Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Growing Grapes, Brambles and Vine Fruits in Wisconsin  Rebecca Harbut  4/10/13 UP856  cc >> Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension. On behalf of those folks and our other organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, here we are in a long, cold spring. We have something to look forward to because we have Rebecca Harbut from the UW-Madison Department of Horticulture. She's also a state specialist with UW Extension Cooperative Extension. She gets to talk about growing good and great stuff. 

Rebecca was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. She got her undergraduate and masters degrees at the University of Guelph which is in Guelph, Ontario. Ontario is just north of Lake Ontario. And Guelph is just west of Toronto, is that correct? Then she went to Cornell University for her PhD in Horticulture, then came to UW-Madison. Then on or about May 15th she gets to head back home to Vancouver where she's taken a job there. I envy her greatly. I like Madison, but boy, Vancouver. How do you pronounce it? Vancouver. Oh, okay. Sorry. 

So tonight, her title is Wisconsin Fruit, Cultivating History and Growing the Future. I've been pitching it as Fruit of the Vine and Work of Human Hands. Getting to grow grapes and other vine crops here in Wisconsin, I think enology is one of the most wonderful thinks ever invented. When I was a Catholic alter boy I always thought that line, "fruit of the vine and work of human hands, but when you come for us out spirits will drink." Of course the response is, "Blessed by God forever." That was one of the few things that I think I'll carry forth into the future from my religious upbringing. Let's here it for enology and other fruit crops, and let's welcome Rebecca Harbut to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [applause]  >> Well, thanks. It's fun to be here. I love to talk about fruit. I am a self-identified fruitaphile. I think everybody is too, they just don't always recognize it. 

I have yet to meet anybody that doesn't really love fruit. So I kind of have the best job in the world, that I just get to work on fruit. Tonight, it's really hard for me to decide what to talk about in a venue like this, so I decided that we would do a bit of a travel through the history of fruit in Wisconsin, and look at a few stories of fruit in Wisconsin. We'll talk about how they've shaped our culture and some of the characteristics of Wisconsin fruit production. We'll do a brief history of fruit. We'll start, you know, with the big picture, and then we'll talk about Wisconsin itself. Then we'll go through three fruit stories, the Old Faithful, the apple, the Big Red. I have to say, that's like Cornell's team is the Big Red. It's my secret, but not so secret because I just said it. Right? The cranberry, and then New Horizons, the grape, which is one of the really exciting fruit stories and fruit frontiers in the Midwest right now. 

Then we'll talk very briefly at the end about fruit in today's society.  Let's start with something small, the history of civilization. Just to sort of put it in context of where we're at in the timeframe. We think of the neolithic Revolution, characterized between 8,000 and 2,500 BCE. This is really the point in time where we started to change from a hunter/gatherer society to having more of an agriculturally based society. Grain crops were starting to be domesticated at that time. Move into the Bronze Age, so 3,300 to 1,200 before the Common Era, this really coincides with urban development. Along with that we start to see this establishment of fruit production. Why does that come with urban development? What was the big shift that really happened in those times? Suddenly you're staying put. You're sitting in one place of a long time. 

And as many of you that grow-- How many of you actually produce fruit? Not commercially, but in your yard or where ever. A lot of us do, right? A lot of us grow fruit. And it's a commitment. You don't plant a seed and then harvest it in the fall. There's a long term commitment when we do fruit production, so when we look at it through that historical lens that was really confined by the fact to societies moved. Unless you stayed put for a long period of time, you just didn't really do a lot of fruit cultivation. When we think of fruit production, and when we look at it historically, this is really where we start to see it coming out. The Uruk vase, which is shown here, is from 3,000 BCE, and in that we actually see depictions of a lot of fruit being used in ceremonial venues. We start to see a lot of that after that time period, the real importance of fruit in those societies from that point on.  There's kind of three blocks we can think of when we think of fruit domestication. 

When we look at the Mediterranean fruits, where the earliest fruits were domesticated, the fig, the olive, the grape, pomegranate. One of the reasons these were so early and the first ones to be domesticated was they were very easy to propagate. You could go and take a cutting from the wild and you could stick it in the ground, and the thing would grow. It was really easy to propagate. It lended itself to, very simply, being taken from the wild and put into this domesticated, cultivated, setting. We see very early depictions of date, olives, grapes, figs, pomegranates, as being some of our first fruit crops that were domesticated. If we go to central and eastern Asia, the fruits of that region, are the citrus, various pome fruits, the apples and the pears, medlar, stone fruits. Those were a little bit later, 800 to 600 BCE. They were domesticated in Central and East Asia, but they sort of reached the West just prior to the Middle Ages as well. In the Middle Ages we see a lot of reference to some of these fruits also. 

Then North American fruits. We're time warped 2,000 years really before we actually start doing this type of domestication. The Native Americans have been using the fruit long, long before this. They were collecting them from the wild and using them in, I would say, pemmican, a food substance that the Native Americans made. They used a lot of cranberry in it. I would say that's the first Craisin, right? They were way ahead of us. They did this a long time ago. But anyway, just collected from the wild by the Native Americans. It wasn't until we really had-- Until the 1800 where we start to see real domestication and intensive breeding of some other the North American crops. So if we look at the big picture, North American fruits species are just getting started with really domesticating them and breeding them and utilizing them, compared to a lot of the other fruits that we have. 

