April 6, 2021 Meeting Notes

 

April 6, 2021 Meeting Notes

President Earl Crowe opened the hybrid meeting at 7 am. The Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, and Invocation followed. Members at Pybus enjoyed the return of food and coffee service!

Visitors included Shanley Crane, Assistant Governor (AG) for Area 8 and Linda Evans Parlette of the Wenatchee Rotary Club.

Announcements

Our first Tailgate Spring Fling Social is on Saturday, April 10th at 5 pm at Martin-Scott Winery. Bring your own food and chairs. Dress warm as we will be outside by the firepit. Wine will be available for purchase. Children are welcome.

Carol Adamson announced a Women in Rotary get-together at 5 pm on Tuesday, April 20th at the Hilton Garden Hotel by Pybus. 

Wenatchee Confluence Rotary is organizing a Cinco de Mayo blood drive at Pybus Public Market and they thought it would be fun to challenge other area Rotary clubs to see which club can donate the most blood. In addition to bragging rights, they will have a fun trophy (fresh off the 3-D printer) we can bring back to our club! Please spread the word amongst our club members. They're also raffling off $50 Pybus bucks that will go to a random donor that day.

 

Here's the link to sign up to donate: http://rcblood.org/3lFy7wG. 

After the blood drive, we'll be sure to talk to you about signing up for the Rotary Foundation Gala!

The Rotary Foundation will have an on-line fundraiser gala on May 12th from 5 to 6pm. Cost is $110 to join and $100 of it is a donation toward your next Paul Harris award. Afterwards at 6:30pm will be the Rotary District 5060 conference, including grants and awards. The District conference is free so be sure to tune in if you can't get there earlier for the gala. More information to follow. Help fulfill our promise of doing good.

Speaking of fulfilling our promise of doing good, the Club Spring Training Experience (CSTE) is coming up. Go to rotary5060.org and look under the "Training” header for CSTE, or heck, just click this handy link to go straight to the 411!

Brags and Confessions

Alan paid a bribe for a good cause. His mother is turning 84 and will be in town for our get together at Martin-Scott winery. He'd like everyone to sing happy birthday to her. Watch for the signal.

Kathleen followed up with a brag for Alan. The Literary Council fundraiser will host multi-evening trivia nights Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday next week (April 12-14). $20 to participate covers teams of up to six people. It's a remote event so get friends and family members from out of the area to join your team!

Erik bragged about his Baylor Bears winning the NCAA men's basketball national championship. They weren't his team before the tournament, but he picked them to win it all in a bracket. His winnings now make him part owner of the team, congratulations!

Craig is off to Africa next week and celebrated his 33rd anniversary with his wife on Easter.

Mansour was back and bragged about it!

Shanley confessed that she should have been here sooner. Reminds us of a certain DG that made us his second visit. But fortunately we're not bitter. ;-)

Earl bragged that Elza turned 20 and confessed he should have gotten a bunch of the exchange students together for the trivia night!

Program

Kathleen introduced the morning program, Kate Evans, Ph.D. and professor of horticulture at WSU. Kate was here to discuss the development and roll out of the Cosmic Crisp apple we've all heard so much about. Kathleen noted that she recently saw online just four of these apples being sold for over $400!

Kate is originally from England, but is here in Washington helping with the Cosmic Crisp and many other development programs WSU is part of. She acknowledged the many people involved in the Washington State apple breeding program, including Wenatchee's Dr. Bruce Barritt who started the Cosmic Crisp project back in 1994.

The aim of these apple breeding programs is to produce a portfolio of new and improved unique varieties especially selected for the environment of central Washington and make them available to Washington State growers. They would not be successful if not for all of the support from Washington State growers and the Tree Fruit Research Center.

In 1997, they pollinated an Enterprise apple tree (the mama) with pollen from a Honeycrisp apple tree (the papa). Now you must be "California Dreamin'" if you thought most of us knew apple trees to do not come true to type from seed. The apples yield vastly different "children" due to varying genes so you don't know if they'll look like one parent or another. To ensure they get the look they're going for, they use vegetation propagation to make them the same.

1998-2000 saw the germination and propagation process. For this phase, they used their land on the east side of the Columbia near Orondo. Then from 2001-2004 was phase 1 seedling evaluation. They select on appearance and the "bite" test before selecting the best individuals to advance in the process. They then store the apples for two months before further lab testing to ensure the apples will withstand storage prior to getting to market.

From 2006 to 2009 is phase 2 advanced selection and data collection. They plant a

small number of trees in North, Central, and Southern Washington State. From 2008 to 2013 phase 3 saw the elite selection phase where there is a larger volume evaluation. The apples also need to be robust enough to withstand commercial packing lines.

Once they have the apples at this stage, they do consumer preference testing vs. parent apples to see if consumers prefer the newer apples. All along the way there is stakeholder engagement. The new apple variety is constantly being evaluated and the development can fail and be halted

at any stage of development.

Of course you can't just release the apple and call it an apple. Prior to release, a US "plant patent" is obtained (WA 38 in this case) and consumer focus groups are used to help come up with a name.

The winner? During one focus group, someone commented that the white parts reminded them of stars in the cosmos (what else did they give the focus group?) And with that, Cosmic Crisp was born.

Then they had to decide on a release mechanism. A stakeholder advisory group was vital in determining the best way to license this product developed from a land grant university such as WSU. They wanted to ensure the marketing efforts would be coordinated with Washington market desks already out there. They also needed to build the brand, to build excitement and interest in the new apple. They utilized a Yakima area management company and a budget of $10.7 million.

The agreement is for growers in Washington State to have exclusive rights for the first 10 years and approximately 15 million trees have already been planted in the first four years, with the first fruit hitting stores in November 2020. COVID impacted the marketing as the traditional process is to get in stores and cut up apples and hand them out. To say that was frowned upon in this establishment was an understatement. New ways of getting samples in front of people were quickly rolled out and national sampling events are going on in March (Kroger stores) and April (Walmart stores) of this year.

Continued development and application of breeding science continues to work on new varieties.

Q&A Session:

Chris asked about how they came to choose the parents for Cosmic Crisp: the Honeycrisp was chosen as one parent due to its exceptional crisp and Enterprise for its desirable coloring.

He also asked about varieties currently in development:

• Phase 1: 1000s of seedlings
• Phase 2: Only about 40
• Phase 3: Just a handful - about 5 varieties

Jill voiced concern about over saturation of apple varietals driving the price down for growers that have varieties growing already. Kate said that their program doesn't look to add to the apple variety portfolio, but rather supplant the ones that are already non-profitable.

Jim asked about cross breeding apples and pears, Kate responded that they aren't working on that.

Rebecca remarked that it costs $50,000-$60,000/acre to change over trees and the amount of consumer confusion due to so many bi-color apples. Kate noted that the green or especially the yellow apples show marks very easily so demand isn't as high for those. She also added that one of the elite stage varieties is pink.

We thanked Kate for her presentation and added that we will be making a children's book donation in her honor.

Progressive Marble Draw Raffle

Shanley drew the ticket and Robin was the "chosen one" to select the winning marble.
She chose the yellow one, which matched the color of her tears. Perhaps we didn't explain that you all are supposed to draw the silver one or maybe you all just like to see the drama build! Better luck next week when the stakes will be EVEN HIGHER!

Closing

Earl thanked Shari for providing morning organization and breakfast service, our guests, and our speaker and closed with this quote from Alice Morse Earle (probably related): "Every day may not be good, but there is something good in every day."