Red, juicy, heat resistant: The hunt for a climate-proof apple

Summary (from the article)

Pomologists know how to grow the perfect fruit. But as the world gets hotter, can they save it from extinction?

It's also an interesting insight into the industry (the photos are kind of amazing)

More accurately, one is in and thousands are out. The difficulty with apples is that, like humans, they are heterozygous: any two offspring of the same parents are very different. Even the seeds of one apple will produce different varieties, probably none of which would taste very good. Left to their own devices, apples are brilliant at biological diversity and terrible at reliably producing what people want to consume. That makes finding the right apple a game of very large numbers.

It could drive you mad if you thought about it too much. No breeder can taste every apple from every tree, and they might easily walk past the one that millions would want to eat — the original Honeycrisp tree was discarded. When I asked why he had picked a particular fruit to taste, Volz replied: “Breeder’s intuition.” He smiled, but it is true. Apple breeders need a sixth sense.

But it can cost €40,000 per hectare to buy new trees, pay patent and brand royalties, install metered irrigation and protect the fruit from sunburn and hail with netting. Until now, there has been little financial incentive to make such a heavy investment in Lleida [region of Spain] because growers are not charged by the litre for their water. This year’s drought might be the necessary shock. Instead of less water, it showed that there could be none.

Despite centuries of experience, much of apple breeding was guesswork until quite recently. No one really knew what was going on inside the fruit’s genes to produce new varieties. That changed in 2010, with the first sequencing of the genome of a single Golden Delicious.

Detailed genomic mapping of apple has provided scientific confirmation of something that is intuitively obvious: many apples are closely related. Tutti’s grandparents are Braeburn, Gala, Splendour and Gala again. “Tutti is remarkably inbred. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s how a lot of crop breeding is done,” says Nick Howard, a molecular apple breeder at the Dutch agriculture company Fresh Forward.
As the climate changes, and trees face more threats from pests and disease, questions are being raised about this lack of diversity. A study of 1,000 varieties at a US government germplasm repository in Geneva, New York, concluded that “Americans are eating apples largely from a single family tree”. It found that a few cultivars had been used repeatedly for breeding in an effort to select for red skin and crispness.

Reminds me a bit of how the Soviets were able to grow oranges in Siberia.