North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

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

	Everyone who finds a new variety, either by breeding or by luck, thinks they will sell it and make a ton of money.  Sorry, but it doesn't happen that way.   First, there are patent fees, which run to a fair amount.  Then there is advertising to get the new variety known.  Then there is propagation, which means running a nursery.  All this has to come out of what you make on the variety.   And if you haven't sent the variety out to be tested in different areas, there's a good chance it may not perform well in many different environments, in which case it will fall by the wayside pretty fast.
Almost all the time, the best you are likely to do is to sell the variety outright to a nursery and try to get something that way.  They have the advertising machine and the propagation, at least, and they can absorb costs by spreading them out over their whole operation.  
Of course they may also decide that it's too similar to something else they sell and don't want it competing, so they sit on it.
In short, breeding and releasing new varieties is NOT a path to riches.  At least if you give the varieties away there is a chance your work will live on, in some form.
-Lon Rombough
Grapes, writing, consulting, my book, The Grape Grower, at http://www.bunchgrapes.com  Winner of the Garden Writers Association "Best Talent in Writing" award for 2003.
On Aug 26, 2005, at 6:25 AM, bluestem_farm@juno.com wrote:

-- "tanis cuff"  wrote:

I have a couple nice chance-seedling apples which I hope I'll share with 
enough people (and how many are "enough"?!) before I quit gardening in 4 or 
40 years.  But I'd like to learn what the more serious explorers & breeders 
have planned for preserving/continuing their work.



A related issue; I too have some lovely pippins that I'd like to share, but what concerns me is that they remain in the public domain.  How can one assure that some low life doesn't patent a particularly nice fruit, if it is new and nobody else has patented it?  It seems that what I read is full of contradictions.  The originator of the fruit is the only one allowed to patent.... but somebody brings a fruit to an ag. station in the 30s, they look at it for 50 years and then decide to introduce and patent it when the law allows them to do so.  There are other instances.   What are the rules, and is anyone enforcing them?
Muffy Barrett
Baraboo WI 
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