Of the thousands of apple varieties grown in the U.S., only a small handful are actually bought and sold on a large scale. They have familiar names, like Honeycrisp, Gala, Fuji, Granny Smith and Red Delicious. But these hugely commercially successful apple varieties tend to overshadow older, more unique varieties known as heirloom, or heritage, apples. Some of these apples are almost literally hidden, found in small orchards and sometimes growing in backyards or on roadsides. While less commercially viable, heritage apples have unique flavors, colors and textures, and their genetic information can be studied to make apples more resistant to disease and even to breed new varieties.
The Washington state legislature recently introduced a bill that would task Washington State University with establishing a heritage apple orchard program. If passed, the university would create a registry of heritage apple orchards, documenting rare or lost apples throughout the state and providing resources to orchards that grow them. We’re joined by Matthew Whiting, a tree fruit scientist at WSU, to hear more about the significance of heritage apples and what a heritage orchard program could mean for the country’s leading apple producer.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Of the thousands of apple varieties grown in the U.S., only a small handful are actually bought and sold on a large scale, and they have familiar names like Honeycrisp and Gala and Fuji and Red Delicious. These commercially successful apples tend to overshadow older, more unique varieties known as heirloom or heritage apples. Some of these rare apples are essentially hidden, growing in small orchards or backyards or along roadsides. A Washington state lawmaker recently introduced a bill intended to take those apples out of the shadows. It would establish a heritage apple orchard program at Washington State University and a registry of these orchards. Matthew Whiting is a professor of fruit tree physiology at WSU. He joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Matthew Whiting: Hey, good afternoon, Dave. Happy to join you.
Miller: How do you define heritage or heirloom apples?
Whiting: Yeah, well, there’s no explicit definition for that. You’ll find different definitions online. Essentially, they’re the varieties that you’ve never heard of. One way to think of it, they’re old. Many have never made any commercial significance. And there’s a tremendous amount of genetic material that’s just never been accessed as they’ve been essentially lost.
Miller: Is it possible some of them simply never even had names to begin with?
Whiting: Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. If you think about it, every seed from an apple is a unique new cultivar and many of these have just arisen from people tossing an apple out the car on their trips and travels over the years and they rise up in the hedgerows and the side roads of rural Washington. Clearly those are not cultivars that would have ever been named or registered.
Miller: This is a key point, right, because if I have a Honeycrisp for lunch today and I take some of the seeds and I make seedlings out of them, I’m not gonna get Honeycrisp. I’m gonna get something else, I have no idea what I’m gonna get.
Whiting: Absolutely right, that’s Honeycrisp that’s been open pollinated. You won’t know what the pollen source was, which is 50% of the genetics of all of those seedlings, and just like siblings in a family, they’re all genetically distinct. They’re unique, absolutely.
Miller: What makes an apple commercially viable?
Whiting: Oh, wow. There’s a few key traits. They often relate from a farmer’s profitability or sustainability point of view, to the quantity and the quality of fruit. Are they consistent producers? Do they produce high yields sustainably? And how about the quality of those fruit? Does it meet consumer demands for texture and sweetness and acidity? We’re also very interested in apples that store in long-term storage cold conditions reasonably well.
And another aspect is just simply that they’re easy to produce from the farmer’s point of view. There’s a lot that goes into growing high-quality apples that you see at the shelves that are never really understood by the average consumer, but from the farmer’s point of view, they have to be relatively simple to grow and produce.
Miller: Is that the case for all the apples we would see in the supermarket, that all of them at this point, they’re there because among other things, they’re easy to produce?
Whiting: Not necessarily, no. In fact, probably one of the more popular cultivars now is Honeycrisp and its several offspring, and it is notoriously difficult to farm. Growers in Washington state can lose up to 50% of their crop in the field, in the orchard, due to physiological disorders. It’s a very tricky one that you wouldn’t know when you get the bag at the grocery store.
Miller: Fifty percent? Wow.
Whiting: Absolutely, it is shocking, but it is one of the most difficult apples to successfully produce high yields of good quality fruit.
Miller: Is that one of the reasons that it can be more expensive than some of the others?
Whiting: Yes, I think that should be part of it. But also, I think it’s just generated a lot of interest. It’s got good notoriety, which is well earned, right? It’s a beautiful piece of fruit. It’s a wonderful eating experience. So there is that as well.
Miller: What are some of the wonderful qualities of the unknown apples that people should be aware of?
