What will most tempt you next time you’re in the produce aisle of your local supermarket? A sweet and easy-to-peel seedless orange? A guava, free of its musky aroma? A miniature pumpkin that cooks in minutes? Or exotic fruits known till now only to the bush-dwelling tribes of Africa and in the jungles of Latin America?
All of these and more are the hope of Israeli farmers and plant scientists who are developing these and dozens of other new species.
“Each successful crop has an economic lifecycle,” says Dr. Yosef Mizrahi, professor of plant sciences at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. “It begins with getting it into the export market. Once launched, it reaps profits until the competition catches up. At this point, the profits will go to those with access to cheap labor, cheap energy and cheap water.
“In Israel, none of these are cheap. That’s why our original crop successes, Jaffa oranges and tomatoes, can no longer compete. To survive, Israeli agriculture must continually seek out new market niches.”
Israel is at the forefront of agricultural development, despite limited natural resources. It has a fertile infrastructure of scientists, extension advisers, farmers and agriculture-related industries, and is among global leaders in allocating funds to agricultural research and development, with $90 million (3 percent of the agricultural gross national product) invested annually.
Some of that funding goes toward developing new and improved varieties of existing favorites. If Israel’s Jaffa orange has long since lost out to cheaper competition, the citrus is far from abandoned.
“The citrus is a seasonal fruit and this is where we can find a market,” says Dr. Yoram Eyal of the department of fruit tree breeding and molecular genetics at the Volcani Institute of Agricultural Research’s Institute of Horticulture.
“Israel has developed some 20 to 30 new varieties of citrus, but very few have been commercialized. You can crossbreed for years to get the qualities you want, and then discover the fruit may have too short a shelf life or some other characteristic that makes it unsuitable. The citrus for which we’re best known today is the easy-peeling Orri mandarin.”
A team led by Eyal’s colleague, Dr. Yoram Kapulnik, director of Volcani’s Institute of Plant Sciences, works with other fruits. They have high hopes for three new varieties they are about to launch.
One is an aroma-free guava. “There are people who like the strong smell of the guava, but many, like myself, really hate it,” says Kapulnik. “We’ve developed an odorless fruit, and have planted the first trees.”
Another of his team’s new product is the raisin-tomato. “These are cherry tomatoes, dried on the vine,” he says. “Existing commercial sun-dried tomatoes are full-sized fruits which have either been sliced to dry in the sun or dried in the oven. The first is not a clean process, and the second dramatically reduces vitamin content. Our product is both clean and healthful. Our raisin-tomatoes are being bottled with olive oil and spices, and are beginning to appear in local supermarkets.”
Volcani’s personal pumpkin also boosts the hygiene of the fruit. “Natural pumpkins are enormous, and are sold in slices,” says Kapulnik. “We’ve bred a pumpkin no bigger than a grapefruit and, at the same time, increased its sweetness. It can be left unrefrigerated for weeks. Sliced in half and popped in the microwave, it’s a delicious snack.”
Rather than claiming a market share by modifying and upgrading existing varieties, Mizrahi and his colleague Dr. Avinoam Nerd of the Institute of Agriculture and Applied Biology at Ben-Gurion University are trying to introduce new crops altogether, working with wild plants from around the globe.
“Since 1984, Dr. Nerd and I have been exploring wild plants neglected by the scientific community,” he says. “We’ve worked with some 45 different species from the Africa, American, Asian and Australasian continents that have been eaten by indigenous people for generations, testing them in five eco-zones around the Negev desert.”
Twenty-two years of investigation suggest that at least 10 are potential cash crops of the future. “The first new fruit we marketed, following 12 years of work, was the pitaya, sometimes called dragon fruit, a juicy cactus from Latin America with a subtle fruity flavor,” says Mizrahi. By crossbreeding a variety of pitayas — red, fuchsia, white-fleshed, green-scaled — they produced “delicious, superb-quality hybrids.” Now grown commercially by Israeli farmers, they are an economic success in Europe.
The pitaya came first because, being cacti, it uses a tenth of the water needed for other plants. But other species will soon be ready for the market as well.
The marula, a fruit that grows wild in the southern African bush, has been tamed into plantations on two Negev kibbutzim. Resembling a small, very juicy yellow mango, the sweet, tangy marula can be eaten as fruit, drunk for its juice, or made into ice cream, gelatin, jam and liqueurs. The first commercial crop will ripen this year.
Another is the Latin American sapodilla, a small egg-shaped fruit, whose rough brown skin encloses fragrant reddish-brown flesh with a taste between brown sugar and root beer. A plantation of 4-year-old trees on Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael is about to bear its first commercial crop.
In addition to the marula and the sapodilla, another six species are at an advanced stage of development, according to Mizrahi.