When we talk about grapes, it's a great example of just what that means in terms of how we use those fruits and what we have to learn about them. Even now, when we look at cranberries, blueberries, things that we think of as, you know, pretty established industries, they are barely selected from the wild. In some cases, cranberries, they're just wild selections. They really haven't had anything done to them. We are operating in a totally different realm, especially when compared to the grains, corn or wheats or something like that, where you would barely recognize them from their real wild ancestors. It's a really neat area actually, to be working in, to be thinking of just the wild genetics of it. Okay, so let's look at a pomological history of Wisconsin. You know when I first came to Wisconsin I thought, hmm, fruit in Wisconsin. I knew cranberries, but what else do you grow in Wisconsin? It's really cold here, right? But it turns out Wisconsin has a great pomological history. I don't know if any of you spend any time with the Wisconsin Historical Society, but there's so much fun stuff in there that you should just go and explore it. 

I'll bet you didn't know that the Garden of Eden was actually located in Trempealeau, Wisconsin. [laughter] This is the little nugget of information that nobody knew about. There was this character, David Van Slyke, who was kind of a self-proclaimed reverend. He wasn't ordained in any particular church or anything, but he read the bible 20 times. Therefore, I guess that gave him some sort of licence to make these declarations. He became convinced that the Garden of Eden was actually located in Trempealeau, Wisconsin. So he published this document, The Garden of Eden. He self-published it in 1886. It talks about how, here it is, I've found it! The best part of this story, I think, is the fact that he sent a copy of this to the Wisconsin Historical Society a couple of years after it was published. I just feel like that's a lot of confidence. 

If you feel like you're going to have the historical significant that you should be documented, and they should have you on record at the Historical Society. I think that's fantastic. I'm thinking about doing it myself. There must be something that I can just get myself in the records that way. So this is, wow, an interesting look at the pomological history, because now we're talkin' about, like, the tree that is actually here. You may take that for what it is and you can make your own judgement call on whether that be the truth or not. Wisconsin has lots of native fruits actually, strawberries, service berries, Amelanchier-- Does anybody-- Service berry, the reason it's called service berry-- Does anybody know? It's really interesting. Service berry is one of the first shrubs that really start flowering in the springtime. It's very early. Back in the old days, when the service berry bloomed, it meant that the ground was thawed out enough you that could start having your funerals and your services. 

That timing often coincided with funerals. Just a happy note now, when see those service berries you can think of that nice aspect. Also, Aronia, black choke berry. There's a reason it's called choke berry, if any of you have ever tasted Aronia. And wild plum, we see those all over the place, black cherries, black currents. There used to be a very big current industry in the US. It kind of has fallen out of favor, but now is coming back again. Blackberries, black raspberries or black caps, elderberries, blueberries and cranberries are some of our real, sort of, native fruits that are here. We can go out and collect them in the wild. They're all really fantastic. 

I would encourage you to get your nature guide out when you go hiking and really keep an eye out. Because you'll find them all over the place. When we think of Wisconsin's fruit history, it really starts with the homesteaders. When we think of fruit industries as they exist today. In the early 1800s we had these homesteaders that often came from the east. Many of them were of Germanic decent, a Scandinavian or Germanic decent. My parents emigrated from Sweden, so when they found out I was coming to Wisconsin they said, "Aren't there a lot of Norwegians there?" That's a negative thing to a Swede, just so you know. Anyway, the homesteaders are the first ones that started pioneering out and establishing fruit production in this area. They grew small fruit. The strawberries, and the things that were here. 

They did well. But they also brought with them seeds from the east that they loved, like their peaches and their apple seeds, and those tree fruits that they thought, "Let's plant this, we love them" They planted all kinds of stuff, and all kinds of stuff died, right? They went through that realization that, wow, it's cold here. We can't grow everything the same. Apples and tart cherries actually did pretty well, but a lot of the tree fruits they brought just didn't survive. They just weren't hardy enough for here. At that time fruit production was not something that they were thinking, let's establish as industry. It was, let's get some nourishment. Let's get some vitamins, and this is a necessary part of existence in this area. You really couldn't just give up on the endeavor of growing fruit, because all of what was native was new to them. They didn't necessarily know what was out there. 

They didn't necessarily know how to go out and forage as the Native Americans had known. I know you shouldn't put this much text on a slide, but we're going to read this. A. J. Phillips was a fruit grower in Wisconsin in the late 1800s. This is what he wrote about the fruit growers in the area. "Why, as I stated, is there a desire for information, because our first settlers came largely from the eastern states. They brought with them to their western homes a love for the old orchard where they picked Baldwins, Pippins, Pehnocks and Rambos in their youthful days and as soon as they had ground enough cleared and broken for an orchard they at once sent east for their favorite trees or contracted the same from the -- salesman, never for a moment thinking this was a colder climate with shorter seasons and not so well adapted for apple growing as the land that they had left, and only when failures began to stare them in the face did they realize that they must use the hardiest varieties." It sounds very simple, but this was a real problem at the time, where everything they planted died. As you know, you don't plant an apple seed and then just harvest it. It may not have died immediately. It may have taken a little while before it actually died. So there's an investment that had gone in there. 

