cc >> Welcome, everyone,
to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the UW Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension.
On behalf of those groups and our other partners, Wisconsin
Public Television, PLATO, and the Wisconsin Alumni
Association, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the
Lab. We do this every Wednesday
night, 50 times a year. Tonight, being right before
Thanksgiving, I'm delighted to be able to introduce to you
Brent McCown, who will be talking to us about the culture
and genetics of cranberries. Brent became a professor
emeritus this year in the Department of Horticulture in
the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, after having
served as a faculty member for over 39 years.
That's an occasion for gratitude.
[laughter] He's a former director of the
UW-Madison's Center for Integrative Agricultural
Systems, where he worked to develop resilient agriculture
and food systems. His research in plant breeding
has encompassed trees and shrubs, such as birch, viburnum,
and rhododendrons in addition to cranberries, as well as the
development of new crops for Wisconsin, including wine
grapes, hazelnuts, and new urban street trees.
He is undaunted by the chilly climate of cranberries, perhaps
as a result of his work from 1970-72, as a visiting scholar
at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of
Alaska in Fairbanks, and also, his work in 1969-71, as a
captain at the US Army Pole Region Research and Engineering
Laboratory, also in Fairbanks. He has received three degrees
from UW-Madison. His bachelor and masters in
horticulture in 1965 and 1967, and his PhD in botany in 1969.
It's one of the great things about working at a university,
and especially at this university, to have people who
have not only spent their entire lives here, but dedicated their
entire lives to the work of this university.
Please join me in welcoming Brent McCown.
[applause] >> Thank you, Tom.
Wow, what can I say, right? By the way, I hope this talk
is going to be a positive talk. We need something positive in
this world right now. So I tend to have a lot
of political raw humor. I can't do that now,
because we're on... [chuckles]
Who knows what the audience is anymore out there?
But this is the closest I can get anyway, without
getting ourselves in trouble. [indistinct]
Read the punch line? I'm your 401k, you mean?
Is that what you're talking about?
[laughter] The smallest one,
of course.
Okay, a little bit about myself. Tom has already done it, but let
me give an idea. I'm actually, because I was a TA
here for three years, I've actually taught, and an
associate lecturer, essentially, before that, I've actually
taught here more than 40 years. But that's okay.
When I was a professor, I spent a good set of my time teaching
undergraduates. I really like undergraduate
students. I spent a lot of time across the
campus in various undergraduate courses.
I still enjoy them, by the way. The other 40% of time was in
research, and Tom already talked about that.
You'll see some of that today. And the other part was something
that's very important on this campus, and most of you who are
retired faculty realize this, the shared governance system is
a very important element. I spent a lot of time on
zillions of committees across campus.
I'm retired now, but I still have two committees they won't
let me off of yet. I just came back from one
actually today. I was also director for the
Center of Integrative Agricultural Systems.
This is a unit that looks at sustainable, what's called now
"sustainable" agriculture. I don't quite like that word,
but nevertheless, organic agriculture, pasture-based
farming, especially cheeses, food systems, which is big now.
So that was very, very exciting. Quite diverse, I think, to say
the least.
If you want to get a hold of me, the best way to do it is email.
I'm not in my office that much anymore, so do it by email.
I access this, so feel free to do it any time you want to.
We're going to cover a little bit of aspects here, a little
bit about the background of cranberries.
How many of you know a lot about cranberries?
Nobody, by golly! Bright audience.
Something about cranberries and the Wisconsin economy.
You might be surprised by the current economic situation,
which is kind of in flux, like all of agriculture.
Something about the needs of the industry, and then those needs,
what they said they could use was part of the research that
I'll be exploring.
I'll spend most of the time on what those needs tried to do,
and that's creating the cranberry of the future.
We'll get into that in some detail.
Then we'll end up a little about where things might be going.
This is going to be kind of a broad based talk, that is, when
I'll talk about cranberries, there are a lot of lessons to be
learned here. One example, and Tom mentioned
it a little bit, is the cooperative nature of working
with not only colleagues at this university, but also with the
farmers, and the various other individuals that are actually
going to put these kinds of technologies into aspect.
The cranberry industry is a beautiful example of this kind
of interaction between university and the state.
Okay, cranberry is a native plant.
Everybody knows that? [chuckles]
Actually, cranberries is native across all the northern
circum-polar region, around, but they're not all the same
cranberries. There are subspecies.
Related to blueberries, lingonberries, and
huckleberries. Lingonberries are the European,
berries all over the place, kind of stuff.
I think the cranberry industry says this is one of the few
native crops that we can grow commercially in the area.
What's another one? Corn?
No, that's native to Mexico, not so much in this area, but we
won't go into that. Cranberry, actually the plant
is not very competitive. I'll show you some of the
slides. You'll see that.
It's a plant that has adapted to be well suited for areas that
don't have a lot of competition. These are areas that don't have
a lot of nutrients and have a lot of stresses.
If nothing else grows there, it's cranberry, as well as some
other aspects. So it goes best in acid peat
lands, higher dense soils, very low pH conditions,
cold, short growing season, low soil nutrients.
