US: New Apple Could Bring Zesty Royalties To 'U'

It started as a blind date. The mother had the remarkable name: State Fair. The father, less showy, was known simply as Minnesota 1691. The birth of Zestar, an apple flowering in Minnesota orchards this year for the first time in large numbers, is a 34-year tale of pollination, tree production and, finally, fruit.

"This is their one child prodigy," said James Luby, a professor at the University of Minnesota's Department of Horticultural Science and a part of the team behind the Zestar's development.

The Zestar -- a contraction of zesty and star -- is the latest in a string of apple varieties developed at the university. Its creators have high hopes, because the Zestar follows the Honeycrisp, a blockbuster apple that has become one of the top sellers in the country and generated millions of dollars in revenue for the university.

Nearly all of the major orchards in the state have at least a few of the trees, said Jim Brikholz, vice president of the Minnesota Apple Growers Association. The mating of State Fair and Minnesota 1691 took place 34 years ago at the Fruit Breeding Barn, now a part of the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. It was 1972, the year of "Pong," and Nixon's trip to China, J. Edgar Hoover's funeral and the year Mark Spitz won seven Olympic gold medals.

The quest to find an apple tree hardy enough to withstand Minnesota winters and flower again the next summer dates even further back -- to the founding of the University of Minnesota in 1851, said Cecil Stushnoff, one of the early Zestar plant breeders at the U of M and now a professor at Colorado State University, Fort Collins.

"Horace Greeley used to write articles to encourage people to go west, but he wrote, 'Go west, but don't go to Minnesota, because you can't grow apples there,' " Stushnoff said. "There were a lot of proud Scandinavian folks who said, 'We'll see about that."'

Even in the age of biotechnology, a centuries-old system of breeding plants by dusting the pollen of one flower onto another by hand remains the best way to develop apple varieties. Genetic engineering allows scientists to change one trait at a time, a technique best for creating, say, disease-resistant crops. But apple scientists don't know which gene creates a crunchy apple, or which gene is responsible for tartness.

Apple flowers rely on insects and wind to carry pollen from one flower to another. Plant breeders do the pollinating by hand, then cover the flower with a waxy paper bag a few days before the flower opens, keeping insects out and controlling which flower gets which pollen, in effect choosing the parents of a new apple variety.

The subsequent fruit creates seeds that are collected in the fall and cooled for three to four months to simulate winter, a dormant period for the apple seed. A plant breeder may make 10,000 crossings to get one good offspring, Luby said.

In this case, the effort didn't bear fruit until 1986. Zestar trees were first made available to growers in 1999. The trees may take up to seven years to produce large quantities of fruit. The Zestar apple, tangy, tart and sweet, was named the most flavorful by a tasting panel in the 1990s. It was even tastier than the Honeycrisp, Luby said. That's when scientists began to see dollar signs.

The university owns the Zestar patent, licensing nurseries to sell the apple tree and collecting a royalty for each tree sold. The Honeycrisp apple, for example, has generated $4 million in its lifetime, making it one of the 10 highest revenue producers at the university. (The university's most-profitable invention is an HIV drug sold under the commercial name Ziagen, among others, that has grossed $200 million.)

Apple season started early this year, thanks to an unusually warm summer. Some of the orchards that grow the Zestar said Tuesday that they were sold out already. "I've been chewing on those for five or six years," said John Leadholm, the owner of Fischer's Croix Farm Orchard in Hastings. "Now there are some apples, so it's time to talk about it a bit."

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