The fruit growers in the area really started to band together and think about, how are we going to do this? They started collaborating. In 1853 the Wisconsin Fruit Growers' Association was formed. They were really the beginning of the industries here. It was dissolved during the Civil War, then later is was sort of reconstituted as the Wisconsin Horticultural Society, which has continued. There's lots of fabulous historical documents from the Wisconsin Horticultural Society that, if you're interested, it's really fun to go and peruse through. In 1887 we had the Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers Association. They've been around for a long time, longer than a lot of people realize. And then in 1889 the Department of Horticulture was actually established. So very early one there was this institution and collaboration between growers and scientists and educators to make this work. That continues today. 

I work very closely with all of these industries and growers. Let's look at three stories. Excuse me. When we think of fruit growing in Wisconsin there's kind of four areas that come to mind first probably. Bayfield where there's the apple industry and kind of a really neat fruit industry up there. The Driftless Area has a lot of apple production here. The Central Sands where the heart of our cranberry industry is. Then up here in Door County where we have a lot of apple, but primarily tart cherry production. Those are kind of the big areas. But there's fruit production that happens all over the state. 

Since I've been here I've put on thousands of miles on my van. You have to travel to every corner of this state to actually cover all the fruit production in the state. Which is great. Okay, so, apple. I always think of apple as kind of the Old Faithful of Wisconsin. It came with the homesteaders, they slogged through it and they sorted it out, and it prevails! It still is around. It's still a really important component of the agricultural face of Wisconsin. When I think of apple growers, I think of tenacity. Because that's really how-- And it stays true today. They are a very tenacious bunch. 

Last year was a real stinker of a year for fruit production. For a lot of our apple growers the average loss was around 60%. And most of them just swallowed that cost. Yet they were just, chin up, and we'll get through this. Next year is going to be better. Peter Giddon was a Minnesotan homesteader. He is the one that found the variety Wealthy, which is a old apple cultivar that is still around today. This is what he says. "True, we were under a cloud for a long time. We planted but did not harvest. 

Our trees withered and perished. Whether is was he frosts of Winter or the sun of Summer that caused them to prematurely die, no one had been able to determine. Plant as we would, the trees sickened and died. No wonder, then, we became discouraged. Orchards to the third and fourth planting failed, a constant drain on the pocket without a ray of light in the future, influenced us in abandoning the enterprise. But those days, and their trials, have passed." And that really is it. They just tried and tried. And eventually he came out with the cultivar Wealthy, which was one of the most widely planted cultivars across America actually. By the late 1800s Midwest apple production had moved from the homesteading front, where it was just subsistence, to a real industry where they were growing fruit to actually sell it. Grow a crop and into retail. 

We think of today's consumers as being really particular and picky. That's not new. Even back then, if you go through the documents in the Wisconsin Horticultural Society, they talk about how, these consumers, they want beautiful fruits and uniform size. They're just lamenting at how particular these irrational customers are. Some things never change. But that consumer demand really drove the apple industry to think about focusing on some cultivars, to figuring out how to do it right and to really bring their production up to another level both in quality and quantity. The Wisconsin Horticultural Society played a really important role. They published and had meetings where they would say, okay, folks, here are the most hardy varieties. These are the ones you can grow. These are the ones that are going to produce. 

All these documents are out there. Some of them you'll recognize probably. Wolf River and Wealthy, that I mentioned before, you can still find those at the Farmers' Market in the fall when you go out here in Dane County. It's really cool. Then they started to form these spray rings which were basically groups of apple growers who got together, and with the advent of chemicals and applications, pesticides and fertilizers, they got together and buy a spryer together. They would hire an operator and that person would go around to a whole bunch of different orchards and do it for them. They really tried to pool their resources and were very collaborative industry. They continue to be that way today. By 1943 there were 215 spray rings in 33 different counties across the state. It was a really excellent way to facilitate the industry to move into and adopt new technologies. 

Apple production today. If you look at the map, every one of those pins is a commercial orchard. They're everywhere. They're a really important part of the Wisconsin landscape. We produce about 50 million pounds of apples a year that have a value of about 20 million dollars. We're number eight in the States in terms of production. That accounts for about 1% of US production. 65%, or something like that, comes from Washington state and New York state takes the rest. There's not a whole lot left to split up between everybody else. We actually hold our own. 

We do pretty well. There are a few large orchards that account for a big chuck of the production, that are doing wholesaling and those are really big operations. But numbers-wise most of our orchards in Wisconsin are less than five acres and are just direct market. They have pick-your-own. They are open to their communities, and they sell to their immediate communities. That is a really important characteristic of the apple industry in terms of the cultural importance of it and the roll that it plays in the communities that they exist in. [inaudible] Pardon me? >> Some are blue and some are green. >> Oh, sorry. This is from the Wisconsin Apple Growers Association website. Depending on what they're status is at times, the colors will be different. 

It doesn't mean anything significant right now. We've kind of taken leaps and bounds in terms of how we grow apples. When you go across orchards in Wisconsin you'll find everything from the huge old standard trees, to these tiny little sticks that are just loaded with fruit, and have to actually be supported by a trellis because we've just created these things to just grow fruit. We don't want to grow trees any more, we just want to grow fruit. There's a real span in production systems across the state. As we've progressed towards these kind of intensive production systems we've also added all kinds of information about how you manage for pests, how you scout. Farmers have to know the life-cycle of every insect that come in their orchard. They have to understand the life-cycle of diseases. It has become a science to grow fruit. Man, the growers are just all over it. 