You'll see that when you see the growers.
I'll put this together. It's also a medicinal plant.
Anybody have a prescription for taking cranberries?
They're prescribed if you have any urinary tract infections,
that kind of stuff. Cranberries is a well-known
aspect. Any bacteria, urinary
infections, tooth decay, it comes out that more and more
research is finding that it does help with plaque build up and
gum tissue kind of problems. Antioxidants.
Who knows what antioxidants do? Well, it's got a lot of
antioxidants in there anyway, situation.
One of the more exciting aspects coming out is it's
anti-inflammatory. That is, slowing down swelling
and inflammation aspect. Very important, it's turning
out, for things like Alzheimer's disease, and brain infections,
as well as heart and the vascular system.
So, all kinds of potentials. Okay, a long history in
Wisconsin. Cranberry was used by the native
people and settlers. I don't have time to go into
this, but there are some really interesting stories about how
the native peoples actually used this crop.
It was heavily used. Commercially produced since
before statehood. It's probably one of our first
crops the native culture produced in Wisconsin.
Thirteen commercial beds that we know of right now that are still
more than 100 years old. They've been producing
cranberries for more than 100 years on the same piece of land.
Does that tell you something about this plant?
It's a winner, man. Now, there's about 200+ growers.
This goes back and forth a little bit.
Interestingly, most of these are family operations, so family
farms and many generations, two or three generations, kind of
stuff, passed down. A very important aspect, as far
as I'm concerned. And in 20 counties.
Did anybody look at the website to see the county?
Where do you see cranberries? You've got to go up that way,
right? There you go.
There are two major areas up in the northwest part of the state,
central, northcentral, northwest part of the state, and then in
the central part of the state. The biggest counties, by far,
are Wood County, kind of aspects, the central part of
Wood County, Jackson County and Monroe County.
Wood County is probably the cranberry capital of the world
situation. What's unique about these
counties, when we're talking about economic development
versus all the other counties that are more southern?
What's special about these counties?
They're farming. They're a little bit of farm,
not necessarily highly productive farming.
The soils there get a little skeptical.
We're in economic stressed areas, in many cases.
Cranberries are really important in these areas, because you'll
see the value of this plant. It's a very important element
for people's jobs and money, in a very important part of the
state that needs this kind of activity.
Do a lot of other things at cranberry marshes besides give
me some cranberries? This is part of the family
thing. They always like to show off,
so there's the cranberry wakeboarder situation.
By the way, the water in these marshes is cold.
So, this guy is strong, but this is even more strong.
[laughter] She's laying in there.
Got a good picture, anyway, but boy that's cold water.
That's about 40-45 degrees. These are strong people,
about as strong as the plant, probably.
Whoops. Sorry.
Let me go back. I pushed the wrong button.
I don't have my glasses on, see that's my problem.
[laughs] There we are...
Okay, moving on. Obviously, researchers also
get out there. [laughs]
And the cranberry growers always laugh at the researchers,
because we always put a lot of flags out and stakes out, and
everything else, that kind of destroy their beautiful marshes.
But nevertheless, it's a glorious place to work.
You'll see why. One thing that's an interesting
place to work is we're up in some of the most interesting
natural areas of Wisconsin. There was one marsh that I
worked on for the last three years, that has had nesting
whooping cranes right there. Right, you know, in sight
of my research box sitting at the site.
It's a very interesting area.
Okay, again the association between growers and the
University of Wisconsin has been very long-term, many, many, many
years, many decades going on. The growers themselves are very
well educated for basic, northern farmer-type growers.
They have a high respect for education.
I don't know how many of the growers' children I've had in my
undergraduate classes here at the university taking degrees at
a four-year college. So, they're interesting.
Beautiful people to work with. They're extremely innovative.
You'll see that. The cranberry, how many of you
have eaten a raw cranberry?
What's it taste like? [laughs]
Well, it kind of puckers you a little bit.
Is that right? It's one of the most important
fruit crops. It's the most important fruit
crop in Wisconsin. It's becoming a very important
fruit crop around the world. So this is innovation, taking
something and making it into a valuable product.
Strong trust between UW, that the cranberry growers have.
They've actually put this money into this, which was kind of
interesting to see. This is what we try to use as an
example for other farm networks and groups to do, to come forth
with. They have a check-off,
a check-off list. For every unit of production of
cranberry, and they do barrels, it's 100-pound barrel kind of
stuff, there's a certain amount of money that comes out of the
cranberry grower's pocket and goes to a special fund in the
state. That goes to the Wisconsin
Cranberry Board, who distributes that money to things like
research, and that kind of stuff.
So, they're paying for a good part of the work, directly out
of all the growers. They're interested.
Very successful. Whoops.
The other aspect is endowed professorship.
I was fortunate enough to be endowed by a professorship in
the cranberry industry. That's how I got into this work
about 13 years ago, kind of stuff.
They also have a couple student scholarships at the university
all the time. So, very much into the
educational aspects of the system.
Okay, this is a cranberry plant. Anybody ever really looked at a
cranberry plant before? [laughs]
A very interesting plant, actually.
