cc >> Welcome, everyone,
to Wednesday Nite at the
I work here at the UW Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW-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
Brent McCown, who will be talking to us about the culture
and genetics of cranberries.
emeritus this year in the Department of Horticulture in
the College of Agriculture and
served as a faculty Lmember for over 39 years.g
That's an occasion
[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
grapes, hazelnuts, and Wisconsin, including wine
He is undaunted by the chilly climate of cranberries, perhaps
as a result of his work from
at the Institute of Arctic 1970-72, as a visiting scholar
Alaska in Fairbanks, and also, Biology at the University of
captain at the US Army Pole Region Research and Engineering
Laboratory, also in Fairbanks.
from UW-Madison. His He has received three degrees
horticulture in 1965 and 1967, bachelor and masters in
It's one of the great things and his PhD in botany in 1969.
and especially at this about working at a university,
have not only spent their entire university, to have people who
entire lives to the work lives here, but dedicated their
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
Read the punch line? I'm trouble. [indistinct]
Is that what you're youtalking about?an?
[laughter] The smallest one,
of course.
Okay, a little bit about myself.
me give an idea. I'm Tom has already done it, but let
here for three years, I've actually, because I was a TA
associate lecturer, essentially, actually taught, and an
taught here more than 40 before that, I've actually
When I was a professor, I spent a good set of my time teaching
undergraduates. I really
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.
that's very important on this campus, and most of you who areg
retired faculty realize this, the shared governance system is
a very important element. I spent a lot of time on
zillions of committees
I'm retired now, but I still across campus.
let me off of yet. I have two committees they won't
actually today. I was jalso director for thee
Center of Integrative Agricultural Systems.
This is a unit that looks at
"sustainable" agriculture. I sustainable, what's called now
but nevertheless, organic dagriculture, pasture-based
farming, especially cheeses,
So that was very, very exciting. food systems, which is big now.
Quite divethe least.nk, to say
If you want to get a hold of me,
I'm not in my office that much the best way to do it is email.
I access this, so feel free to anymore, so do it by email.
We're going to cover a little bit of aspects here, a little
bit about the background
How many of you know a of cranberries.
Nobody, by golly! lotBright audience.es?
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
what they said they could use iwas part of the research that,
I'll be exploring.
I'll spend most of the time on
and that's creating the whacranberry of the future.o,
We'll get into that in some detail.
Then we'll end up a little about
This is going to be kind of a broad based talk, that is, when
I'll talk about cranberries,
learned here. One example, there are a lot of lessons to be
it a little bit, is the cooperative nature of working
with not only colleagues at this
farmers, and the various other university, but also with the
going to put these kinds of intechnologies into aspect.ly
The cranberry industry is a beautiful example of this kind
of interaction between
Okay, cranberry is university and the state.
Everybody knows that? [chuckles]
Actually, cranberries is
circum-polar region, around, native across all the northern
cranberries. There but they're not all the same
Related to blueberries, lingonberries, and
huckleberries. Lingonberries
berries all over the are the European,
I think the cranberry industry place, kind of stuff.
native crops that we can grow scommercially in the area.w
What's another one? Corn?
No, that's native to Mexico, not
won't go into that. Cranberry, so much in this area, but we
is not very competitive. actually the plant
Islides. You'll see that.
It's a plant that has adapted to
don't have a lot of competition. be well suited for areas that
a lot of nutrients and These are areas that don't have
If nothing else grows there, have a lot of stresses.
other aspects. So it it's cranberry, as well as some
lands, higher dense soils, goes best in acid peat
cold, short growing season, velow soil nutrients.s,
You'll see that when
I'll put this together. It's you see the growers.
Anybody have a prescription for taking cranberries?
They're prescribed if you have
that kind of stuff. aCranberries is a well-known,
aspect. Any bacteria, urinary
infections, tooth decay, it comes out that more and more
research is finding that it does
gum tissue kind of help with plaque build up and
Who knows what antioxidants do? Well, it's got a lot of
antioxidants in there anyway, situation.
