commercialization

Professor Martha Mutschler and executive chef Steve Miller

Cornell researchers have developed new mild onions that will have chefs crying – tears of joy. Twelve years in development and with a couple years of testing to go, researchers say it will be just a few years before the mild locally grown onions are available to the public.

“These onions have a longer shelf life and still produce huge flavors; I see them as being a consumer’s dream,” said Steve Miller, Cornell Dining senior executive chef, who with a Wegmans supermarket executive chef has tested about a dozen of the experimental onion hybrids.

In general, current mild onions are watery and soft due to low sugar content (called low brix), which leads to a short shelf life and makes them mushy when cooked. Longer-lasting pungent onions are higher in sugar and caramelize when cooked, but reducing their bite requires more cooking, which also softens them.

The new Cornell onions “have the initial aroma and flavor of a mild onion, but they have a lot less water,” said Mike Washburn, executive chef at Wegmans. As result, they have a longer shelf life and stay crisper and intact when cooked in soup or chili or when grilled.

Martha Mutschler, professor of plant breeding and genetics, developed the mild onion lines and used the results of the chefs’ tests to inform selection of the three new hybrids of mild onions that were in expanded trials last year.

…The doubled haploid mild onion lines are unique in that they are totally inbred: “The seeds from each double haploid plant will produce identical plants” that are extremely uniform for any traits, said Earle.

…Mutschler is coordinating three phases of the project: …to develop hybrids adapted to New York state; …working with New York onion growers to field test the experimental hybrids; …working with executive chefs for culinary tests to determine potential marketing of the new onions. These phases are interrelated as seed companies and growers need to know consumer interest in the product before they take the risk of investing in producing a new crop.

Bravo! I am forever characterized as relying on my loyalty to Mediterranean recipes which invariably “start by taking an onion…”

Field trials of Syngenta drought-tolerant corn at Western Kentucky University

Illinois farmer Mike Cyrulik didn’t foresee this year’s drought when, this spring, he planted 20 bags of a new corn seed on a slice of his 5,000-acre farm. Today, weeks before the harvest, much of his and his neighbors’ crop is dead or dying. But not the portion of his land where he planted the new seed. The healthy looking plants have “wound up being the talk of the town,” says Cyrulik, who expects a significantly higher yield, by 30 to 50 bushels, from each of those 220 acres in Bloomington.

The reason is drought-resistant corn, produced by one of the world’s largest seed companies, Syngenta, which began limited sales just before the 2011 growing season. In fact, three major seed producers—Syngenta, along with DuPont and Monsanto—are hoping for successes similar to Cyrulik’s in the midst of the worst drought to strike the U.S. in half a century…

Drought tolerance is one of the most challenging areas of research in agriculture, says Monsanto drought and water utilization lead Mark Edge. In recent years, technologies that allow more rapid screening for promising raw genetic material have helped advance both traditional breeding and genetic modification programs in this area…

Part of the difficulty in engineering for drought tolerance is that researchers must find genes that have a large enough effect on a plant’s response to warrant a major commercialization investment, says Purdue University agronomist Mitch Tuinstra. The average transgenic crop can take Monsanto more than a decade and $100 million to bring to market.

“It’s going to be one of the key mechanisms moving forward, but I don’t think we’re going to find the magic bullet that solves all of our problems,” he says. Technology can’t change the fact that a plant needs water, he says…

Despite the Syngenta corn’s success on his farm, Cyrulik cannot yet answer the initial question—how the product would perform for him in an average rainfall year—that spurred him to try it out in the first place. He thinks it could be useful to pay the premium for seeds that can provide a safety net for drought, but they’d still have to produce up to his usual standards when normal rains come.

I can understand that question all right. It’s why my pickup – the last truck I bought eight years before I retired – is four-wheel-drive. 98% of driving never required the extra traction. But, those few job sites that were challenging enough to need it – or our usual late summer trips into the forest with a dead-and-down permit to cut firewood for our home for the winter justified the extra expense at purchase time.