It's interesting in a number of ways, but the first place, it's
got two major growing parts. See these winding stems?
So if you plant a cranberry, a small little plant of a
cranberry, the first thing it does is end up having these
called kind of like strawberry runners.
Shoots will take of along the ground.
All they do is go long, six, eight, 12 feet.
I depends on the nutrients it has.
This allows it to establish itself on open land or ground,
or something like that. These root into the soil.
The next thing that happens are these little shoots that come
out of each of the axillaries of this cranberry.
They develop what we call these uprights, these little
independent uprights. The uprights only grow one to
two inches a year. They're the ones that bear all
the fruit. So we have the runners and the
uprights, kind of situation. A very interesting plant
biologically. First, if you look at this
slide, you can see several things that are of note.
First place, what's the color of the leaves?
They're red, okay? Cranberry leaves are evergreen,
like rhododendrons. They're broadleaf evergreen
leaves. This is a plant that is just
classical for these plants that grow in these low nutrient, hot,
acid conditions. These evergreen leaves are just
very common for these kinds of plant situations.
And what they do is put out the red color during cold times of
the year, so late fall. Right now, they're all red up
north, all during the winter. Then during the spring,
gradually this color goes back to green, situation.
This is a protective measure. The pigments here protect these
leaves from being sunburned during the high sun days in the
winter and early fall, okay? Very interesting.
The second thing to look at is see these little--
I'm supposed to use this pointer.
On the top of each of the these stems, see that little bud?
That's the flower bud for next year.
Every one of these uprights, not every one, a lot of these
uprights will have flower buds form now.
That will develop the next growth of the upright into
flowers for next year, situation.
I'll get into that more, because it's real important to the
biology of these plants. Okay, there's your upright
fruiting. That's all one year's growth,
okay? So, essentially the flowers are
at the base of this new shoot for this year.
The flowers are on the basal part of it.
Then, there's vegetative growth above that.
Then at the top, there'll be another bud for next year.
Okay? Situation.
So that's the upright kind of situation.
A very interesting plant. These kinds of little fruiting
shoots are not uncommon for a lot of woody crops.
Apples have this. They're called apple spurs.
It's where your apples get grown.
Your pears have that. This is essentially a small,
cranberries get no bigger than about six to eight inches, kind
of stuff. Yet, it's got all the
physiology and development of a big tree situation, but it's all
on this small little plant. Beautiful to study with, right?
Okay, there's another example of an upright.
This is a very unusual upright, though, because until we did
some breeding, and other people started to do some breeding, and
development of new cultivars, this was something we had not
seen. You would not see an upright
that had fruit and a flower bud. I don't know how many of you
grow apples, or pears, or something, but a common of the
old cultivars, a common trait was alternate bearing.
That is, they would bear a real heavy crop this year, wouldn't
set any flower buds. Next year, there would be very
few apples, and then it would set another big crop the year
after that. That's alternate bearing.
These uprights would do that. Now we've been able to get some
traits in it, where this one is very common, where it will set
fruit and set flower buds for the next year, which makes for
much more uniform production in the bed.
Okay, why is it called cranberry?
Because it's a crane flower, like a little crane sitting
there. This is an example of the
flower, a close-up of the cranberry flower.
That little drop is nectar sitting there, so these are bee
pollinated or insect pollinated. Just like most of the fruit
crops, when these things are in full flower, the growers also
bring in all kinds of bee hives, etc., to pollinate,
so same thing, kind of pollination.
That's a native bog marsh area, which has native cranberries
in it. The one person close to us
is a student. The one next to him, in a blue
shirt, is the actual cranberry grower.
I think he's a fourth generation in this particular family
situation. Notice what they're in.
They've got wader boots on. This is water.
They're standing in water. So these cranberries,
essentially necessarily don't grow in the water, but what they
do quite often is grow on little high hummocks that are there.
Or more importantly, if there's sphagnum moss, they'll grow on
top of the sphagnum moss and follow that.
They don't like to be in the water all the time.
But they like to be in this kind of a wet area.
There's a cranberry marsh that's kind of--
I love this picture. You don't see these much
anymore. They've all been straightened
out. But that's what I call a lovely
cranberry bog. This is out of Massachusetts.
There are several things to point out here.
The first thing, see all these little kind of sprinklers, these
things here? These are all sprinkler heads.
So cranberries do not have drought tolerance, and because
they're in this managed area, they like to be watered quite
often. Water management besides
watering, and I'll look at some other area of water, water
management is extremely important for cranberry
production. That's why these particular
areas are really important, because they have a lot of water
associated with it. The second thing to notice is
this is all dark. It's all dark because the leaves
are in that red coloration. This is an early spring
situation. Thirdly, notice the areas around
it. Cranberry growers, for every
acre a cranberry grower has in production, there's eight to ten
acres that are natural wetlands, because they need to have this
water source continually to supply their own needs.
So actually, the cranberry growers are very heavy land
managers of very important resources in Wisconsin.
Interesting game. Beautiful fishing.
Beautiful hunting. Some of the reservoirs of the
cranberry growers are just full of so much fish you almost have
to pick them up. Not quite like that.