One of the more exciting
anti-inflammatory. That is, slowing down swellings
and inflammation aspect.
out, for things like Alzheimer's Very important, it's turning
as well as heart and disease, and brain infections,
So, all kinds of potentials. the vascular system.
Wisconsin. Cranberry Okay, a long history in
people and settlers. I was used by the native
this, but there are some really interesting stories about how
the native peoples
It was heavily used. actually used this crop.
before statehood. It's Commercially produced since
crops the native culture probably one of our first
Thirteen commercial beds that we produced in Wisconsin.
more than 100 years old. know of right now that are still
cranberries for more than 100 years on the same piece of land.
Does that tell you something
It's a winner, man. Now, about this plant?
This goes back and there's about 200+ growers.
Interestingly, most of these are forth a little bit.
farms and many generations, two or three generations, kind of
stuff, passed down. A very
as I'm concerned. imAnd in 20 counties.far
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
the central part of the state. part of the state, and then in
are Wood County, kind of The biggest counties, by far,
Wood County, Jackson aspects, the central part of
Wood County is probably the cranberry capital of the world
situation. What's unique about these
counties, when we're talking
versus all the other counties athat are more southern?nt
What's special about
They're farming. They're these counties?
not necessarily highly a little bit of farm,
The soils there get a little skeptical.
We're in economic stressed
Cranberries are really important areas, in many cases.
see the value of this plant. in these areas, because you'll
for people's jobs and money, in Ia 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
so there's the cranberry like to show off,
By the way, the water in wakeboarder situation.
So, this guy is strong, but this is even more strong.
[laughter] She's
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
theWhoops. Sorry.ly.
Let me go back. I pushed
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
because we always put a lot of laugh at the researchers,
everything else, that kind of destroy their beautiful marshes.
But nevertheless, it's a
You'll see why. One thing gthat's an interesting.
place to work is we're up in
natural areas of Wisconsin. sThere was one marsh that Ig
worked on for the last three
whooping cranes right there. years, that has had nesting
of my research box Right, you know, in sight
It's a very interesting area.
Okay, again the association between growers and the
University of Wisconsin has been
years, many decades going on. The growers themselves are veryy
well educated for basic,
They have a high northern farmer-type growers.
I don't know how many of the respect for education.
undergraduate classes here at the university taking degrees at
a four-year college. So,
Beautiful people to work with. they're interesting.
You'll see that. The They're extremely innovative.
have eaten a raw cranberry?
What's it taste like? [laughs]
Well, it kind of puckers
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.
something and making it So into a valuable product.ng
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
Cranberry Board, who distributes to the Wisconsin
research, and that that money to things like
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
the cranberry industry. That's endowed by a professorship in
about 13 years ago, how Ikind of stuff. work
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.
cranberry plant before? [laughs]
A very interesting
It's interesting in a number of ways, but the first place, it's
got two major growing parts.
So if you plant a cranberry, See these winding stems?
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
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 fruit. So we have tthe runners and thell
uprights, kind of situation.
biologically. First, A very interesting plant
slide, you can see several if you look at this
First place, what's the thcolor of the leaves?e.
They're red, okay? Cranberry
like rhododendrons. They're lbroadleaf evergreen,
leaves. This is a plant that is just
classical for these plants that grow in these low nutrient, hot,
acid conditions. These
very common for these kinds eveof plant situations.st
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,
The second thing to look okay? Very interesting.
I'm supposed to at use this pointer.le--
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,
uprights will have not every one, a lot of these
That will develop the next flower buds form now.
flowers for next growth of the upright into
I'll get into that more, because year, situation.
biology of these plants. it's real important to the
fruiting. That's all Okay, there's your upright
okay? So, essentially othe flowers areh,
at the base of this new shoot for this year.
The flowers are on the
Then, there's vegetative basal part of it.
Then at the top, there'll be growth above that.
anothOkay? Situation.year.
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
cranberries get no bigger than is essentially a small,
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.
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
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,
there. This is an example of the
flower, a close-up of the cranberry flower.