Whiting: That’s a great question, and in fact I can’t really answer that entirely, can I? The short answer is we don’t really know, but there’s so much more diversity though in key apple traits that you think about whether it’s a Red Delicious or a Golden or a Granny or a Fuji or a Cosmic Crisp. They’re related to the aroma, first of all, there’s a tremendous amount of diversity in aroma volatiles that are produced by different apples. And then you think about the key traits related to the flavor, that’s primarily sweetness, the sugar profiles, the acidity, then that complements that sweetness, and the various acids that contribute to a different types of acid profile.
There’s the texture, there’s the crunch, there’s even things like color, the skin color. There’s a full gamut from green Grannies to full bright red Fuji and Galas to all kinds of what we call bi-colored apples that have a greenish yellowish background with a beautiful red blush to them. So there’s so much, so much more to it.
Miller: The introduction of the bill that I mentioned in my intro, it suggests that there are not enough people finding or preserving these heritage apple trees. Have you found that to be true?
Whiting: Well, it’s really a passion project for several people, and it is important to know that there are national efforts underway to preserve regional and local heirloom apple cultivars around the nation. I have colleagues who participate very actively in these projects. It isn’t necessarily well known on the forefront of people’s minds, but it’s absolutely a passion project for many folks.
It is something I think it’s coming to the front now as we look at modern breeding programs and really, a funneling and a reduction in the genetic diversity oftentimes in these programs. If you look at the parents of the very popular commercial cultivars, there’s a short list of those that are used predominantly. And so, we do start to think a little bit about more what might be lost or might be accessible in some of these old heritage or heirloom types.
Miller: As you were describing that funneling, I was thinking about the English monarchy where there’s kind of, for lack of a better word, inbreeding over the years, and it seems like that’s partly what’s happening with apples. The markets have seen, people like these, so let’s just cross this one with this one. These are already successful and let’s give the people more of what they want.
Whiting: Absolutely, that’s the thinking, or at least traditionally it has been. My colleagues in genetics and breeding and genomics might certainly have a different opinion, but traditionally that has been the thought process. Well, this is a great apple, that’s a great apple, let’s take some pollen from that one and put it onto the flowers of this one, collect those seeds, which will all be siblings but uniquely different and see what we get.
Miller: There was a tree in Vancouver that was a descendant of a tree that was described as the grandmother of all modern apple cultivars. That tree was propagated before it died a couple of years ago, but is it possible that there are historically or genetically exciting apple trees that die before anybody gets a cutting?
Whiting: Yeah, it’s a bit depressing to admit, but that’s absolutely the case. It’s estimated that there were more than 20,000 distinct apple genotypes or cultivars if you go back 500 years, that played a role at some point. By rough estimates, half of those or more are now extinct. So that genetics, that pool is no longer available.
Miller: Would a lot of those have been, where humans cared about them because of cider as opposed to raw snacking?
Whiting: Definitely, definitely, and there’s a lot of interest in the specialty cider community and there tends to be in the dessert apple community, the large-scale commercial production of dessert apples. The cider industry has been a little bit ahead of the game in terms of understanding the significance and the traits that some of these more obscure, older cultivars can provide to a cider where they’re looking at acidity and tartness and bitterness and astringency and a lot more characters that can come out in the juice.
Miller: About a week ago, some of your colleagues at WSU gave members of the public their first chance to taste the latest new apple variety developed by your university. It’s called Sunflare, and because these things take time to actually grow commercially in orchards, it’ll be some number of years before we’ll see them in stores, but that’s, following Cosmic Crisp, that is the new WSU apple of the future. What role could heirloom apples play in commercial breeding efforts?
Whiting: That’s a great question, and Sunflare is a good example. The parents of Sunflare were Honeycrisp and Cripps Pink, and Cripps Pink is better known as Pink Lady, as a trademark for it. Those are two very well-known and very commercially successful apple cultivars. And so it’s a hybridization from those two that led to Sunflare. And in fact, that cross was made more than 30 years ago, and now we’re finally moving it towards commercialization. So it is a slow process.
Some of the things that my colleagues in genetics, genomics are very interested in with the heritage cultivars are other traits: possibly aroma, texture, but we’re also interested in traits that might be related to the production or ease of production aspect. It’s believed that there’s a lot of resistance to abiotic and biotic stressors in some of the older material that we don’t have in some of the newer cultivars.
Miller: Matthew Whiting, it was a pleasure talking with you. Thanks very much.
Whiting: My pleasure, Dave. Thank you.
Miller: Matthew Whiting is a professor of fruit tree physiology at Washington State University.
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