Beautiful, clean clear water, so it's awesome.
Okay, there's a modern marsh in Wisconsin.
This is a bed that was planted. This is one-year-old vines.
They will begin to take off for one year.
This is one of the largest cranberry grower areas,
Cranberry Creek, up near the Wisconsin Rapids area.
The thing to note here is the design of the modern bed.
It costs anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 an acre to put in
these beds. They're laser leveled.
They have all kinds of sand added to the bottom so they have
good drainage there. All kinds of access to water
resources and flow. That water resource is managed,
so it flows beautifully from one spot to the other.
So very high cost of getting this established.
But once you get it in, like this, this is probably one of
the best designed systems that you can find.
By the way, that's another cranberry grower.
She actually manages a marsh that's the second largest in all
of Wisconsin, okay, so women are out there.
[chuckles] Very good, by the way.
Okay, go back to this thing. How would you harvest that
fruit? This is about that tall.
That's three acres, right there. They've got 50 of those beds.
You have about two weeks to harvest it.
You're going to pick it by hand? [laughs]
If you are, you're going to be very cold out there!
Okay, the old way they used to do it is by hand, actually.
This is called a cranberry rake. You essentially would get into
this. You'd partially flood that
marsh, that bed, so that it raises up a little bit.
Then you'd go through and you'd rake all this up.
In fact, the very high quality cranberries that you get that
are fresh market cranberries are done with this kind of, there
are better ways than to do it by hand, but close to this,
or hand-picked, because they're better quality berries.
They're not injured for fresh market, but they're not bruised
enough with this-- The cranberry growers in
Wisconsin invented a new way to do it.
This is what made the industry. It's based on what?
The numbers on the bottom are not important.
This is a cranberry fruit cut open.
What's unique about it. It's hollow.
What does that mean? It floats, by golly.
Fully innovation way to do it. If these fruit float, let's
flood that marsh, knock them off those vines, and they'll just
float up to the top. By golly, this has made the
Wisconsin industry. There's an aerial photograph of
a cranberry bed. Those white things are what they
call beaters. They go along and very gently
beat the vines a little bit. All these fruit come off.
There's your cranberries for Thanksgiving.
Cool, huh? Brilliant.
But, what's it depend upon? A lot of water, a good source of
water. All the cranberry areas are
located in areas that have a lot of water flowing through them.
If you look at the water management of cranberry growing
areas, it's a state managed area, and there's water from
one spot, and it flows through all the different marshes,
and all the native areas, etc. It's a massive flow of water.
They've used it for a part-time situation.
It flows on beyond them. Pretty cool.
So, there's the beater. It's essentially an egg beater
kind of thing. It lightly beats it up.
All the fruit comes to the top. Anybody been there during this
time? You should get up there.
It's one of the finest pictures of Wisconsin in the fall, okay?
Not only do you have this, and sometimes you'll get beds that
are ten acres, just solid cranberry color sitting there,
and all around them are these natural areas with fall color,
etc., and the geese are going over, etc., it's just
phenomenal. Besides all the visitors from
Minnesota are coming down, so you have all kinds of things
to see! Human and vice versa.
It's well worth exploring. Okay, then they corral all those
berries to get them up to a conveyor belt.
That goes into a truck. The truck then moves off
to a processing plant. I think we have three processing
plants now in Wisconsin. Then the cranberries are made
into a sellable product and stored.
Okay, current economic situation.
Again, Wisconsin's number one fruit crop.
About 18,000 acres, 120,000 acres of managed land
for each of those 18,000 acres. These are land managers, very
important. They're very proud of this.
About $350 million, plus or minus impact, it depends on the
year. But man, for these counties,
it's very important. Even more important, 7,000 jobs.
These are people that are living in the area.
These are not people who have come up just for these jobs.
These are all native areas. Market, ten percent fresh,
frozen and canned berries. Most all of it goes to?
Good old juice. Except that's changing.
What's the big change? Good old craisins, okay.
A very important product. I'll give 'em to you
in a little bit. Good old dried cranberries.
Okay, very high value crop. Grossed about $8,000 per acre.
Again, it depends on what the value is.
This will vary per year, etc., but that's average for this kind
of stuff. But remember, it costs $30,000+
to establish this thing. Very high risk crop,
potentially. Until the late '70s, the supply
often was limiting. So that just created all kinds
of incentive to try to expand the number of acres that were
being produced in Wisconsin areas.
That's occurred. Production in Wisconsin has
increased steadily in the last decade.
We've had about a third increase in acreage.
So, successful. What's the potential?
That typical agricultural thing, over-production.
We'll see what happens. Increase in production also
occurred nationally, by the way. We're not the only ones that
produce cranberries. Both the coasts, west coast is
pretty minor, except for in Canada.
Canada is becoming a larger producer all the time.
If you ask most Americans where cranberries are produced, what
would they say? Massachusetts.
[blows raspberries] [laughs]
No way! But historically, and actually,
that's where Ocean Spray headquarters is located.
