Plant and Food Research (HB Scientists on Air) – Allan White

You’re listening to Radio Kidnappers, the voice of Hawke’s Bay, and I’m Lyn Trafford presenting on behalf of the Hawke’s Bay branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Hawke’s Bay Scientists on Air – your opportunity to get to know recently retired and practising scientists from around the Bay. It is my pleasure to introduce Allan White from Plant and Food Research. With thirty-nine years of research, Allan has contributed to the success of breeding and biotechnology which has resulted in apple and pear cultivars that today we take for granted.

As we bite into a beautiful, delicious, yummy, crunchy Jazz apple, how many of us think about the science and scientists behind that apple? Well, probably no one. But today we’re going to do just that as we welcome Allan White to Radio Kidnappers. Welcome.

Allan White: Thank you, and good afternoon.

It’s really nice to have you here with us today. Now you’re not a local boy from Hastings, are you? Whereabouts are you from, Allan?

Well I was born and brought up in Wairoa.

And did you go to school in Wairoa?

Yes. Started out at North Clyde Primary School, and then to Wairoa Primary and finally to Wairoa College.

And during that process from primary school to secondary school, when did your interest in science develop, Allan?

Well I have to admit I wasn’t very good at science. I did better at subjects like English. However, I guess I originally wanted to be a pilot and applied to get in the Air Force but didn’t make it.

You applied while you were at school to go in the Air Force, did you?

Yes, yes. Then due to my eyesight which was marginal, they wouldn’t accept me. So without any better thought I declared to my teachers that I was going to go to university.

And you ended up in Massey in Palmerston North?

Exactly.

What were you studying down there, Allan?

Well I took horticulture, once again because despite the fact that I’d always declared I wouldn’t be involved in fruit growing having been brought up in an orcharding family, I ended up taking horticulture.

It’s kind of in the blood then, isn’t it?

Mmm, a reversion to type or something.

Yeah, something like that I suppose. [Chuckle]  So you studied at Massey, for what, three, four years?

Five years.

Five years; and during your degree, did that make you more decisive about a career in horticulture?

Oh, yes. I mean, I became very interested in science and and its application in horticulture. And I can remember visiting places like the DSIR [Department of Scientific & Industrial Research] in Havelock North and and thinking, you know, ‘That must be absolutely fantastic to work in a place like there.’ But I did, at the end of the university, go home, for a while.

Back to Wairoa?

Back to Wairoa, and worked on the family property; it lasted about six months.

That doesn’t always work when the young scientist comes home and starts trying to tell Dad and Granddad how to run their business.

Oh, and elder brother. So no, I can remember conversations along the lines of, “Well Allan, trees don’t grow the same in Wairoa as they …”

Do they not?

No … well apparently not.

That’s because they grow just that little bit ahead of trees that grow down here in Napier and Hastings?

Well no, I think the reason was that my father and elder brother didn’t actually accept some of the ideas I was trying to introduce into their management. But Wairoa is an interesting place horticulturally, and it’s an area that really has huge potential yet to be realised. Fruit in Wairoa mature at least two weeks before here in Hawke’s Bay, so on the local market, for example, this is a huge advantage in getting fruit to the market early and achieving a higher price. And the family orchard was based around that; we used to send plums and peaches all around the country to places like New Plymouth and Hawera and Palmerston North. And there was always a great demand for the fruit from there because it was early.

There’s always an advantage in that, isn’t there? Just as there sometimes is in the late harvest as well, in that it’s slightly different. Do you think that Wairoa’s potential will come to be?

Well I would hope so. There are quite a few people who realise the advantages of growing fruit in Wairoa. It’s really a matter of getting the act together; ensure the infrastructure and the support needed to establish a viable industry is put in place.

So having decided that maybe it wasn’t so good to be on the orchard with Dad and your brother, what happened to you then?

Oh, I saw an ad [advertisement] for a technician in the DSIR research orchard out at Havelock North; applied for it and was interviewed and given the job.

And this must be about thirty-nine years ago then?

It must be.

So you went to Havelock North – it’s just down the road really, and nicely placed between Wairoa and Palmerston North, I guess – but the beginnings of a really, really interesting work history, I think?

Well I think, you know, I was fortunate that I arrived in research at a time when … well I often say, you know, the first conversation I had with my boss who lived in Auckland was, “Really, Allan, you can do whatever you like just so long as it doesn’t cost anything.”

Oh, how good; that really that kind of sums up science sometimes, doesn’t it? It’s so hard to get the money to actually bring to fruition the ideas that are stuck in the scientist’s head.

Yeah.

So what happened then?

Well I took him at his word, and I guess I’m the sort of person that [who] relished that challenge. And so I started to get involved in various jobs – I mean, I was given work to do; I had responsibility for evaluating peaches, nectarines, plums, all the stone fruit.