They're incredibly progressive in adopting integrated pest management practices, and really trying their best to use those new technologies and the science to efficiently and sustainably produce a crop. But it's been really difficult, and there's a huge variability of what you would find across the different orchards. That's one of the great things too. You can go to one orchard and find some of these big, old trees. Then go to another orchard and you'll find this row upon row of 1,600 trees per acre of just chock-a-block trees. This aspect of the apple industry is just production, production, production, where as every other agricultural sector has gone, there's this really push to produce fruit. On the other side of that, one of the most important things that I think the apple industry in Wisconsin really does is make connections. In the communities in which these operations exist they very often are the one point which urban, non-agricultural individuals, citizens, actually connect with agriculture and food production. When I was in New York at Cornell we had a school education program, and lots of our orchard here have those as well, were they welcome students to come. I was amazed at how many people, even in rural New York, how many of those kids had actually never picked an apple off of a tree. 

The apple industry in Wisconsin actually plays a really important role in facilitating that opportunity for kids, for adults, for community members, to reconnect with the agricultural sector, to think about food production. It's a really important component. This gentleman that you see driving the tractor here, this is Tom Ferguson. He owns Morningside Orchards up in Eau Clare. He's one of the bigger growers in the state. This is where you'll find him a lot of Saturdays, sitting on a tractor being Farmer Tom, as he calls himself on Saturdays. He's just educating. That had become a really important role of the apple growers, is to educate. We've gone from homesteaders to ambassadors. The role of apple growers has really shifted, and yet remained to same. 

They've kind of gone from being just farmers producing food, to being farmers, scientist, they're entrepreneurs. They've got big businesses they're running now. They're entertainers because they've got these big farms where kids are coming, and they're educators. This is a really impressive bunch, I think. A really inspiring sector of agriculture to work with because of that really important connection to the rural community. And to our history as a state and the role that apple production has played. Most of our apple growers appreciate this and take it very seriously. Let's shift gears to the cranberry industry. You go from primarily direct market and dealing with people coming on your farm to cranberries. Big, right? Wholesale, processing, it operates almost like a commodity more than a-- It's a very unique fruit crop. 

There are not many fruit crops that operate in this kind of realm. A true North American fruit, right? This is the true North American fruit, cranberries. Cultivation began in Wisconsin around 1860. Really all they did was they dug ditches around wild stands, and started cultivating them. That was pretty much it. That remained the way that it was done for quite a long time. We're the largest producing cranberry region in the world. We produce about 60% of the world's crop. We have a very long tradition in this state. Many of our farms are fourth generation cranberry farmers that are still running those same farms. 

The oldest producing bed has been in continuous production for over 100 years. That's sustainable. It's been producing for 100 years. It's really amazing. They're very long lived plants. The ability to change cultivars is very small. You don't need to plant a new cultivar every year. So we've been growing the same cultivars for ages, for over 100 years. There's about 250 cranberry growers in the state of Wisconsin. There's almost 18,000 acres in production. 

There's about 7,000 people that are employed in the industry, and it contributes about $350 million to the economy. This is a very significant portion of Wisconsin's economy and agricultural sector. I have to do this, because there's so many misunderstandings of cranberry production. How are they actually produced? Cranberries woody perennials. They have an 18 month growth cycle. So when you are producing this year's crop, you are looking at that year's crop, next year's crop is already starting to set in that plant. You're already setting the buds for the next year. If you mess up it kind of haunts you for another whole year if things go wrong. Wisconsin produces cranberries primarily in sand. They're grown in 12 to 18 inches of just pure sand. 

They are not grown in water. They actually don't like to be grown in water at all. They'll tolerate it, but they don't like it. Most of the production is for processing. Sweet and dried cranberries which are, Ocean Spray's brand is Craisin, but there are other brands that have that same product. Juices or sauces, or now there's cranberry salsas and you can find all kinds of stuff. They're getting very creative these days. Cranberry wine, right? And there's some production for the fresh market as well. There's a couple growers primarily that produce most of the fresh cranberries in the state. You can't think about cranberries without thinking about water. 

They don't grow in water, but it is an incredibly essential part of cranberry production. They tolerate periodic flooding. That's very unique. Most plants don't tolerate any sort of flooding. But they can tolerate being under water. They use flooding for frost protection. In the early spring they'll flood. Last year it was a life-saver in the early spring that they could flood their beds and protect those crops from those really low April temperatures. Of all the fruit industries, the cranberries did okay because they were not affected by those late frosts that we had. In the wintertime you can go out and look at cranberry beds and they're totally covered in ice. 

They'll flood it up, make ice, and they drain out the water that's on the bottom. Then there's an air space where the plants are sitting. The ice layer just sits on top and protects them from the cold temperatures and the wind. They also use it for harvesting of course. That's the one where you get all the beautiful pictures. They flood the beds, they go through and beat the plants with beaters or different implements, and then the berries float. That's how they harvest them. A lot of the farmers now have what we call tail recovery systems which allow them to recycle the water that gets used. They'll just kind of circulate it in their own operation. A lot of them in the more historical areas, they all share the same water. 