Increasing competition with juice markets makes it a lot
more competitive. Remember, a good percentage of
the cranberries go to juice. How many different juices
can you see on the market? All kinds of juices, all kinds
back and forth, so there's all kinds of competition for juice.
A real interesting aspect to look at.
Continue to have difficulty balancing supply and demand,
simple agriculture, right? Nothing new about that.
Typical of many agricultural products.
This is something I've seen twice in the 25 years I've been
working with cranberries. There's a marketing order for
cranberries. That is a group that gets
together nationally and says we've got too many cranberries,
if we produce all these cranberries, we're going to end
up with some major economic stress to the farmers.
So, then they put an order saying you can't sell 20% of
your crop, or something like that, okay?
This doesn't often happen, but it happens occasionally.
So this is what we see. All these cranberries dumped on
the side. It's terrible to see.
No lessons there. A new factor is off-shore,
are huge. Craisins have increased
the shipment, the demand for off-shore demand
for cranberries, hugely. Japan, France, etc., really love
craisins. They really do.
We're the ones that produce them at the moment.
Okay, so that's the basics of the industry then.
The kind of question we had, especially when I got this
endowment, this professorship, what can we do for you?
You know? There's been all kinds of,
especially the Extension people have been very good at working
through, you know, insect control and weed control, and
all that kind of stuff. But what can I do for you?
This is all being done already, right?
So, we went through and talked to them quite a bit.
Of course, the first thing they say, well, I'd like to increase
yields versus our inputs. Any farmer says that, right?
Big deal. Add valuable product.
That is, can we add some characteristics and traits to
cranberries that will increase their marketability to other
markets, craisins being an example.
That situation. And continue to decrease the
impact on the environment. They're in very sensitive areas.
There's an example. [laughs]
Cool picture, huh? They're all around.
This is not unusual, by the way. You see them up there during
harvest season. These are critical areas.
Originally, the marshes were actually destroying very good
wetlands, prime wetlands. That was originally back in the
early 1900s, kind of stuff. No longer are cranberry beds put
into major wetlands at all. They're put into higher areas,
kind of situation. In fact, most of the cranberry
beds I've seen put in, people might call it a wet area, but
it's too scrub. It's scrub oak.
There's very little wildlife around on it at all.
But nevertheless, there are these sensitive areas because of
all the water moving through. It's very important to realize.
Okay, so this whole area is managed with water flowing
through it. So one of the major design
things is how you manage these water characteristics, and what
do we use water for? We use it for irrigation during
the summer, during the growth period.
Any idea what else we use water for in cranberries?
Harvest, of course, we've got to flood it up.
The other thing that's interesting about cranberries is
they're not very cold hardy.
They're native to northern Wisconsin.
Why aren't they cold hardy? They don't like winter.
Duh. [laughs]
So, how can they survive up in northern Wisconsin
in native areas? [inaudible replies]
Well, that's what they use, but how do the cranberries
themselves survive? Snow.
Snow is the blanket up there. They are in low areas,
and snow accumulates. So they grow in these low areas
because the snow makes a beautiful blanket.
So the growers-- exactly, you're right.
In the winter, when it's supposed to get cold up there.
It's not cold yet. When the ground begins to freeze
a little bit, the growers will gradually flood each of these
beds. Ice will form on each one of
them, and eventually, all these cranberries will be completely
under ice. That protects them from all this
wind and changes in cold and stress, which you might have
during winter. They survive beautifully that
way. Again, innovative Wisconsin
innovative farmers. Cool.
Very unique. Okay, so we'll be going out now,
so what do we do to try to help a little bit, this industry.
Again, this was 15-20 years ago, okay, remember that.
One thing that we got called on often was that by golly, you
know, Brent, I tell ya, we produce beautiful cranberries,
there's a lot of crops, really high quality, but we can't
compete with the east and west coasts for special markets.
The reason being is that they produce cranberries that have
higher color. They have a longer growing
season than we do. Why do you produce cranberries?
Color is probably 99% why you produce the cranberry, right,
that situation. So these west coasts, because
they had longer growing seasons, the fruit would stay mature
longer, and would have much higher contents of these
pigments, than Wisconsin would have.
Potentially, because we had the heavy winters coming in, we're
not coastal, we had to make sure we harvested those things before
everything froze, otherwise you'd destroy the crop.
So we had to harvest them a little bit earlier, okay?
Ah-ha, that sounds like something I can work on, since I
came from Alaska. [chuckles]
So Wisconsin has quite a disadvantage.
I said before that, our short growing season compared to the
coasts. One objective we had was to
develop a highly colored, early maturing cranberry
for Wisconsin. The other one is--
Whoops, darn it. Sorry about that.
I think I'll put my glasses on.
Let me just go up...
So, there we go. The other aspect, of course,
is this environmental aspect. The environmental aspect was
primarily, the biggest problem that they were concerned about
at that period of time, was that they had to use some pesticides
to control the insects and the weeds.
But there was all this water moving through all the time.
That's a sign of potential problems, okay?
So we said, well, gee, maybe we could find some way to develop
the ability to use some of the new pesticides that were being
formed that were much more environmentally kind, not the
heavy duty workers, kind of stuff, and make it worthwhile.
