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Comment by walnutclosefarm | Hacker News Reader

Although I appreciate the work folks like Tom Brown do, the notion that he has actually rescued 1000 varieties is a bit of a stretch. An apple variety is only really rescued when it has found a home in commerce and some significant consumer base wants it. Otherwise it's just on life support in a museum, and maybe in a few home orchardists' little collections of trees - it's perpetuation still hanging by a thread. In particular, trees grafted, as Brown's are, onto dwarf roootstock, sometimes mutiple varieties per tree, and maintained by an 80 year old retiree, could all be gone again in a decade or two, even if his records are meticulous. Dwarf apple trees don't live long, and a single ice storm or hurricane could kill hundreds of varieties in a single pass.

This is not to dis Tom's work, only to say, the actual rescue is very tenuous.

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> An apple variety is only really rescued when it has found a home in commerce and some significant consumer base wants it.

This is such a sad viewpoint on the world when biodiversity is valued only if it is commercially exploitable. See other threads on what "home in commerce" really means: optimizing for transportability and uniformity at the expense of flavor and nutrition.

Late to the heirloom party, but this summer a friend offered me a cheese and tomato sandwich from her garden. I originally wasn't interested because tomatoes were always kinda meh for me. But after some encouragement I went for it and after the first bite, I realized I just never actually had a truly juicy and flavorful tomato in my life.

When you say something needs to be commercially successful to be viable, be careful what you're optimizing for. Our commercial agriculture systems don't always optimize for the things you're sold in the slick marketing commercials. There's alternative commerce systems out there, but they look like a farmer's market where you might be surprised by a variety you've never tasted before and might have a few blemishes rather than the scale of a national supermarket where both coasts and everyone in between always gets the same consistent but bland red delicious.

> When you say something needs to be commercially successful to be viable, be careful what you're optimizing for.

I'm optimizing for survival. If an apple variety has no market, it won't be eaten or enjoyed (so it becomes at best a museum accession), and in the longer term, it won't be grown, propagated or maintained, and because these things don't live forever, and don't propagate themselves, it will disappear. It doesn't have to have a huge market, it can be regional, or highly specialized; it can even be for nursery trees so people can try to grow it in their back yards. But just like anything that has to be produced (that is, that doesn't just persist on its own), it will disappear if no one is willing to pay for it to be produced.

So, I'm not making a value judgment about commercial vs other, I'm just saying what it takes to keep something alive.

It takes money to keep a variety alive, but commerce isn't the only source of money. A properly supported public collection, for example:

https://brogdalecollections.org/the-fruit-collection/

Saving heirloom apples has zero biodiversity value, or near two it. All domestic apples are extremely inbred and from a one or two cultivars brought to Europe a few hundred years back. The reservoir of apple biodiversity , at least for sylvestris is in its native range where domestic apple cultivation is actively polluting the genome. I think that's like khazakhastan and western china.

To add to this, any seeds from wild pollination will result in new 'varieties'.

It's trivial to regain diversity from this species, and it's not like apple is on the edge of survival.

To add to this, any seeds from wild pollination will result in new 'varieties'my

It's trivial to regain diversity from this species, and it's not like apple is on the edge of survival.

Common apple is still genetically very close to the true native species from Kazajahstan forests. This was a surprise for everybody.

There are other species from Japan to Siberia that can act as pollen donors.

Tomatoes are the extreme of what's better from a home garden.

Or as my former colleague put it: I didn't know I liked tomatoes until the first time I traveled to Europe.

Are apples one of those plants that require grafting to be true to type?

Yes.

What you're describing sounds more like "revive" or "sustain". Interesting and important next steps, for sure. Saving a variety from imminent destruction is still a "rescue", though.

That's a fair and good correction. My only point is that they are still extremely vulnerable to extinction, unless there is demand for them in the market.

> Although I appreciate the work folks like Tom Brown do, the notion that he has actually rescued 1000 varieties is a bit of a stretch. An apple variety is only really rescued when it has found a home in commerce and some significant consumer base wants it.

This was a great article about someone putting in a lot of work to collect and sustain old apple varieties. I didn’t expect to come into the comments and find people gatekeeping the concept of rescuing old apple varieties, especially not on the basis of a lack of consumer demand. He has made these available to others who want them, per the article.

Come on, this guy rescued varieties from extinction. He’s not on a mission to restore their popularity among the general public. Heirloom varieties are fun and rare and unique. Let’s enjoy and appreciate this for what it is.

I think their point is that apple seeds don’t grow true to their parent, so every single sprout from a seed is essentially a new variety, and they are continually created and lost -- the genetic line is not extinct, these are all the same plant. Capturing a large collection of palatable apples is fun, but framing this as some sort of historical preservation is kind of tenuous.

Many fruit collectors like Tom also make their collection available to other collectors.

In 1920, there were 23,000 varieties of Apples in the U.S. On U.S.D.A. land, they grow less than 3,500. There are less than 7,600 in the world. The article is misleading. The claim is Mr Brown has rescued more than 1,200 varieties.

The ONLY variety of Apple native to the U.S. is the Crab Apple.

Apples are a $22B industry.

The Crab Apple you refer to is a species, not a variety. And, to be clear, while there were many, many varieties of apples named and propagated in North America in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, almost all of them were of the same, single species.

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