Nick Krause writes in Business Day about the launch of a new, NZ-developed pear cultivar, made from a cross between a Japanese and a Chinese pear.
The cultivar has yet to be officially named, and is simply being called PremP109 for the moment.
An excerpt: (read in full here)
“”Maxie and Crispie haven’t gone that well. The 109 pear is quite an advance on that in terms of its attributes.
“It has an exceptionally good storage life and shelf life and has, we think, a better all round package.”
“The pear breeding programme is a lot smaller than the apple breeding programme – the pipfruit industry in New Zealand harvests around 300,000 tonnes of apples while the pear crop would be around 1-2 per cent of that.”