We'd do all this, of course, while increasing yields.
You hope. So, we used classical plant
breeding for the fruit color. But we didn't know how to do
much breeding of cranberries in a relatively short time.
We had to develop the techniques.
I'm just going to run through this real quickly.
These are cranberries grown in pots in a greenhouse.
We said, boy, you know, this is a problem.
You use a cranberry plant, you're going to cross it,
it takes a year to get the seed, there's a dormant seed.
And to germinate, it takes another three to five years for
that plant to flower. I don't know if I'll be around!
[laughs] There's ten years of testing.
We'll make this thing go as fast as we can, so we decided we'd do
all the breeding in the greenhouse, and we'd take the
parents we wanted, put them in pots in the greenhouse,
and then do the crossing in the greenhouse, very nicely.
That saved us one year, at least, right there.
Also, it's much easier to do pollination of cranberries in
the green house than it is on the bottom here with this wind
blowing around, and the gnats and mosquitos in your face.
These are the fruit from a cross.
We developed, you realize what's called microculture, that is,
it's sterile, in vitro culture of plants, used quite often in
the horticulture industry for multiplying plants quite a bit.
That's what you see. Those are jars, essentially,
that are sterile inside. We take the seeds off these
fruits before they mature, before they got dormant.
We'd sterilize them, the surface of them, put them in the special
media that grows plants, and we'd germinate very quickly,
right in those bottles sitting right there.
The advantage of this was that they're all clean,
they all have 100% germination. The other advantage was that
we had those permanently in storage.
We didn't have to worry about keeping those plants alive.
They were just, we could take those jars and just
reculture them all the time. Really cool.
This microculture, we developed that for the industry.
This is all sterile, with hoods. Those are the kinds of number of
individual plants that you can have in these kind of things.
It went very well. Once you said, okay, I want to
now get some plants out in the field again, how do I do that?
I take these little shoots. They're called microculture.
These are micro-shoots with micro-propagation and
micro-cuttings. Anyway, you take that little
cutting off, you root it, you put it into something that you
put in the field, and you plant it in the field.
Really cool. So there's an example of all
these little plants that came out.
This is probably one particular, in each flat is probably one
particular cross that we did, that we wanted to see what was
going on. We then went back into the field
and started planting them. Now, there are no Wisconsin
cranberry research farms.
Where do we have to work? In the growers' fields.
Talk about cooperation? I mean, we're talking about
very, very valuable property here.
For a while, I had 10-15 acres of plants, contributed by
growers. Cool, huh.
Very valuable. Of course, I hope we showed them
the benefits of this. So anyway, there it is.
There's one of the fields. Those are all individual
seedlings from a particular cross.
You have to let them grow up. It takes about two or three
years before they start producing something.
You can get some idea and valuation of their ability to
survive pests and diseases, and fruit color, and vigor, and all
this kind of stuff. You go through and you select
them. So, use classical plant breeding
parents, high yielding, average color.
You have two parents that we really chose.
One was a high-yielding, average color hybrid.
This a cultivar called Stevens. It's been around forever.
It was the most highly planted cranberry in the United States,
that situation. Then there was a native
cranberry selection that we liked to grow, but it was a real
tough plant to grow, but gorgeous color.
I thought well, gee, maybe if we combine that, we'll combine this
ability-- Stevens was grown because it
was easy to grow, but it didn't have the color in Wisconsin.
The other one was beautiful color, but it was a bitch
to grow. So, put them together and maybe
two and two make four, if we're lucky.
[laughs] Okay, so here we are.
Parent two is the Stevens. This is harvested in
September or October. You can see how color increases
with time, situation. Parent one is the native plant.
Notice how much more color it has in both periods of time.
The hybrid seedlings, there's two examples of hybrid
seedlings. We had hundreds of seedlings.
These are two examples to give you an idea of differences.
Some of them turned out to be even whiter, with less color
than is typical with Stevens. But the one in the middle,
yeah! And we had a number of these
that had a beautiful, dark red color, beautiful sized fruit.
Actually, they tasted better than the other ones.
I've got some here if you want to taste them.
So, we were able to develop and select for this high coloration.
Notice in September, we still have very good color.
That's early. Most cranberries are harvested
in early October. This is going to be very
important, because it turns out that as we increase production,
we have, and most cranberries are harvested in a period of two
to three weeks, that situation, but we have only three
processing plants. They're very expensive to
produce. What if we could increase the
harvest time, therefore increase how often, the length of time
those processing plants are operating.
Add two weeks to them, they're huge.
That's exactly what's happened. We now can harvest some of these
cranberries in September, opening up the processing plant
earlier. So, there we go.
The standard selection goes to Stevens, there's an example of
it. We called it HyRed.
The hardest problem we ever had with this particular cultivar
was naming it. [laughs]
We could not agree on a name, so we went with HyRed.
Interesting. There we are.
The nice thing about it, too, is that notice those white berries
in the Stevens? That's because some of the
berries that are buried in the canopy need light to get color.