That little drop is nectar
pollinated or insect pollinated. sitting there, so these are bee
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
is a student. The one next to him, in a blue
shirt, is the actual
I think he's a fourth generation cranberry grower.
situation. Notice in thwhat they're in.mily
They've got wader boots on. This is water.
They're standing in water.
essentially necessarily don't grow in the water, but what they
do quite often is grow on little
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
But they like to be in the water all the time.
There's a cranberry tmarsh that's kind of--.
I love this picture. You
anymore. They've all don't see these much
out. But that's what been straightened
cranberry bog. This is I call a lovely
There are several things out of Massachusetts.
The first thing, see all these to point out here.
things here? These are little kind of sprinklers, these
So cranberries do not have all sprinkler heads.
they're in this managed area, they like to be watered quitee
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
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
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
acres that are natural wetlands, production, there's eight to ten
water source continually because they need to have this
So actually, the cranberry to supply their own needs.
managers of very important growers are very heavy land
Interesting game. resBeautiful fishing.n.
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
Beautiful, clean clear quite like that.
Okay, there's a modern water, so it's awesome.
This is a bed that was planted. This is one-year-old vines.
They will begin to
This is one of the largest take off for one year.
Cranberry Creek, up near cranberry grower areas,
The thing to note here is the design of the modern bed..
It costs anywhere from $20,000
these beds. They're to $40,laser leveled. put in
They have all kinds of sand added to the bottom so they have
good drainage there. All
resources and flow. That kinds of access to water
so it flows beautifully from one spot to the other.
So very high cost of
But once you get it in, like getting this established.
the best designed systems this, that you can find.ne of
By the way, that's another
She actually manages a marsh cranberry grower.
of Wisconsin, okay, so that's the second largest in all
[chuckles] Very wgood, by the way.e.
Okay, go back to this thing.
fruit? This is about that tall.
That's three acres, right there.
You have about two They've got 50 of those beds.
You're going to pick weeks to harvest it.
If you are, you're going it by hand? [laughs]
Okay, the old way they used to to be very cold out there!
This is called a cranberry rake. do it is by hand, actually.
this. You'd partially flood that
marsh, that bed, so that
Then you'd go through and iyou'd rake all this up.t.
In fact, the very high quality
are fresh market cranberries are cranberries that you get that
are better ways than to do it dby hand, but close to this,e
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
Wisconsin invented a cranberry growers in
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?
Fully innovation way to do it. It floats, by golly.
flood that marsh, knock them off If these fruit float, let's
float up to the top. By thogolly, this has made thest
Wisconsin industry. There's an aerial photograph of
a cranberry bed. Those
call beaters. They go whalong and very gentlyhey
beat the vines a little bit.
There's your cranberries All these fruit come off.
Cool, huh? Brilliant.
But, what's it depend upon? A lot of water, a good source of
water. All the
located in areas that have a lot cranberry areas are
If you look at the water of water flowing through them.
areas, it's a state managed maarea, and there's water fromg
one spot, and it flows through
and all the native areas, etc. all the different marshes,
They've used it for a It's part-time situation.ter.
It flows on beyond
So, there's the beater. It's them. Pretty cool.
kind of thing. It esslightly beats it up.er
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
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,
berries to get them up then they corral all those
That goes into a truck. The truck then moves off
to a processing plant. I think
plants now in Wisconsin. Then the cranberries are made
into a sellable product and stored.
Okay, current economic situation.
Again, Wisconsin's
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
About $350 million, plus or minus impact, it depends on the
year. But man, for
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.
Good old juice. Except Most all of it goes to?
What's the big change? that's changing.
A very important product. GoI'll give 'em to youy.
in a little bit. Good old dried cranberries.
Okay, very high value crop. Grossed about $8,000 per acre.
Again, it depends on
This will vary per year, etc., what the value is.
of stuff. But remember, but thait costs $30,000+his kind
to establish this thing.
potentially. Until the Very high risk crop,
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
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.
produce cranberries. Both Wthe coasts, west coast isat
pretty minor, except
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
Increasing competition with juice markets makes it a lot
more competitive. Remember, a good percentage of
the cranberries go to juice.
can you see on the market? All How many different juices
back and forth, so there's all kinds of juices, all kinds
A real interesting kinds of competition for juice.
