Winding his way through low lying lands seeking out poorer stands of pine and deciduous trees in Manitoba’s boreal forest near Thompson, fruit breeder Bob Bors finds what he’s looking for.
A short hike and a snip later, another haskap plant is carefully scooped up and packed into peat moss for the trip back to the breeding laboratories at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon where Bors has made a name for himself.
Bors plans to use a year-long sabbatical to search remote locations to gather as many native haskap or blue honeysuckle plants as he can find. He also plans to travel to Japan, where the plant is already a favourite fruit for many people.
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The goal is to bring samples to the university where he has worked since 1999 and produce varieties with good northern vigour, traits similar to those found in many Canadian potatoes.
“I get so excited I can’t sleep at night,” he said, citing the 160,000 haskap plants expected on the Prairies within a few years and the upsurge in cherry production.
“With those two crops, and saskatoons, we’ve laid the groundwork for mechanically harvested fruit to be grown on the Prairies on a large scale.”
The three fruits are among several bright spots and innovations in a healthy prairie economy that ranges from biofuel to wind energy.
The hardy fruits offer health benefits and require few chemicals to grow.
Bors thinks the Prairies, and particularly Saskatchewan, are well situated to take advantage of fruit with low costs of production, lots of land and a sunny growing season.
“We have a long-term economic superiority for these crops,” he said. “This works with other innovations on the Prairies and is another example of prairie ingenuity – a very flavourful one.”
Bors was born in the United States. He grew up near a U.S. Department of Agriculture research station and regularly entered produce in country fairs.
His ongoing fruit work, which stretches back to his university days in Maryland and Guelph, Ont., has spawned three new fruit associations for haskap, cherries and apples.
The Haskap Canada Association grew from a speech given by Bors two years ago that led to the group’s formation and a quarter section of plantings for its president, Dave Negrych, at Roblin, Man.
He called Bors the mother of haskap.
“He is the driving force behind haskap and continues to promote and get people excited about it,” he said, citing Bors’s passion, optimism and enthusiasm.
Negrych expects demand to well outstrip producers’ ability to produce for the next few years.
In addition to promoting and sharing information, the new association wants to create pods of growers to create new processing centres or work with existing local processing plants.
Cherries have also swelled from zero trees to 70,000 and are expected to grow to a million pounds of production in the near future, said Mel Annand, president of the Canadian Cherry Producers Inc. and a director with the Saskatchewan Fruit Growers Association.
“Without (Bors’) involvement, there was not any prospect of commercial development on the Prairies,” he said. “He sees opportunities where others have not and brings that to fruition.”
Annand said Bors’ work in fruit breeding is key to the success of the industry and worries about past funding cuts to the native fruits program at the university.
“If the public thinks there’s value in fruit breeding on the Prairies, that program needs to be funded,” he said.
