Preserving North America's Historic Fruit Tree Cultivars

https://www.jakkawpress.com/about-us

The Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and Canada, already being heralded as a pomological classic, is designed to comprehensively record and illustrate our food crop heritage in rich detail, thus helping to rescue and popularize the historic varieties that still exist.

https://appletreeproject.org

The Boulder Apple Tree Project is a unique organization in that it agglomerates ecological, historical, and genetic information regarding apple trees in Boulder County, Colorado with the assistance of community members, citizen scientists, undergraduates, and researchers. Our goal is to map and measure all of the oldest apple trees in Boulder to find the varieties that were planted as part of Boulder’s unique apple industry in the early 1900s. Amy Dunbar-Wallis is the project coordinator at the Boulder Apple Tree Project. She is a PhD student at the University of Colorado in Boulder interested in studying how field research experiences shape undergraduate education.

https://www.facebook.com/lostappleproject/

The Whitman County Historical Society Lost Apple Project seeks to identify and preserve heritage apple trees and orchards.

https://www.mofga.org

John Bunker is an apple historian, gardener and orchardist. In 1984 he started the cooperative mail-order nursery Fedco Trees. In 2012 he founded the Maine Heritage Orchard in Unity Maine. His recent book, “Apples and the Art of Detection” recounts his 40 years of tracking down, identifying and preserving rare apples. He lives with Cammy Watts on Superchilly Farm in Palermo Maine. To contact John or to learn more about John and Cammy’s activities, go to http://outonalimbapples.com.

https://montezumaorchard.org

The roots of Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project (MORP) were established when co-founders Jude and Addie Schuenemeyer began their horticulture careers in 2001. For fifteen years, they ran a nursery that had originally been in business for over 50 years and had a lot of older clientele who often asked about apple varieties they remembered enjoying as children. In asking around, the Schuenemeyers realized just how many old trees still grew in the region – hidden or right in plain sight – sometimes forgotten, and other times revered by the families who always remembered. They founded MORP in 2008 with the belief that the remarkable orchard culture and economy that once thrived in southwestern Colorado could be rebuilt. MORP works to preserve Colorado’s fruit growing heritage and restore an orchard culture and economy to the southwestern region.

http://www.temperateorchardconservancy.org

Temperate Orchard Conservancy (TOC) was established in March 2012 to preserve and share the genetic diversity of tree fruits that are grown in the temperate climate zones of the world.

https://seedsavers.org/

Seed Savers Exchange, or SSE, is a non-profit organization based near Decorah, Iowa, that preserves heirloom plant varieties through regeneration, distribution and seed exchange. It is one of the largest nongovernmental seedbanks in the United States.

https://www.ars.usda.gov

The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief scientific in-house research agency. Our job is finding solutions to agricultural problems that affect Americans every day from field to table. Here are a few numbers to illustrate the scope of our organization:

• 660 research projects within 15 National Programs
• 2,000 scientists and post docs
• 6,000 other employees
• 90+ research locations, including overseas laboratories
• $1.5 billion fiscal year budget

https://myfruittree.org

https://horticulture.wsu.edu

Dr. Cameron Peace is fascinated by fruit, genetics, history and what breeding offers future generations. He is a professor in the Department of Horticulture at Washington State University, and his research program aims to bring the benefits of natural diversity and the genomics age to fruit breeding. He uses new genome-wide DNA profiling techniques to understand the inherited attributes and ancestry of fruit trees. His current passion is reconstructing the family tree of all apple varieties, and the same for cherry. Go to MyFruitTree.org . In Pullman, he oversees the student-run Palouse Wild Cider apple breeding program.