Continue to have difficulty balancing supply and demand,
simple agriculture, right?
Typical of many Nagricultural 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
together nationally and says a group that gets
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
your crop, or something sayinglike that, okay?20% of
This doesn't often happen,
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
the shipment, the demand have increased
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
The kind of question we had, of the industry then.
endowment, this professorship, especially when I got this
You know? There's whabeen all kinds of,u?
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
cranberries that will increase characteristics and traits to
markets, craisins theirbeing an example. other
That situation. And continue to decrease the
impact on the environment.
ThThere's an example. [laughs]s.
Cool picture, huh?
This is not unusual, by the way. They're all around.
harvest season. These You are critical areas.uring
Originally, the marshes were
wetlands, prime wetlands. That actually destroying very good
early 1900s, kind of stuff. No was originally back in the
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
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
things is how you manage these of the major design
do we use water for? We use wateit for irrigation duringhat
the summer, during
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
inthey're not very cold hardy.is
They're native to northern Wisconsin.
Why aren't they cold hardy? They don't like winter.
Duh. [laughs]
So, how can they survive
in native areas? up in northern Wisconsin
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
because the snow makes they grow in these low areas
So the growers-- a beautiful blanket.
In the winter, when it's exactly, you're right.
It's not cold yet. When the supground begins to freezeere.
a little bit, the growers will
beds. Ice will form graduallon each one off these
them, and eventually, all these cranberries will be completely
under ice. That protects
wind and changes in cold and them from all this
during winter. They stsurvive beautifully thatve
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
there's a lot of crops, really produce beautiful cranberries,
compete with the east and west high quality, but we can't
The reason being is that they produce cranberries that have
higher color. They
season than we do. Why do you produce cranberries?
Color is probably 99% why you produce the cranberry, right,
that situation. So these
they had longer growing seasons, west coasts, because
longer, and would have much thhigher contents of thesee
pigments, than
Potentially, because we had the heavy winters coming in, we're
not coastal, we had to make sure
everything froze, otherwise we hyou'd destroy the crop.efore
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
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
Whoops, darn it. other one is--
I think I'll put my glasses on.
Let me just go up...
So, there we go. The
is this environmental aspect. The environmental aspect was
primarily, the biggest problem
at that period of time, was that that they were concerned about
to control the insects they had to use some pesticides
But there was all this water and the weeds.
That's a sign of potential moving through all the time.
So we said, well, gee, maybe we could find some way to develop
the ability to use some of the
formed that were much more new pesticides that were being
heavy duty workers, kind of stuff, and make it worthwhile.
We'd do all this, of course,
You hope. So, we while increasing yields.
breeding for the fruit color. But we didn't know how to do
much breeding of cranberries
We had to develop in a rthe techniques. time.
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,
it takes a year to get the you're going to cross it,
And to germinate, it takes seed, there's a dormant seed.
that plant to flower. I don't anotknow if I'll be around! for
[laughs] There's ten
We'll make this thing go as fast years of testing.
all the breeding in the agreenhouse, and we'd take thedo
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
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
it's sterile, in vitro culture called microculture, that is,
the horticulture industry for multiplying plants quite a bit.
That's what you see. Those
that are sterile inside. We take the seeds off these
fruits before they mature,
We'd sterilize them, the surface before they got dormant.
media that grows plants, and of them, put them in the special
right in those bottles we'd germinate very quickly,
The advantage of this was that they're all clean,
they all have 100% germination. The other advantage was that
we had those permanently
We didn't have to worry about keeping those plants alive.
They were just, we could
reculture them all the take those jars and just
This microculture, we developed that for the industry.
This is all sterile, with hoods.
individual plants that you can Those are the kinds of number of
It went very well. Once hayou said, okay, I want tos.
now get some plants out in the
I take these little shoots. fThey're called microculture.?