One grower will take it, flood up their beds, and then the downstream growers hope that they're all still getting along and they're all going to share their water. Irrigation is the other way we use water. Irrigation is what we consider consumptive use. The flooding isn't consumed. We don't consume that water, it's just moving through. But irrigation is where we actually consume water with the plant. We use that for frost protection and then just regular irrigation throughout the growing season. For every acre that we have in cranberry production there's about six acres that are managed in wetlands across the state. If you consider, we have almost 18,000 acres in production, that's a lot of acres that are in wetlands. So anytime go to a cranberry marsh most of them will have these fairly significant areas of wetlands associated with them. 

Our cranberry growers tend to be very big birders. They're always out on their marshes. They know all the birds that live in their wetlands. They're kind of obsessive about them actually. This was taken from one of our marshes in Cranmoor. This is the support lands for a fairly large cranberry marsh where they will pull their water resource from when they flood. One of the big things that the cranberry industry has been doing and working with UW really closely on is a lot of sustainability initiatives. They're unique in that they have some of the highest adoption rates for a lot of these practices, such as past management. 77% of them hire a scout to come on their farm and scout for pests, so that they're only spraying a product on if they have reached the economic threshold. 88% use non-chemical controls to control pests. 

They'll flood instead of spraying. They'll put on a flood and try to drown the bugs out rather than put a chemical down. 88% use tissue and soil analysis to make their nutrient management decisions. They're not just applying nutrients, they're looking at what the crop is taking up and then putting down the appropriate nutrients based on what they're seeing. Cranberries are a real newbie on the domestication front. But we've got new varieties that are just being released, and they're replacing varieties that were released in, like, the 1800s and early 1900. It's really wild. So we've got a huge learning curve to figure out now, we've got all these new genetics coming in. Growers are planting new varieties, and we're kind of scrambling to figure out how exactly we grow them. They produce more, they behave differently. 

They've been growing these other varieties for 100 years. They've really figured them out. It's a very uncomfortable space for someone to be in when suddenly, wow, this is all new. It's really exciting. There's new releases that have come from a breeding program here at UW-Madison. Bret McCowen is our breeder who just retired last year. His program has put out several new varieties, and there are several that have come out from Rutgers as well. I'm not going to spend any time on this, but some of the work that we're doing with cranberries is really looking at understanding bud development. With most fruit crops we have a really good understanding of how they fruit, how their buds develop. We understand hormones signaling. 

But with these very new crops, and ones that are produced in very specialized areas, we really don't know a lot. We're trying to look at some very fundamental physiology on how these plants actually grow. Also, yield prediction modeling, so how do you predict what the crop is going to be the next year. That's an important thing for a thing like cranberries where they do try to do some crop forecasting. We've done a lot of work using technology to monitor soil moisture and really try to reduce the amount of water that we're putting on the plants during the summer for irrigation, to try to reduce water use. Okay, so grapes. New Horizons. Grapes are one of the most exciting and fun-ist parts of fruits industry in Wisconsin right now. Really there's very few opportunities as a crop physiologist to work on a totally new crop. It doesn't happen very often. 

So I've been really fortunate to have to the opportunity. I'll bet you didn't know that Wisconsin was actually the birthplace of the Californian wine industry. Hum. All these things you're learning about Wisconsin, right? The Garden of Eden, California started here. Agoston Haraszthy, and I don't know how you say his name. I probably butchered that, but he's not here. He was a Hungarian born immigrant. He came to the US, and he's considered the father of Californian viticulture. But he actually started right here in Wisconsin. He was the founder of Buena Vista Vineyard in Sonoma, California and the Buena Vista Viticultural Society which is the first large corporation in California organized for the express purpose of engaging in agriculture. 

Our first agricultural enterprise. But it all started in Wisconsin. He built a town. I'm not going to try to say that word, but it's Hungarian for beautiful place. It's now Sauk City. He built mills. He raised corn and grains. He kept sheep and all kinds of animals. He opened a brickyard. When you go through Sauk City a lot of those old, historic buildings were built with bricks from his brickyard. 

He kept a store and operated a ferry that went across the river, and he built the first bridge in that area across the Wisconsin River. And, most importantly, of course, he planted the first vineyard in Wisconsin. That's the most important contribution ever, right? Has anyone heard of Wollershiem, Wollershiem Winery? That's where his first vineyard was, at Wollershiem Winery. In 1846 he showed up, established this city, planted a vineyard, got a winery going and then he kind of left town. He left town in 1949. So he didn't stay around for too long after he planted the vineyard. He moved on to California and started his enterprises there. But there was a German fella, Peter Kehl, and his son, that took over the vineyard when he left. They continued with that endeavor until 1900 when his son died, and really the vines just died with him. The vineyard ended and that sat unproductive until the 70s. 

In 1967 we had our first winery that was established. Agoston did make some wine but it wasn't an established winery, but that was the von Stiehl Winery. Then in 1972 Bob Wollershiem actually purchased this old land and brought it back to a vineyard, and it continues to produce. It is currently our largest vineyard and winery in the state. They just re-did the grotto there fairly recently which is pretty fun. Okay, so let's think about what we're actually talking about when we talk about grapes. The genus is vitis. These are some of the species within that genus. There's like a bazillion of them so this is a subset. Just know that. 

Vitis vinifera is the European wine grape. That's your Merlot, you Cabernet Sauvignon. That's what you are familiar with when you think of your wines. That's what the California industry is based on. That's what the European wine industry is based on, is vitis vinifera. There's over 5,000 cultivars. It's 90% of the world's grape production, for now, right? Vitis labrusca is a North American species. That is basically the Concord grape, the fox grape, Welch's grape juice. That's vitis labrusca. Then these next two, vitis riparia and vitis rupestris, are two other America species and those are the two that have become really important in our cold climate grape industry. 