What do you mean by evaluating, Allan?

We imported many varieties from overseas – somebody had to work their way through them to sort out which were well adapted; which had the requisite characteristics to make them a commercial variety.

So what are we looking for for those characteristics, other than maybe yumminess?

Productivity, resistance to diseases, large size, attractive looking fruit – all these types of things that both growers need so that they can grow an economic crop, and consumers want so they’re willing to part with money.

So all those years ago, did you find those characteristics in the fruit that we were producing in New Zealand, or were you only looking for it in fruit that was imported into New Zealand?

Well there weren’t a lot of varieties coming out of New Zealand.

Why was that, Allan?

I guess, if we’re talking about stone fruit – peaches and nectarines, etcetera – we didn’t have a lot of active breeding at that stage; that started to happen about the time that I was employed by DSIR although I didn’t become involved in that programme – I got, for various reasons, pushed towards apple and pear breeding.

Which was just as well for the people of New Zealand, I think, that you were pushed that way because all sorts of good things came from that programme that you were first part of and then oversaw?

I was appointed as the first full time pip fruit breeder.

So what were you looking at at that time?

Well I guess … you know, I need to acknowledge the influences that were around at that time, because I just didn’t arrive at being a breeder without any help or assistance in the history of the Institute. So I guess there were people, private orchardists, who had got into breeding; people like William Kidd, an orchardist living in Greytown who bred apples like Kidds Orange Red, and actually made the cross that led to Gala. So that was a big influence. There was the guy that I worked with out there, Doctor Don McKenzie, who’s an iconic figure in the history of the fruit industry in New Zealand, particularly the apple and pear industry. One of the first jobs that I had was to assist him in evaluating many apple varieties that we had bought in from overseas. He’d imported around about eleven hundred varieties, and we worked through these and found that none of them really were successful.

What were you trying to look for? That’s an awful lot to study – were you tasting them? Growing them? What were you trying to do with those apples?

Well you have to grow them, and then you have to eat them. So a prerequisite for being in the game that I’ve been in is a very strong stomach and ability to eat a lot of apples a day.

Trees wouldn’t have grown as well anyway, as others I presume?

Well there’s that; so you’ve got environmental adaptation, you’ve got productivity, you’ve got ease of management in the orchard – all these types of character[istics] are really good.

Where was the stock coming from to do this?

Oh, well Don imported material from the UK, [United Kingdom] from the United States, from France, from wherever, really … Japan; you know, so that was another major influence if you like in the background, to starting the breeding programme.

Why did we need to breed apples? What was wrong with the apples that we had?

A lot of people were quite happy with them; but at that stage another influence was the development of refrigeration which enabled us to export fruit from New Zealand around the world. And the effect of that was to narrow down the number of varieties we grew; so in the sixties and early seventies we were growing really three varieties of apples – Red Delicious, Golden Delicious and Granny Smith. The reason for this was that they were able to be stored long enough to be shipped around the world, but the downside was that they didn’t have the same flavour and aroma of a lot of the apples like Cox’s Orange etcetera, which you know, people really like to eat. So I mean, some people like Red Delicious and Granny Smith. There’s a demographic of about ten percent of the population that will eat Granny Smith and nothing else.

There’s something particularly nice for me about a really green apple for cooking.

So you can take pleasure in knowing you’re in a minority group … you’re not one of the pack.

Guess so.

So there was motivation like that. When William Kidd died, his family asked the DSIR if they wanted to take over the breeding, or look in the population that he had down there. And so Don McKenzie went down to Greytown with another colleague and they sifted through the seedlings down there and identified about eight that they thought were worth looking at, and Gala was one of those. So that sort of convinced Don that we needed to breed our own apples, you know; coupled with the experience of not finding anything after scanning the world for suitable varieties to extend our variety mix, he became convinced we needed to start our own breeding programme. So he did that in [19]69.

It‘s quite early, isn’t it?

It was, yeah. Now as it turned out, that programme wasn’t successful; but, you know, Don being Don, [he] wasn’t deterred by that. We treated it as a learning experience. And so when I arrived in Havelock North in 1975 I was immediately press ganged into helping him start another breeding population, and that was one that I inherited from Don when he retired. And we were able to select varieties like Pacific Rose, Pacific Queen, and Pacific Beauty and some others. The three that I just mentioned are still grown successfully; in fact are enjoying somewhat of a revival with our interest in developing our Asian markets, and Pacific Queen and Pacific Rose in particular.

Is that ‘cause they’re sort of big and pretty? Kind of pretty looking apple?

Well there’s nothing wrong with looking pretty, is there?

There’s not; they are pretty.

So you know, the first point of interaction if you like with a consumer, is the eye, and so they do have to look attractive or have some appeal. But the real thing that you need to select for is eating pleasure, so that when people eat a fruit they get pleasure from it and they want to repeat that. And so that’s why varieties such as Pacific Rose and Pacific Queen, successful as commercial cultivars, is because people actually, after being seduced by their good looks, actually …

It’s not hard to be seduced by them. Tell me about the story of Jazz.