These are micro-shoots
micro-cuttings. Anyway, wityou take that littleand
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,
particular cross that we did, that we wanted to see what was
going on. We then went
and started planting them. back into the field
Ncranberry research farms.n
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 growers. Cool, huh. by
Very valuable. Of course, I hope we showed them
the benefits of this. So anyway, there it is.
There's one of the fields.
seedlings from a Those are all individual
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
One was a high-yielding, that we really chose.
This a cultivar called Stevens. It's been around forever.
It was the most highly planted
that situation. Then cranberry in the United States,
cranberry selection that we liked to grow, but it was a real
tough plant to grow,
I thought well, gee, maybe if we but gorgeous color.
ability-- Stevens was combine grown because itine this
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,
[laughs] Okay, so here we are.
Parent two is the Stevens.
September or October. You can see how color increases
with time, situation. Parent
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
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
that had a beautiful, dark red number of these
Actually, they tasted cbetter 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
in early October. This cranberries are harvested
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
produce. What if we could increase the
harvest time, therefore increase
those processing how often, the length of time
Add two weeks to plants are operating.
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
Steit. We called it HyRed.e of
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
in the Stevens? That's that notice those white berries
berries that are buried in the because some of the
In Stevens, they just stay canopy need light to get color.
they color up anyway. whBeautiful coloration.ed,
Okay, we are "Bred to be redder and better."
This is the first-- This
around with the computer. This is my technician playing
patented. WARF has it is tand is the licensee.ver
Done in cooperation with
Okay, this may also, by the way, the university, right?
cranberries. We're improve some health aspects of
not as other people looking just beginning to look at this,
pigment systems that develop the a little bit, but some of the
these compounds that are pigments, also develop some of
urinary tract infections, etc. important in some of these
Okay, herbicide or the But that's not proven yet.
We tried to concentrated on herbicide use instead of
insecticides, and everything
much easier to do else, bthan insecticides., it's
But more importantly, they kept on saying time and time again,
the weeds are my
The weeds are my biggest problem.
The problem is that you have biggest problem.
short, perennial plants. native plants come in that are
bottom of the Thecranberry root down.the
They're hard to control.
cranberry. So you say, They're tucked away on this
that. That was the beginning of
biotechnology in Wisconsin, and in the world, essentially.
Madison became a center of all
labs, and we got cooperation kinds of small biotechnology
these aspects. Idea, make witha cranberry resistante of
to the effects of a low-impact herbicide.
Again, a herbicide that does
than the ones they were using. much less environmental problems
to be able to do this. What we needed were some genes
cranberry the only plant in that The idea was to make the
sprayed with a herbicide, that was the only plant that
survived, and all the weeds were killed.
So you had to put something in
You see this now with other it tthings on soybeans, andance.
everything else all over the place.
This is much better. So we
This is interesting. used genetic engineering.
learned here. Again, There's been some lessons
technique. I'll go we had to develop the
Again, we used these through it real quickly.
These are little stems microculture plants.
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,
biotechnology company. I little independent, dynamic
I'd just walk in there worked with them all the time.
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
then. The idea here now, is that you have a used
little petri dish, you put your tissue in that petri dish, the
plant you want to get the gene
case. The genes, into there, your stems in this
genes are put on little gold pieces, very fine gold
particles, face powder
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
Those blue spots-- You see is an example of a stem.
Those are the gold pieces that never got into the stem.
That's the stem. There's
there. Those blue anpieces are cells.ht
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
engineered plant. Okay, got let's move forward.ally
Fast forward, it took us ten years to do it.
Here's an example in culture system.
We also have a gene mixed into
in there that makes it kind of this, a mixture of genes we put
in the medium that resistant to a chemical you put
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
That hopefully has also the herbicide resistant gene, but we
don't know that yet. We take
them all the time. But them out and go through
at? This is a herbicide called
Liberty, a very environmentally "friendly" herbicide.
