New Avocado Variety Finally Gets Life After More Than 50 Years in the Making
A new avocado variety that’s more than a half-century in the making will soon be available to growers in the global marketplace. It’s called the ‘Luna UCR’ and offers great flavor, a rind that turns a tell-tale black when ripe, and high postharvest quality. Growers, meanwhile, will benefit from a smaller tree size, allowing denser plantings for more efficient and safer harvesting, and minimal pruning.
It also has a type of flower that makes it an efficient pollinizer for various avocado varieties, including ‘Hass’. Planting the ‘Luna UCR’ intermingled with other varieties could help ensure good yields by increasing pollination rates
Developed by University of California, Riverside (UCR), agricultural scientists, the ‘Luna UCR’ is officially known as the BL516. It is protected under a pending patent that credits Mary Lu Arpaia, a UC Cooperative Extension Horticulturist, and her colleague Eric Focht, a UCR staff research associate. Other credited “co-inventors” are former UCR scientists Gray Martin, the late David Stottlemyer, and the late B.O. “Bob” Bergh, who left UCR in 1991.
The variety will be marketed to growers worldwide through a partnership with Eurosemillas, SA, a company based in Spain that specializes in international marketing of proprietary crop varieties. Under an agreement worked out by UCR’s Office of Technology Partnerships, Eurosemillas is the licensee of the variety. Eurosemillas has established partnerships with growers in 14 countries outside of the USA to grow the ‘Luna UCR’.
The development of ‘Luna UCR’ goes back to the work of Bergh in the 1950s, explains Arpaia, who described him as UCR’s “first real long-term avocado breeder.”
Back then, the avocado industry sought a green skinned Hass as an alternative to the smooth-skinned and green-colored ‘Fuerte’ avocado – the nation’s top seller from the 1920s to the 1970s. Meaning “strong” in Spanish, the ‘Fuerte’ is so named because it survived deep freezes in Los Angeles in the early 20th Century. It has excellent flavor but was a problem for growers because it’s an alternate fruit bearer, which meant the trees produce robust fruit crops only once every two years.
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The ‘Hass’, meanwhile, had much going for it, including a great nutty flavor and a skin that easily peeled. But, in the mid 1950s or so, consumers turned their noses to the Hass, because they associated its black skin when ripe with rotten, spoiled fruit, Focht says.
So, Bergh went to work, planting thousands of genetically different avocado seedlings from a ‘Thille’ avocado, an offspring of the Hass, in search of a perfect green version of an otherwise Hass-like fruit. So, more than 20 years later, in 1983, he succeeded with the release of the ‘Gwen’, named after his wife.
Unfortunately, the ‘Gwen’ avocado was a commercial flop.
Bergh was taken aback, but not defeated, Arpaia adds. He recognized that although Gwen had not found a place in the commercial marketplace, it might provide the basis of future avocado varieties.
“So, he decides in 1985 he’s going to make one big final push because he’s getting older and getting ready to retire,” Arpaia says.
Bergh planted as many as 70,000 genetically different seedlings from ‘Gwen’ mother trees at three sites with different climates in San Bernardino, Ventura, and San Luis Obispo counties. Hedging his bet paid off when all the trees planted in the Mentone area of San Bernardino County died in an unusually deep freeze. Yet, one of the Ventura Country trees that grew in Camarillo became the first of what is now the ‘Luna UCR’ avocado, with the preferred black skin when ripe. Unfortunately, Bergh will not see the release of this fruit of his labor. He died in 2021 at age 96.
“Fruit breeding is a very long-term process,” Arpaia says. “So, you build upon the shoulders of your predecessors.”
For more details, continue reading at news.ucr.edu.
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