Scottish Raspberries in China

Here's a bit of news that kind of surprised me:

Chinese deal is berry good news for Scottish raspberry growers (The Scotsman)

First of all (this isn't the surprising part), let me just say that you don't have to be in the berry business (or the fruit blogging business) very long to get really sick of all the "berry"="very" puns. It's not that clever--give it a rest.

Secondly, note the one small line in here:

"While there is currently no plant royalties legislation relating to raspberries in China, Kerby reckoned a good deal has been struck."

China is basically the world capital of intellectual property theft, has no mechanisms of or, as far as anyone can tell, real interest in, enforcement of patent law. Enforcing plant patent law is tough in the best of cases (note that SCRI seems to be satisfied with 75% success in the Spanish case mentioned in the article, and that is in an EU country with rigorous laws). SCRI has, in my mind, essentially given their raspberry varieties to the Chinese people, and probably to much of the entire world. I have spoken to fruit breeders who have gone to China and seen whole vast fields of what they recongized as their varieties, but were being distributed under other names and claimed as Chinese-developed varieties. They've got a billion and a half people and a gigantic and arcane legal bureaucracy--does any one really think they're going to keep any kind of handle on that? One breeder I know, when asked how to protect one's varieties in China, responded with "By making sure they never, ever enter that country".

I'm not sure the headline even makes sense. Good news for Scottish raspberry growers? How so? Because SCRI is presumably making money on this which will support further breeding for Scotland? I hope it's quite a lot. Otherwise this is just competition for Scottish exports in China, and, probably elsewhere in the world, once these escape the flimsy legal bounds of the deal that's been struck and are being propagated freely.

I don't know, maybe I'm just a cynic.

Update: Just to be clear, this isn't intended as a criticism of the Chinese people or Chinese breeding. There really is not a cultural understanding of the idea of plant patents (hell, we barely have one in the U.S.) and it's not even really illegal (or at least wasn't last I checked a few years back) so it's not like it's a nation of criminals. China does have many fine plant breeding programs and breeders, so I'm not intending to imply that all they do is steal and re-name varieties. But it does happen.

'Explorer' primocane fruiting black raspberry!

I could be wrong, but I believe this is the first instance of primocane-fruiting I've heard of in black raspberry.

'Explorer' Black Raspberry

Pete Tallman, by the way, is a private grower/breeder from Colorado. From what I've heard, he's got a very impressive program, and he appears fairly active in NAFEX.

For those of you wondering what primocane fruiting is, and why it's a big deal, here's the basics:

The above-ground portions of brambles (Rubus species) are biennial. Normally, canes grow one year, overwinter, then produce fruit and die. During their first year, they're called "primocanes", during the second, fruiting, year, they are called "floricanes". Primocane-fruiting cultivars, however, deviate from this plan by producing flowers at the tips of their primocanes (portions of the primocanes that flower die and do not flower the next season, so such canes are not flowering twice). This is important for a couple of reasons: a) It removes the requirement to overwinter canes and simplifies care. Because fruit is being borne on first year canes, after the fruit is harvested the plants can be mowed down and allowed to grow back completely each year, and as a result there's less danger of damage from severe cold, because the roots and crowns are less susceptible to damage than the canes. b) It extends the harvest season. Generally, the existing canes from the previous year flower in the spring or early summer, while the primocanes are growing. Once the primocanes have grown, they begin flowering, generally considerably later in the season, sometimes continuing until frost. This can provide new opportunities and markets for growers.

Primocane-fruiting red raspberries have been around for a while, and make up a significant proportion of the industry. For reasons that aren't clear to me, they're frequently called 'fall-fruiting raspberries', yet one never hears 'fall-fruiting' applied to blackberries, despite a similar trait.

Primocane-fruiting blackberries are a relatively new development. The first two cultivars, 'Prime-Jim' and 'Prime-Jan', were released recently by the University of Arkansas, and more are in the pipeline. The trait was introduced from a single source, a wild diploid selection called 'Hilquist', which was weakly primocane-fruiting. The trait is a single recessive gene, but in the tetraploid blackberry breeding program managed to go unnoticed for many years, until it was developed by Dr. Jim Moore and his graduate student (now Dr.) Jose Lopez-Medina, and later Dr. John Clark. Researchers in Europe have also been working on transferring the raspberry primocane-fruiting trait into blackberries, but to my knowledge no cultivars have resulted from this effort.

So far as I can remember, however, I hadn't heard anything about primocane-fruiting black raspberries. Although theoretically crossable with red raspberries and blackberries, this is frequently too difficult to be practical (purple raspberries, as you might have suspected, are hybrids of red and black raspberries). On top of this, the native germplasm base has been shown to be surprisingly uniform at the genetic level, limiting the breeding potential. So the discovery of a new trait in black raspberry is rather exciting in general.