How long have you been working at East Malling?
11 years.
What are the best parts of your job as a breeder?
I most enjoy selecting in the seedling populations. I spend a lot of the summertime walking around the orchard, tasting and making notes on the best individuals. I am always amazed at the level of variation you can find, even in the same family, and I never fail to get my 5 A DAY.
And the most frustrating part?
The most frustrating part of breeding cherries is the difficulties of raising large progenies. Fruit set can be hampered by many environmental factors like frost, unseasonably high temperatures, low humidity, and seed germination ranges from five to 50 per cent. So a lot of work goes into producing each of the individual seedlings we evaluate.
How many crosses do you make each year, and how many progenies would result from the crossings?
Each year we make around 2,500 individual hand pollinations for 10 or so different parental combinations.
What are the main aims of the breeding programme?
We are developing cherry cultivars adapted to intensive orchard systems. For the UK this means we want to create varieties that are compatible with Gisela dwarfing rootstocks. Growers need cherries that deliver a good yield every year, have some natural resistance to common problems such as rain, and above all they have to be large, sweet, firm and tasty. There are already plenty of good cherry varieties that crop in the mid-season, so we are keen to look at early- and late-cropping cultivars. We would also like to provide growers, retailers and consumers with interesting novel varieties such Rainier-type cherries.
When do you think you will have some new varieties for UK growers to trial?
We have shortlisted seven promising selections from the trials, which will be tasted by members of the breeding group and retailers this summer. We hope to choose the best three to four and start propagation in August, so young trees should be available for grower trials in a couple of years.
How has breeding changed in the past few years, and how do you see it evolving in the future?
Until 2009, cherry breeding and genetics at EMR was supported by DEFRA. The focus was on understanding the genetic control of traits such as fruit colour and self-compatibility and, to a lesser extent, developing late fruiting cultivars for UK growers. In the last couple of years, we have been working directly with industry partners Univeg and AIGN. This collaboration brings a commercial drive to the programme as well as an international dimension. We are now much more market-focussed with Univeg and its customers involved at an early stage of the cultivar development process and AIGN enabling worldwide trialling and commercialisation. This is a positive change for us, and for the UK cherry industry as a whole.
In terms of the way we manage the breeding programme, there are now some interesting opportunities to shorten the selection process through the use of genetic markers. This is really exciting science and I could go on for hours. But in layman’s terms it will mean we can screen young seedlings and find out if they have inherited desirable traits just by analysing the DNA from a single leaf.
Ultimately, trees will have to be grown and evaluated for fruit quality but we could focus only on the most promising one from the start. We are running a truly commercial breeding programme at East Malling now, but at the same time we are a respected research station with close relationships in the scientific world, so we are always looking at ways to use science to improve everything we do. -
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