North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Lon J. Rombough" <lonrom@hevanet.com>]

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From: ARS News Service <NewsService@ars.usda.gov>
Reply-To: ARS News Service <NewsService@ars.usda.gov>
Date: Fri, 02 Jan 2004 09:03:22 -0500
To: ARS News subscriber <lonrom@hevanet.com>
Subject: Replanting Papayas

STORY LEAD:
Replanting Papayas: New Tactics May Cut Costs
___________________________________________

ARS News Service
Agricultural Research Service, USDA
Marcia Wood, (301) 504-1662, MarciaWood@ars.usda.gov
January 2, 2004
___________________________________________

The sweet taste and creamy texture of a fresh papaya make this exotic
tropical fruit a perfect addition to a zesty salsa, colorful fruit salad
or refreshing shake. Or, you may prefer your papaya halved and served
with a splash of lime juice.

Scientists with the Agricultural Research Service and their university
and corporate colleagues are working out a science-based strategy to
streamline today's costly replanting of papaya orchards. They're doing
the work in Hawaii at the agency's U.S. Pacific Basin Agricultural
Research Center, headquartered in Hilo. Most of America's papaya crop is
grown in Hawaii.

Papaya trees bear fruit less than year after they're planted. However,
yields typically taper off once trees reach 3 years of age. This means
that most papaya orchards have to be replanted every 3 to 4 years,
according to ARS plant physiologist Maureen M.M. Fitch at Aiea, Hawaii,
near Honolulu. 

Fitch has developed a high-tech approach for simpler, less costly
replanting. It relies on using shoots from ideal papaya plants to
generate multiple laboratory plantlets. Screening all plantlets with a
highly accurate laboratory test insures that the plantlets, when mature,
will produce trees with the fruit that growers and consumers want.

With this approach, growers need only place one young papaya tree per
planting hole in their orchards. That's in contrast to today's practice
in which growers must place at least five young trees per hole to insure
a 97 percent chance that at least one will produce the desired fruit.
The other four trees have to be chopped down, a time-consuming and labor
intensive practice.

The idea of propagating perfect papaya plantlets in the laboratory
isn't new, but the technology that Fitch is fine-tuning will be freely
available, in contrast to proprietary techniques. Read more about the
research in the January 2004 issue of Agricultural Research magazine,
available online at:
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/jan04/papaya0104.htm

ARS is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief scientific research
agency.
___________________________________________

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