Aestivalis is another one. The Norton grape is-- There's actually a book that I read recently called The Wild Vine. It's a really fun history of the Norton grape if you want to read about grapes some more. That's another American species where there has been some wine production made out of that. Rotundifolia is the Muscadine grape which is another really unique flavored grape. Arkansas and down in the southern states you'll find Muscadine grapes. They don't have great cold hardiness though, so you don't see them around here very often. So vitis riparia and vitis rupestris are the two species that have totally transformed the grape landscape here in the Midwest. The cold hardy grapes that were originally grown when Agoston first came were actually French-America hybrids. Marechal Foch was the primary variety, and Wollershiem continues to grow lots Marechal Foch. 

There are many vineyards around here that still grow that grape and make a really nice wine out of it. It is a vitis vinifera crossed with a cross of riparia and rupestris. Some of the other ones are Vidal Blanc, Chambourcin and Seyval. They are marginally hardy so we don't see a lot of them growing here. They've got a little too much of that vinifera influence in them. They don't tend to have the hardiness here. What we're seeing now coming are these riparia-based hybrids. Elmer Swenson was a private citizen of Wisconsin and he worked for the University of Minnesota. He worked in one of their gardens, and kinda became really crazy about grapes. He started doing breeding. 

He and the University of Minnesota are the two primary sources for our cold hardy grapes that have been released and developed. Both wine and table grapes have been release by them. The breeding effort actually started in 1908. Talk about a commitment. We're just getting an industry started a hundred years later. Elmer Swenson from Osceola, Wisconsin, he began working on grapes in the 60s really, and that's the time period where most of the effort was really put in for developing these new varieties. He retired in the 80s, and since then, released many varieties after he retired. There's a list of them. You might recognize some of them. If you go to the Farmers' Market you'll find a lot of these table grapes there. 

They're fantastic. We actually have a lot of them growing out at West Madison Agricultural Research Station out on Mineral Point Road. In August we have a field day and you can come and taste these. They will just knock your socks off. You'll be forever disappointed with the grape you buy in the grocery store. If you don't want that, then don't come taste them. [laughter] This is where we're at now. These are counties with vineyards. Every county that has a grape in it has a vineyard in it. It's absolutely mind boggling the acreage in grapes that has  gone in. 

It is just exploding. These are the counties where we have wineries. Also exploding. The wineries tell us, we need more cold hardy grapes. There's a huge need. Currently many of them are buying in grapes from New York primarily, and producing some of those grapes. But the desire is to make wine out of the locally grown grapes. But as you know, it takes some time before you actually start getting a harvest off of those grapes and get them established. There's been a bit of a lag in the industry in terms of getting the wine out and getting the grapes together. Which is actually kind of a good thing because these are new. 

We haven't totally figured out how to make really great wine. The longer we have to really perfect that wine-making process, the better the wines that come out in the end. It's good to sort of grow into the industry and give the wine makers time to figure it out. There's a whole lot to learn. These are totally new genetics. Everything we know about growing grapes and making wine is based on vitis vinifera. We've got centuries of information and experience that we can draw from, but totally different species. So while we can definitely use a lot of the information from that, we really have to temper it with, okay, but these are different species that really behave differently. They have different growth habits. One of the things that you will find is when you see these hybrid grapes you very quickly have a jungle all of the sudden. 

Your grapes are somewhere in there. Compared to vinifera where they really don't grow-- They're not super vigorous, they're not throwing out crazy canes everywhere. These ones really are. So we've really had to re-think how you balance that vine with vegetative growth and fruit, and getting the crop load balance correct. What kind of trellis system do you grow it on? I don't know. We have to figure all these things out again. What's the best way to grow it? How do you prune them for optimal growth? What kind of spacing do you use in a vineyard? All these very fundamental questions that we're just starting from zero on. The fruit chemistry is very different from the viniferas. When it comes to making wine, you just can't take what you do with a vinifera and do the same thing with any of these hybrids. The chemistries are quite different. 

When do you harvest them? That's the big question that we've been looking at in my lab, helping understand what the chemistries are to know when you actually harvest them. And how do we make great wine? There are some really fantastic wines that are coming out now from the cold hardy grapes. I just had a Port-style Frontenac that was absolutely knock your socks off. There is huge potential and really excellent quality coming out. I'm really excited about getting everyone up to speed on them. The research community has approached this as, we've had these industries going, Ah! What do we do? We've got together a big project called the Northern Grapes Project. There's 12 universities. There's 18 different industry associations. We're kind of pooling resources. We got funded by a grant through the USDA to really look at answering some of these fundamental questions. 

In our lab we've got three research vineyards. We've got one at West Madison. All of these you can go and visit. I would really encourage you to do so. It's really fun to go walk through the vineyards. Peninsular, which is up in Door County, and then the Spooner Agricultural Research Station which is up, way up, where we basically find out what it takes to kill them. Amazingly enough, we haven't got a grape off of those vines yet. Then we do a lot of on farm research. I've been really closely with the Danzingers. I love them because they're a great example of who the Wisconsin grape-grower is now. 

