College Station, Texas
March 28, 2005
In the late 1980s, Dr. Leonard
Pike stood at a roadside vegetable market in Russia and watched
a produce man chop, chop, chop much like a butcher slicing deli
meat. When he was finished, the thin, yellow medallions under
his knife were gathered up like poker chips, weighed in a bag,
and handed to the customer.
"He was cutting carrots. They sold them sliced, even back then.
I thought that was fascinating," said Pike, a horticulturist who
was in Russia on a seed-collecting mission for the
Texas Agricultural Experiment Station.
Besides the novelty of slicing carrots for sale, Pike was struck
by the lemon yellow color of Russian carrots, cousins to the
common orange varieties in the United States. Before he left
that country, Pike gathered up some Russian seed to deposit in
the U.S. Department of Agriculture's world seed collection.
His selection of more than 20 years ago now may be parlayed into
sliced carrots for the U.S. market within the next couple of
years. Pike eventually obtained some yellow carrot seed for his
own planting trials and harvested the crop about a month ago. A
Texas processing company is gearing up to package that and other
vegetable novelties.
In a processing room at Texas A&M University recently, Pike's
yellow yield were stacked up against maroon, red and improved
orange carrots for strenuous tests to see which would make it to
the next step in breeding.
"The interest now is more than the color," said Pike, known for
developing popular produce such as the 1015 onion and Beta Sweet
maroon carrots. "Each of those colors indicates that a certain
phytochemical is present. My goal is to get one carrot that has
them all."
Phytochemicals are naturally occurring compounds that prevent
disease. Pike hopes to pack lutein, carotene, anthocyanin and
lycopene into one carrot, regardless of what color -- or color
combination -- the carrot turns out to be. Each of those
compounds has been shown to ward off various diseases and
improve health.
Breeding a better carrot is important, he said, because adding
value to something people already eat plenty of means they could
be healthier. Americans eat more than 5 pounds of carrots a
year, according to the USDA's Economic Research Service.
Deciding which carrots to keep in the breeding program is no
small effort. Pike, research assistant Michael Faries and
several students first washed the 250 bushels harvested from a
South Texas field, sorted for conformity, tasted for flavor and
finally sliced off a chunk to analyze for sugar and
phytochemical content.
From that, some 80 bushels will planted by mid-April in
selectively arranged cages designed around individual hives of
honeybees to allow carrots to pollinate without crossing with
unintended varieties.
The process will be narrowed next year, and with the luck of a
good growing season, carrots could begin to show up in grocery
stores in another year. |