In Stevens, they just stay white, where in the HyRed,
they color up anyway. Beautiful coloration.
Okay, we are "Bred to be redder and better."
This is the first-- This is my technician playing
around with the computer. This is the first cranberry ever
patented. WARF has it and is the licensee.
Done in cooperation with the university, right?
Okay, this may also, by the way, improve some health aspects of
cranberries. We're beginning to look at this,
not as other people looking just a little bit, but some of the
pigment systems that develop the pigments, also develop some of
these compounds that are important in some of these
urinary tract infections, etc. But that's not proven yet.
Okay, herbicide or the pesticide aspect.
We tried to concentrated on herbicide use instead of
insecticides, and everything else, because first place, it's
much easier to do than insecticides.
But more importantly, they kept on saying time and time again,
the weeds are my biggest problem.
The weeds are my biggest problem.
The problem is that you have native plants come in that are
short, perennial plants. They would crawl along the
bottom of the cranberry root down.
They're hard to control. They're tucked away on this
cranberry. So you say, okay, we'll look at
that. That was the beginning of
biotechnology in Wisconsin, and in the world, essentially.
Madison became a center of all kinds of small biotechnology
labs, and we got cooperation with them to bring in some of
these aspects. Idea, make a cranberry resistant
to the effects of a low-impact herbicide.
Again, a herbicide that does much less environmental problems
than the ones they were using. What we needed were some genes
to be able to do this. The idea was to make the
cranberry the only plant in that bed, that when that bed was
sprayed with a herbicide, that was the only plant that
survived, and all the weeds were killed.
So you had to put something in it that gave it that resistance.
You see this now with other things on soybeans, and
everything else all over the place.
This is much better. So we used genetic engineering.
This is interesting. There's been some lessons
learned here. Again, we had to develop the
technique. I'll go through it real quickly.
Again, we used these microculture plants.
These are little stems that came out of there.
We developed a way, through biology and through hormone use
to develop these little buds. Each of those little buds on the
stem comes from a single cell on that shoot, on that piece of
stem. So, many little shoots
developing there. We've got the genes.
This is not the exact concept we had.
We got the genes from Agri--. Anybody ever hear of it?
It used to be a small, little independent, dynamic
biotechnology company. I worked with them all the time.
I'd just walk in there and we'd work together.
They'd say, oh, gosh, I'm working on soybeans and corn and
cotton, dull, dull, dull. I wanted to work on cranberries.
That's cool. [laughter]
So we had a lot of cooperation. We got the genes from them.
They developed the Gene Gun, a bombardment thing.
It's still used a little bit now, but it was heavily used
then. The idea here is that you have a
little petri dish, you put your tissue in that petri dish, the
plant you want to get the gene into there, your stems in this
case. The genes, all that DNA, the
genes are put on little gold pieces, very fine gold
particles, face powder sized particles.
Those gold pieces then are shot into the stem and they carry the
genes with them. Very simple kind of system.
Some of those worked. This is an example of a stem.
Those blue spots-- You see all those sparkles around?
Those are the gold pieces that never got into the stem.
That's the stem. There's an axillary bud right
there. Those blue pieces are cells.
We put a gene in there that had a special color called GUS, that
kind of situation. We could tell that when a cell
absorbed our particular DNA, it would turn bluish under certain
conditions. Ah-ha!
It worked. Now we get those individual
cells to form buds and we've got ourselves a genetically
engineered plant. Okay, let's move forward.
Fast forward, it took us ten years to do it.
Here's an example in culture system.
We also have a gene mixed into this, a mixture of genes we put
in there that makes it kind of resistant to a chemical you put
in the medium that normally kills plants.
It's that situation, an innocuous kind of thing.
That shoot coming up is growing because it has genes in it that
came from this bombardment situation.
That hopefully has also the herbicide resistant gene, but we
don't know that yet. We take them out and go through
them all the time. But what herbicide do we look
at? This is a herbicide called
Liberty, a very environmentally "friendly" herbicide.
Much friendlier than what they were using, no question about
that. Rapid breakdown in the soil.
Very little toxicity to animals, fish, etc., so nice to the water
systems there. Effective on most weeds.
There's some history of use of it in Europe and other areas,
so there's some background to it already.
We got the gene for that. The genes that went into--
The herbicide works by essentially altering nitrogen
metabolism in the plant, a very common kind of thing.
Nothing unique. Essentially, the plants die of
ammonia toxicity. Very straight forward kind of
stuff. Where do we get the gene from?
The gene came originally, we didn't do this, other people did
this, it came originally from an isolated soil bacterium.
So it exists out there all over the place.
Essentially, the gene that we put in there to give resistance
to this herbicide destroys the herbicide.
It actually degrades the herbicide, which makes it nice,
because that means we can spray the crop with the herbicide and
we don't accumulate herbicide, because it's being degraded.
Sounded good, didn't it? My gosh, will it work?
So the results were encouraging, to say the least.
The flat next to me is a flat that has both weeds and
cranberries in it. Never spayed.
The flat on the other end is a non-genetically engineered
cranberry plant, but sprayed with Liberty.