They're dairy farmers, and they're now vineyard owners and wine makers. It's like the greatest story, because then right beside them is going to be a lawyer from Chicago that has decided that he's going to get into wine making and establish a vineyard here. It's the most wild group I've ever worked with. I mean wild, really fun. We do a lot of work on farms with commercial growers. Because the reality is the growers are the ones that have really taken on most of the risk and done a lot of the preliminary figuring out and costly learning of what works, what doesn't work in their experience. The value of industry has been absolutely immeasurable in gleaning from their experiences and what they've learned in the process of growing these new vines. I'm just going to show you very quickly a few of the sorts of things that we're looking at. Right now we're just looking at three characteristics that we often harvest on, parameters that we use when we are trying to identify the grape quality that we want, the harvest point. Brix, which is a measure of the sugar content, the percent soluble solids, titratable acidity and then pH. 

We'll go through each one them. As you can see we've got five different varieties here. Over the course of the ripening process, we start of August 15 and went all the way to the end of September, every week we go out and take samples of grapes and we measure what all these parameters are. Each one of these points is one week, then we kind of keep going out. We do it for pH as well. We go out and we measure what the pH is each week. Because with these varieties we actually don't know what the optimum is for any one of these varieties. What do ya gotta do? You just gotta start collecting data. Start figuring out what these curves look like, where they level off, and at what point you see, Oh, great! Sugars are really high, but, whoa, my pH is also way too high. I've got to back up. 

I'm not going to base it on that sugar content. I need to go a little bit further back so that I'm in that optimal pH range. Typically you're in the range of 2.8 to 4. Anything over 3.9, 3.8, you start to allow for microbial growth. The stability of that product really becomes compromised. You really don't want something that is high pH. If you let it hang on the vine too long that pH can climb up a little bit too high. Titratable acidity is another measure that we use. It is a range from 4 to 18 grams per liter. This is something that is very unique to the cold hardy. 

We tend to have much higher levels of titratable acidity. For a wine maker, wow, you really have to approach that differently when you have such high acid levels. That's been one of the biggest things to help the wine makers understand is how you deal with that acid. It's a characteristic of the grape, and to not view it as negative thing, but it's just a characteristic of the grape that you have to work with. So this is the kind of work we're doing. We work really closely with industry. We get lots of input from them. I post those results on my website so every week they can come on and look at what those values are for our research sites. Man, we're making progress, slowly but surely. You'll see more and more wine grapes coming out. 

I think this is a really exciting area, viticulture, and fruit production in the state. It kind of represents this whole world of opportunity. You know, when you think of-- We often don't think of whole new agricultural industries starting up on this scale. The speed at which is has happened, and the scale at which it has happened, is just really unique and really fun. It's not just Wisconsin. You actually see it all over the Midwest. I think it's something that is really here to stay. So, if you have a chance, go visit some of the wineries around the state. Make sure you look for cold hardy grapes, the locally grown grapes. A lot of the wines are still grapes that are brought in to Wisconsin from other states. 

Okay. Am I okay for time, Tom? Okay. I don't have much left. Don't worry. I promise. Fruit in today's world. One of my pet peeves is this. Here's one of the big drivers of fruit for people today, right? What's the obsession? It's like loaded with antioxidants, or it's this super-duper awesome thing that blueberries will make you smile. Wow! That's amazing! It's going to save your prostate. All these things that fruit can do. 

It's not just fruit. There are other food sources, but fruit really are the center of it. They do tend to be very high in nutrients and in antioxidants, and all those desirable compounds. But it gets a little bit lost, right? It gets a little bit lost in all the noise. Helping consumers understand what these things mean and what value fruit has. Do you buy an extract? Is there value in just eating fruit? Just simply eating fruit? There really is, there's a lot of value to it. There's a lot of noise around this kind of super-fruit. It's annoying on the one hand, but it's fantastic on the other hand. It's open up a whole realm of opportunity and new crops that nobody would really look at before, because it has these really high levels of antioxidants, and the health component is just number one. It's brought to light all kinds of crops that we really didn't think about before. 

So that's been a great thing. Oh, those guys. [laughter] Do you know, we tried to get those guys in Wisconsin and they're just actors. They're not real cranberry growers. >> Say it isn't so! >> I know, right? It's shocking. The media lies to you. Okay, so there's big interest in super-foods. There's also this big interest in local foods. That has been a very big component as well in creating new opportunities for fruit production. One of the big things that has come out of the local foods is native crops. 

There's been a real interest in, hey, what actually grows here? What are the native crops that we grow here? People want to know and they want to try them. They don't necessarily want to try aronia actually, but aronia is one of those that has benefited enormously from the whole super-foods thing. It is extremely high in the antioxidants and anthocyanins. Using it as an extract, there's suddenly a market for it. We can grow aronia here. We can grow it really well. There's now a Midwest Aronia Association even. I mean, wow! There's a whole other industry that just showed up. Service berry is another one that people are really interested in. They'll eat it. 

You know, Amelancier is traditionally an ornamental shrub that we grow in our gardens. But you can eat it, so eat it! You should eat it. [inaudible] Then we have things like currants and blueberries. All these native crops, there's been a real boost in interest on them. Value the local. I put a perhaps there, because I think people will always say, absolutely I will pay extra if that came from a ten-mile radius from here. But sometimes when they actually go to pay for it and they make that selection in the store that doesn't hold. They still go for those California strawberries that were only $1.50 for that quart instead. But I think there's potential there. The big piece is, people are starting to really think about where their food comes from. 