Much friendlier than what they
that. Rapid breakdown were usinin the soil.on about
Very little toxicity to animals,
systems there. Effective fish, etc., so nice to the water
There's some history of use of on most weeds.
so there's some itbackground to it already.s,
We got the gene for that. The genes that went into--
The herbicide works by
metabolism in the plant, a essentially altering nitrogen
Nothing unique. Essentially, very common kind of thing.
ammonia toxicity. Very the plants die of
stuff. Where do we straight forward kind of
The gene came originally, we get the gene from?
this, it came originally from dian isolated soil bacterium.did
So it exists out there
Essentially, the gene that we put in there to give resistance
to this herbicide destroys the herbicide.
It actually degrades the
because that means we can spray the crop with the herbicide and
we don't accumulate herbicide,
Sounded good, didn't it? because it's being degraded.
So the results were encouraging, My gosh, will it work?
The flat next to me is a to say the least.
cranberries in it. Never spayed.
The flat on the other end is
cranberry plant, but a non-genetically engineered
It killed the weeds! [laughs]
Did a good job with the cranberries, too.
The one in the middle used
cranberry plant, resistant to the Liberty herbicide, and the
weeds are gone. Oh, we
went out to one of the local said, gosh, we actually
big celebration. Right bars that's closed now and had a
there. It was too thegood to be true.ght
What do you do? But it
commercialized. In fact, will probably never be
anymore. We destroyed it.
Tsk, tsk, tsk. The
to destroy it. And growers asked us
Any idea why? Pardon?
[inaudible] Okay, there was the problem,
cranberries, if you ask an
like about cranberries, the word individual consumer what they
If you talk to consumers, what "natural" comes up all the time.
engineering, the word t"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
The company that owned these problem. But guess what?
company, it starts with an "M ge," a bigger company anyway.ger
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
upping the lawsuits, big that herbicide use, they're
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
And also, the industry, they're smart to do this, I think.
They're concerned. They're
right? They said, hey, intelligent people,
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
How's that for a picture, huh? the future and about --
If you go on the Internet Thiand search for pictures ofum.
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
good water management, improving more of an increasing issue is
particularly recycling within a particular bed more than
having it flow through, so we have less potential problems.
That's coming along. A
A big one, climate change. lot more work to do.
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 the change in annual average temperature
from 1950 to 2006. This is
really good site, by the way. This is the WICCI site.
Fantastic information on
Obviously, these areas are it. I showed this to them.
according to this, and probably increasing predictions,
increasing climate change.
Now, is that good or bad? WeWhat was one of the majorng.
limitations of cranberry
A short growing season. Guess what, the growing season
has increased by two weeks
They're actually getting better fruit that they barely need my
hybrid. That's not
nevertheless, so it could improve the cranberry industry,
right? But you don't know that.
What's another aspect that comes
[inaudible] Yeah, it's along with climate change?
have infestation changes, but the big thing is an increase in
variability. No farmer
variability in their likes increased
We see that now. Look what's going on out there,
right, these last three weeks.
We anticipate there will be very drastically increased
variability in this, so therefore, how do you try to, as
a researcher, do
One aspect is what something about that?
That is, instead of planting I call resilience.
this beautiful, very expensive just one or two cultivars in
series of different ones to work field, let's develop a whole
different times, that have with that could be harvested at
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
Great for a plant breeder, into that slowly.
Except I retired. Health so I've got a permanent job.
possibility. It's really benefits are another
health claims. Anybody hard to substantiate
medical researchers at all? The problem, as I see it, and
a lot of plant researchers see
cranberry are from a mixture of different kinds of compounds and
characteristics, a plethora of
kind of stuff together. If you different antioxidants and that
you have to work on? get an NIH grant, what do
[laughs] You can't One god damn compound!
kind of things. It won't work.
We've done a little bit of it,
hint of it, but you're but it's, you know, you have a
So there has to be a change in not substantiating.
This is not only cranberries, how this is a lot of stuff.one.
If we find out what's going on, we can increase those
potentials, I think,
But we don't know yet. And very strongly.
Okay, there you go. There's of your Thanksgiving.ts.
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]