It killed the weeds! [laughs]
Did a good job with the cranberries, too.
The one in the middle used a genetically engineered
cranberry plant, resistant to the Liberty herbicide, and the
weeds are gone. Oh, we said, gosh, we actually
went out to one of the local bars that's closed now and had a
big celebration. Right there, man, it's right
there. It was too good to be true.
What do you do? But it will probably never be
commercialized. In fact, the plant doesn't exist
anymore. We destroyed it.
Tsk, tsk, tsk. The growers asked us
to destroy it. And who funded all this?
Any idea why? Pardon?
[inaudible] Okay, there was the problem,
cranberries, if you ask an individual consumer what they
like about cranberries, the word "natural" comes up all the time.
If you talk to consumers, what they don't like about genetic
engineering, the word "unnatural" comes up all the
time. Well, I've got a PhD, so
"natural" versus "unnatural," I said to the growers, are you
sure you want to play this game? [laughs]
Okay, that's why. Let's go through what happened.
We cannot use the plants. Problems of securing the rights
to the genes. When we got it and used it for
research, there was no problem. But guess what?
The company that owned these genes got bought out by a bigger
company, it starts with an "M ," a bigger company anyway.
And they wouldn't give us rights for commercial use.
Now, this is called a risk problem, right?
Cranberry crop is a very high value crop, $8,000 per acre.
If something goes wrong with that herbicide use, they're
upping the lawsuits, big time big money lawsuits.
They said unh-unh. We're not.
This crop is too small for us to have that kind of risk.
We're not going to do it. So we couldn't get the gene.
And also, the industry, they're smart to do this, I think.
They're concerned. They're intelligent people,
right? They said, hey, I'm not going to
risk it, not in my marsh. And I said, I don't want to be
the one university research professor who destroyed the
Wisconsin cranberry industry, right?
[laughs] So, it's gone.
Instant lesson learned. But it would be fantastic.
Okay, a little bit about the future and about --
How's that for a picture, huh? This is actually a record album.
If you go on the Internet and search for pictures of
cranberries, there's zillions of music groups that have
cranberries, or something or other, it's incredible.
Okay, a little bit of the future, vast opportunities to
improve production still, particularly disease and pest
resistance, a fair amount being developed in that.
Breeding has got a long way to go in that.
Continue to integrate with the environment.
What's now becoming more and more of an increasing issue is
good water management, improving the water management,
particularly recycling within a particular bed more than
having it flow through, so we have less potential problems.
That's coming along. A lot more work to do.
A big one, climate change. Here's a very interesting
graphic. Growers hated me
to show this to them. The darker the color, the
greater the climate has changed already in Wisconsin.
Where are the big cranberry growing regions?
[laughs] Where those things are.
Isn't that interesting? Now, this is actually warmer.
This is the change in annual average temperature
from 1950 to 2006. This is real information from a
really good site, by the way. This is the WICCI site.
Fantastic information on it. I showed this to them.
Obviously, these areas are subject to very strong,
according to this, and probably increasing predictions,
increasing climate change. Weather patterns are changing.
Now, is that good or bad? What was one of the major
limitations of cranberry production in Wisconsin?
A short growing season. Guess what, the growing season
has increased by two weeks in the last ten years.
They're actually getting better fruit that they barely need my
hybrid. That's not quite true, but
nevertheless, so it could improve the cranberry industry,
right? But you don't know that.
What's another aspect that comes along with climate change?
[inaudible] Yeah, it's not just because you
have infestation changes, but the big thing is an increase in
variability. No farmer likes increased
variability in their weather patterns.
We see that now. Look what's going on out there,
right, these last three weeks. We increase variability.
We anticipate there will be very drastically increased
variability in this, so therefore, how do you try to, as
a researcher, do something about that?
One aspect is what I call resilience.
That is, instead of planting just one or two cultivars in
this beautiful, very expensive field, let's develop a whole
series of different ones to work with that could be harvested at
different times, that have slightly different traits, and
not so related to each other, so you have this resilience of
being, no matter what the climate changes to during this
particular season, you have this flexibility, resilience.
I think they're buying into that slowly.
Great for a plant breeder, so I've got a permanent job.
Except I retired. Health benefits are another
possibility. It's really hard to substantiate
health claims. Anybody in the medical field or
medical researchers at all? The problem, as I see it, and
a lot of plant researchers see it, is that the benefits of
cranberry are from a mixture of different kinds of compounds and
characteristics, a plethora of different antioxidants and that
kind of stuff together. If you get an NIH grant, what do
you have to work on? One god damn compound!
[laughs] You can't do that with these
kind of things. It won't work.
We've done a little bit of it, but it's, you know, you have a
hint of it, but you're not substantiating.
So there has to be a change in how some of this stuff is done.
This is not only cranberries, this is a lot of stuff.
If we find out what's going on, we can increase those
potentials, I think, very strongly.
But we don't know yet. And of course, new products.
Okay, there you go. There's your Thanksgiving.
I want you all to challenge me on this one.
[laughter] Okay, very good, thank you.
That's it, thank you very much. I appreciate it.
[applause]