.) And when breeders came out with an improvement—something bigger, something with more color, something harder—it not only helped growers deliver what the retailers wanted in the short term (arguably good), but it also validated the retailers’ expectations that fruit could and should be big, red, and hard (inarguably bad). A produce buyer might see a new, big red rock of a variety and say to growers, “Bring me more like this.” The growers would then go back to the breeders, and the breeders would try to produce a solution. By the 1980s, this cycle had all but washed out the importance of flavor. With flavor so low on the list of priorities as to be negligible and with growers picking the fruit earlier and earlier to give it a longer shelf life, plenty of the plum varieties looked good in the produce section, but when you ate them, you didn’t necessarily feel like you’d gotten a good return on your investment. They were not plums that inspired repeat sales. They were farmer-friendly and retail-friendly, but they were not consumer-friendly. In terms of eating quality, plums had devolved. That was problem number one.

  The second major problem was that there were way too many plums being shipped out of California in the late 1980s. This was due in part to the messy decentralization of the industry that David Albertson had described to me, the dissolution of the so-called Big Eight. As commercial packers, the Big Eight contracted with individual growers for the course of the season. When there were hundreds of buyers on the retail end but the bulk of the sales were going through the Big Eight, it was still a seller’s market, and the industry could afford to think in terms of volume.

  But in the mid-1980s, the retail game was changing. Buyers were moving away from volume and starting to pay more for larger fruit. While all varieties have certain gene tic limitations on how large they can get, the grower can do a lot to affect fruit size: how much and when he waters, how much and how carefully he thins his trees, which nutrients he uses on his trees, how long he lets the fruit stay on the tree. Growing larger fruit often meant growing less of it per tree. But if it cost the same amount—say, four dollars per box—to grow, pick, and pack large plums as it did to grow, pick, and pack small plums, and if buyers were paying twelve dollars per box for large plums and six dollars per box for small plums, then the advantage was obvious.

  This transition from volume to size was one factor that was breaking up the hegemony of the Big Eight and creating a great flourishing of smaller, independent packing sheds who wanted more control over when and how they packed their fruit. Those who saw what was happening on the retail side and reacted accordingly were able to do fairly well during this time. But in the late 1980s, much of the industry was still growing for volume, and so record plum crops were coming out of California. Most of those plums were small. The result was that a lot of growers were losing money.

  On top of that, the California plum industry itself was falling apart. There were complaints among growers and packers that the standards for quality and size were being enforced arbitrarily. Certain packers were hovered over and inspected almost box-by-box while other packers were allowed to ship what ever they wanted. Not only were some growers fed up with the way inspections were being carried out, a group of them was frustrated with the idea of inspections altogether. They channeled this frustration toward the California Tree Fruit Agreement. The CTFA had been created during the New Deal as part of the “federal marketing order” movement. Marketing orders are strange hybrid things—trade associations that act a little like miniature, semiprivate governments. They were created to give farmers of certain crops the power to set standards for and collectively promote the crops they grew. When a federal marketing order for a certain crop was created in a certain area, anyone who grew that crop in that area was automatically included in the marketing order. Participation, much to the displeasure of many an independent-minded farmer, was usually mandatory.

  In 1933, three marketing orders were enacted for the California peach, plum, and nectarine growers, and the CTFA was created as an umbrella organization to manage them. Each crop has its own central committee within the CTFA, and there are also subcommittees that oversee research budgets and quality standards. But the main function of the CTFA has always been to promote California’s plums, peaches, and nectarines to consumers, and the money for that generic promotion comes from the growers themselves; for every box of fruit shipped, growers must pay what’s called an assessment fee. Each arm of the CTFA sets its own assessment fee—usually in the ballpark of twenty cents per box—and then revisits the amount every several years when it holds a referendum on whether or not to continue with the marketing order.

  The CTFA was an easy target: With the glut of lackluster plums, the shift from volume to size, the market in the gutter, and the widespread belief that inspections were done unfairly, dissatisfaction with the marketing order was at an all-time high. In the late 1980s, a small group of growers began withholding their assessment fees from the CTFA to protest against the size standards. Eventually, the group sued the USDA, arguing both that the standards for peaches, plums, and nectarines were “arbitrary and capricious” and that their being forced to participate in the federal plum marketing order’s generic promotion was a violation of their free speech. Why, these growers argued, should they be forced to pay for generic promotion of all plums—promotion that essentially put forth the idea that all plums were equally good—when the goal of their in-house promotion was to convince customers that their plums were better than everybody else’s? Weren’t they being forced to compete against themselves? For an interesting glimpse into what a Court of Appeals judge called “one of the more byzantine, and all-encompassing, areas of federal regulation,” read the summary of Wileman Brothers and Elliott vs. Espy. (Michael Espy was the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture at the time.) The same judge wrote in his opinion: “The complexity of the legal proceedings in this case have been matched by their prolixity.” Eventually, a variant of the case made it to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled five to four against the growers.

  There had been lawsuits against other marketing orders in the past (the mushroom case was a doozy), but this was a defining moment for California stone fruit growers, who had, for the most part, always operated according to the principle that the rising tide lifts all boats. With the Wileman lawsuit out in the open and the growing realization among growers that the quality of what you packed was becoming as much a factor as the quantity, there was a prevailing sense that when the tide took you out, no one else would be there to make sure that you had battened down your own hatches.

  And so, in the early 1990s, when plum growers were presented with the usually routine vote on whether to continue participating in the federal marketing order, they acted on their dissatisfaction and voted themselves out of the CTFA and into a voluntary growers’ association. In so doing, they freed themselves up from minimum-size standards and the per-box assessment fee. Freedom, at least, was the idea. But the secession was a flop. Without a central command, the
plum industry lacked the ability to report even to itself the nature and volume of its pack-outs. Plum growers saw an immediate decline in both the overall volume of the crop and the average price per box they got from retailers. So a couple of years later, in 1994, the plum growers repented and returned to the CTFA. This time, instead of resuscitating the federal marketing order that had been in place before the break, they set up a state marketing order that looked, smelled, and felt much like the initial arrangement, only this time they worked with oversight from the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) instead of the USDA.

  Soon after the creation of the state marketing order, another plum grower filed another complaint, this time against the CDFA, citing a similar restriction on free speech, but according to the California constitution, not the U.S. one. The case made it to the Supreme Court of California, which sided with the grower and remanded the case back to the lower court, which had based its earlier decision on the Wileman ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. That case, which was eventually settled out of court, was filed by a family of stone fruit growers named Gerawan.

  All this drama fostered a general sense among many California stone fruit growers that plums were no longer worth the trouble. A joke that still circulates summed up the ill will. “A peach is like your mother: It’s always there for you. A nectarine is like your girlfriend: It’s something really dear and special. A plum is like the harlot down the street: It’ll screw you every time.” Growers were sick of being screwed by plums. They were a headache. Plum was a dirty word.

  So it was not the best time for the Zaigers to begin introducing a line of plum hybrids. But that’s exactly what they did.