They are willing pay a little bit more because they're starting to more appreciate the value of having that. How much food can we provide locally?  Well, we live in Wisconsin. If we really are just going to depend on our growing season, yikes! It's going to be short and we're going to be eating a lot of cabbage and potatoes. But there's technologies that we can use that help us extend that. And there's lots of ways to extend our growing season. Here is some of the work we've been doing, particularly with raspberries, putting them in high tunnels. You can get a month extra of production if you put them in a high tunnel. Super-simple technology that just allows you to extend that season and increases the ability to actually provide raspberries locally right into October. [inaudible] Yeah, thanks Tom. A high tunnel is basically a plastic single-poly, very simple structure that you can close up. 

It just traps in the heat during the day and helps accumulate degrees in temperature, in the spring and then in the fall. With fall-baring raspberries, when we plant them, here typically we get taken out by frost right about when the fall-baring raspberries are just about in full-swing. Then it's the sad-ist day ever. You go out and see these. So sad! If you put them in a high tunnel you can keep going. You can get through several frost nights and continue producing. We actually had triple the amount of fruit that came out of our high tunnel compared to the field planting that was right beside it out here in West Madison. So huge potential to really both increase the total of production, but also the time of production. And this is used for vegetables as well. The early spring greens you see in the market, those are produced in these sorts of structures that allow you to manipulate and extend that season. 

Low tunnels, these are little tunnels, also used. They're even easier. You just put it right over your row. I do this in my garden at home too. I just put in my raised bed, I cover it in plastic and I'm harvesting before my neighbors are every year. It's very satisfying, right? [laughter] Up here you can see, are actually sweet cherries, cherry trees under a high tunnel. There's really two reasons for that. One is the shift in production time, but also, what's the big problem with sweet cherries? The birds, and they split with the rain. You get one rain fall and they all split. You put them in a high tunnel they don't get any rain on them. 

You eliminate the problem of splitting. You can control the birds. Suddenly you have a sweet cherry crop that maybe you wouldn't have had before. I think there are new ways that we're starting to really think things. If we really take seriously the idea of, let's produce as much as we can right here, for as long as we can. If we really put our minds to it, I think there's huge potential to really expand that and do that. Fruit has a really important role in our society. There's a connection to it to every individual. I teach a fruit class at UW, and I always-- My goal is that those students will leave that class and never be able to eat a fruit without having some sort of mental exercise thinking about where that fruit came from. What are the social costs of that fruit that I'm eating? What does it mean to me? Did it come from my community or did it come from some other community? If so, which one? What does it mean about that production that's in that community? So look for new crops. 

I'm sure we're going to see all kinds of new stuff showing up. There's aronia, that's elderberry, --, currants, hardy kiwi fruit. It's not native, but native but huge potential I think for hardy kiwi fruit. If you've ever tasted one, they're just little pockets of sugar. They're delicious. There's lots of really interesting things that I think we'll start to see showing up, because we're suddenly really motivated. I'll just end by saying this, that the value or the role, that fruit plays in a society really depends on who you ask. One of the most interesting places to go if you're a fruitaphile is Japan. You can see in that apple there, fruit is a gift. It is something to be revered. 

It is luxury item. Is it a sign of wealth and status? These apples-- companies will actually have their company logo on the apple. You can do this at home. If you cover up an apple as it's ripening, it has to have sunlight for that color to change. So if block the sunlight, it won't develop any color there. If you put these stickers that will block the light in the shape that they want, the motif, then you get these apple that have these company logos and stuff on them. They give them to their clients. It's really funny, right? Down on the bottom, square watermelons. They grow watermelons in boxes so that they have this square shape. Then they sell them for like $50 a watermelon! Fruit has a very different place there. 

It's a gift. It's a luxury item. It's a totally different way of looking at fruit. In Thailand up here fruit is like an art media. They carve these phenomenal pieces of art out of fruit. And they do vegetables as well. You should Google it. Thai fruit carvings. It will blow mind what they can do. In our culture, a lot of the time, it's just a way to get nutrients. 

And it's got to be fast and it's got to be convenient. Our, sort of, approach to it been, okay, let's package it. We'll pre-cut it. We'll make sure it's peeled so you don't have to do anything to it. Then you can just eat it. It really is just, I want to feel healthy, I want to eat fruit, but I don't want it to inconvenience me. It has to be fast. That has really influenced the way we deal with our fruit and we deliver our fruit in our culture. There's been a huge international drive to really encourage fruit and vegetable production in third-world countries because they're very high in nutrients. But they also have the potential, they have high market value. 

So there's a potential to actually generate income. You can produce for yourself and sell a high-value product. Internationally there's been a really global effort put into fruit and vegetable production systems that will work in third-world countries, using native fruits there, and finding ways to deal with post-harvest storage, transportation, and some of the limitations to really use fruit and vegetables to be both a nutrient source but also a means to actually generate income as well. As with beauty, it's in the eye of the beholder. The role of fruit really is dependant on how your particular culture sees it, and how they value it. I would encourage you to really think about fruit in a whole new way. Think about where it's coming from, and what possibly could we do to maybe re-think how we produce fruit and the types of fruit that we eat. Because I think if you are open minded you will be exposed to a whole world of deliciousness that comes right from here, right from next door or down the street, or maybe even a hundred miles away. I think that's all I have. [applause]