In 1985, ’86, the Apple and Pear Marketing Board decided that they wanted to invest in a [an] apple breeding programme, and so I was given the job of starting that programme. And based on the experiences that I’ve just described and others, and other influences, I decided that the best thing I could do was choose two high quality apples that were locally developed in New Zealand. One of course was Royal Gala and the other was Braeburn. And there were sort of sound scientific reasons for doing that around adaptation; but also, they were – and Royal Gala still is – one of the leading high quality apples in the world, and many people would say that Braeburn is there as well.

Yeah, I think so too.

So I chose the best and crossed them; and we started through the process of having about eight and a half thousand seedlings that we worked our way through, and ended up with a set of about twenty selections from that. The occurrence of the combination that gives you a successful apple is extremely rare – very, very rare – and we would sort of say as a rule of thumb, ‘bout one seedling in every ten thousand that we produce in a breeding programme.

So how do you find that one?

You’ve got to be tenacious. I would say you’ve got to have good technique; you’ve got to understand what you’re looking for in a broad sense, and you have to set up systems that evaluate all these thousands of seedlings, each [of] which have a different fruit. Some of them eliminate themselves very early because they might be crab apples, or they might have very bad russet or [be] cracked, or be just too bitter to eat or something like that. But to work out what is a successful cultivar is something that is … yeah, quite difficult. I think once again I was fortunate that I worked in an industry that was very united; we had the Apple and Pear Marketing Board – that provided funding, and also provided a mechanism for doing large scale trialling around the country. So we had about twenty selections after sifting through all the thousands of seedlings, which appeared to meet the sorts of criteria … good size, good productivity, nice eating quality, crisp, juicy … these types of traits. And we were able to evaluate them across the country in large scale trials which gave us [the] sort of information we needed, to see whether they stored, they transported; and they were adapted to management in orchards on an extensive scale.

And out of that came Jazz?

Out of that came Jazz, and a whole stable actually, of others from that programme. So that cross was surprisingly successful.

And it’s a beautiful apple. And in front of me I’ve got a piece of paper that says it’s the ‘loudest apple on record’, and I think that must come come from its crunch, huh?

Yeah – well it didn’t inherit it from me. No, I think that is – it’s the crunchiest apple, and it’s a marketing ploy.

Yeah, and it works. We mustn’t end our interview without talking about the pears. Now there’s one here that’s called the Papple. I don’t know whether that appeals to me or not, but it sticks in my head because it’s a funny sort of thing. Now this pear – was that developed for the Chinese market?

No, it wasn’t. Just very quickly, when I started breeding pears in 1981 the whole reason for starting a breeding programme was that European pears as we know them, are soft, buttery, beautiful aroma, lovely flavour, wonderful eating, but not well adapted to supermarket selling. So when you go to a supermarket, most of the pears you get are hard, and they’re not particularly nice, in my opinion. So I was aware that Chinese and Japanese pears … the Asian species of pears … were selected for crisp, juicy texture; so I came up with the idea that if we crossed the Chinese types, which we could do with the European pears, we would combine crisp, juicy texture with high aroma and flavour that we like in the European pear. And so after several generations of crossing, we’ve now ended up with fruit that do [does] combine flavour and texture.

And look nice.

They look lovely. A whole new adventure for me was I was invited to go to China to look at the red pears that were growing in the tail end of the Himalayan Mountains, up against Burma and Laos and Cambodia and Vietnam. And in that region, there were red-skinned pears growing. Now we had red-skinned European pears, but the Chinese pears were [an] incredibly beautiful red colour. So I was fortunate that I had some people in China who invited me to go there and showed me these pears. It was an amazing trip; we averaged fifteen kilometers an hour over these mountain roads in an old van. And as a result, I was able to integrate those characteristics into the pears that we had. Papple is currently selling for £1UK [GBP] a [per] fruit in London.

That’s amazing. And you’ve become part of the Chinese Academy of Foreign Experts, and that’s because of your work with pears?

Yes. And that that’s quite an honour that I feel …

I think so, yes.

So I’m a member of the Academy, and they invite me and pay for me to go to China to continue the work that I’ve been involved in.

Is this kind of like an advisory capacity?

Well I’m involved in a collaborative research programme there.

Good. And that’s ongoing for some years yet?

Yes, yes.

Keep you out of trouble for a wee while then?

I’ve never been in trouble.

On behalf of the Royal Society and Radio Kidnappers, thank you, Alan White, firstly for that lovely Jazz apple and for the Envy apple that I have sitting on my desk here as we are talking, but also for being one of the Hawke’s Bay branch of the Royal Society’s Scientists on Air.