2 ms·

It can cost over $10M and 22 years to create a new Apple variety.'

19 points by jelliclesfarm 6y ago

Jedd 6y ago
TFA asserts "... $10.5 million went into marketing the apple" which speaks against the 'create new variety' claims. Actual creation of a new apple variety is painfully simple - pick an apple growing in an orchard with multiple varieties, and plant the seeds and wait a few years. It's a coin flip whether it'll be good, or indeed how much it will differ from either of its parents and what characteristics it will have - but it really is that easy. But there's ~10,000 known apple varieties out there, selected over hundreds of years to be ideal in one or more of several distinctly different categories (cooking, baking, saucing, cider, fresh, long storage, preserve, jam, etc), with huge variation in how local climate and soil will affect the fruit, and also what flavours & textures each person may prefer. These guys aren't claiming this is the best apple, happily, but it is definitely designed for mass production: works well under irrigation, fast to fruit, prodigious fruiting, disease and pest resistant, attractive and edible skin, consistent size, flesh that's slow to brown, long storage and robust for transport -- and, dare I say it, attractive to the North American market (which probably means sweeter than what most other cultures would prefer).
Alex3917 6y ago
Interesting, but also kind of propagandistic and it definitely doesn't take anywhere near that much time and money. In reality you need two generations of fruit: a first generation where you plant 1,000+ trees with good ancestry, and then a second generation where you make sure your selections do well when grafted, stay true to form, and thrive under a variety of different conditions and microclimates. This really takes at most a few hundred thousand dollars and maybe 15 years, the only reason this specific variety cost so much to create is that they were trying to do the biggest rollout of all time for a huge commercial crop. And don't get me wrong, Cosmic Crisp is fine. But I don't think they're any better than Snap Dragon, which probably cost well under a million dollars to create. All in all, if you have a house with some land then you can basically do this in your back yard for almost no money if you're so inclined.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  apples for market have other criteria like storability and colour etc. now that we have robots for harvesting in apple orchards, standardisation and timing and everything is going to be dependent on specific trait breeding.

19 points by jelliclesfarm 6y ago

Jedd 6y ago

TFA asserts "... $10.5 million went into marketing the apple" which speaks against the 'create new variety' claims. Actual creation of a new apple variety is painfully simple - pick an apple growing in an orchard with multiple varieties, and plant the seeds and wait a few years. It's a coin flip whether it'll be good, or indeed how much it will differ from either of its parents and what characteristics it will have - but it really is that easy. But there's ~10,000 known apple varieties out there, selected over hundreds of years to be ideal in one or more of several distinctly different categories (cooking, baking, saucing, cider, fresh, long storage, preserve, jam, etc), with huge variation in how local climate and soil will affect the fruit, and also what flavours & textures each person may prefer. These guys aren't claiming this is the best apple, happily, but it is definitely designed for mass production: works well under irrigation, fast to fruit, prodigious fruiting, disease and pest resistant, attractive and edible skin, consistent size, flesh that's slow to brown, long storage and robust for transport -- and, dare I say it, attractive to the North American market (which probably means sweeter than what most other cultures would prefer).

Alex3917 6y ago

Interesting, but also kind of propagandistic and it definitely doesn't take anywhere near that much time and money. In reality you need two generations of fruit: a first generation where you plant 1,000+ trees with good ancestry, and then a second generation where you make sure your selections do well when grafted, stay true to form, and thrive under a variety of different conditions and microclimates. This really takes at most a few hundred thousand dollars and maybe 15 years, the only reason this specific variety cost so much to create is that they were trying to do the biggest rollout of all time for a huge commercial crop. And don't get me wrong, Cosmic Crisp is fine. But I don't think they're any better than Snap Dragon, which probably cost well under a million dollars to create. All in all, if you have a house with some land then you can basically do this in your back yard for almost no money if you're so inclined.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago
apples for market have other criteria like storability and colour etc. now that we have robots for harvesting in apple orchards, standardisation and timing and everything is going to be dependent on specific trait breeding.