It will be a short talk today on some work we've been doing over the past three years on new blush pear varieties at that have been developed in conjunction with ourselves and Australian national pear breading program. The three that we've looked at as far as, storage and harvest, when to harvest them, are the ones up there on the screen which is ANP-0118, ANP-0131 are the main two. These two, have been released, and another very promising variety, that doesn't have a name yet that we just call ANP-0534.
Here's some shots of these three varieties on the field lab that you'll be going after this talk. Now those of you who know a little bit about blush pears will know that other blush pears that are out on the market, have a couple of problems. These are what they are. They don't ripen on the tree and because the blush and colour is set it quite early you can't rely on colour to determine when to harvest. So how do you harvest? And what indicators do you use to decide when to pick? The next problem is that some of the other blush varieties, when they don't ripen on the tree and they don't ripen after harvest, unless you cool them and that means putting them in a temperature less than say one degree. And how long you need to do it until they're fully ripe in other words they reach maximum sweetness. Farrell, which is a relative of these three, needs 10 to 12 weeks, at point five, to get rid of this mealiness problem that it has. So is this a problem with these new these three new varieties? Another problem that may crop up, is scold. Are susceptible to this post harvest problem?. So they were the aims of what we're trying to do.
Now specifically with regard to when you decide to harvest them, we wanted to see if we could use the DA meter to correlate that with firmness because we still believe firmness is the primary indicator to decide when to harvest Pears. But with the DA meter, could it be used as another non-destructive tool if you like, to decide when it's time to pick. So we did a series of trials from four to six weeks leading up to harvest time. Where we correlated firmness with the DA readings.
For the storage trials, we also did three harvests of the fruit to find, was there any difference between whether you pick early, normal or late. And the difference was seven days. So we picked seven days before what we would term normal commercial harvest, which again was primarily determined by, firmness, seven days before normal and seven days after. How did those three harvest perform in cool storage.
Now just a little bit about the DA meter, we've used this extensively is stone fruit and apple. It's also being used over CAs. It was developed in Italy and it basically what it is, is it detects Chlorophyll-A content in the skin, and it correlates that with ethylene production. And, if you get sufficient ethylene production you can segregate the fruit into what's called maturity stage, so you get pre-climateric, climacteric, in other words when ethylene is first produced, and post-climacteric. With stone fruit, I know I've done quite a bit of work with yellow nectarines, it worked beautifully. It is related to the time course of ethylene, and this is some work I did with John Lopresti, looking at the correlation. The IAD value is along the bottom. The higher the value the less ripe fruit, the greener fruit. And ethylene's running up and down. The arrows, the one on your left, is when harvest is normally carried out. So you get a variant, and you get these three stages. Which is over ripe, which is correlated to naught point three - naught point four on IAD. Ripe, naught point five - naught point six, and under ripe which is point seven and above. Now, that would be very good if pears produced ethylene. And, unfortunately we didn't find any. I'm going to go into that in a bit more detail, in a little while.
What we did, as far as storage goes, is we looked at the literature to find out how other blush pears are stored. We didn't want to reinvent the wheel and go through the whole process of working out what’s the ideal CA atmosphere, what's the ideal storage temperature because they've been sorted out. So, we stuck to storing at minus naught point five plus or minus, around about one degree, so minus point five to plus point five. We stored them in an air and CA. The CA atmosphere is 1.5 1.5. We had a look at the effect of storage time over up to about seven or eight months, on the fruit quality. So, did they develop scold? What changes do we see in firmness, sweetness, shelf life, in order to develop protocols to insure the fruit will reach whatever market there aimed at, as they've have identify in consumer studies, the Asian consumer studies, Bruce Tomkins will talk about them in November.
These are the trials that we did. We stored ANP-0118 Lanya, twice, this year and two years to seven months. We stored ANP-0131 Deliza, twice, up to eight months. We actually went up to 10 months in 2015. ANP-0534 we stored last year. This is what we found. First of all when we're looking at the best time to harvest Lanya, we did not find ethylene, whether before or after harvest. So you can't use the DA meter to set harvest classes. There is however a strong correlation between firmness and the DA reading, so you can use the DA meter as a guide. And we found that the ideal harvest maturity based on the fruit quality after storage was when you get a DA reading between 1.2 and 1, and that correlated between about four and a half, 4.6 to 4.3. And we found that the best time to harvest Lanya was about the same time as WBC, in other words, first week of January too early Feb. It really depended on the season. One season we started harvesting 28th of December. This was particularly early. This year it was late. So it's all, as you know, about reading how the seasons going.
Now, here's some results from storage trials. You'll see on the bottom we stored Lanya up to 28 weeks. This is basically just looking at was there any difference between CA and Air on firmness. And you'll see firmness declined in both CA and Air. A little bit more in Air, but from a statistical point of view there's really no difference. Now, because I've got so much data and I didn't want to bamboozle you, this data that I'm showing you is what the fruit were measured directly after they come out of storage. We also measured them 7 days after storage, but I didn't want to confuse you with all that. But what we're finding is that the CA, even though you don't see a benefit of fruit immediately after they come out, seven days down the track, after seven days at 18 degrees, the CA fruit are a much firmer and better quality fruit.
This is the effect of the three harvest times, on firmness during storage, and you'll see as you'd expect, the firmness of the early harvested fruit was quite a bit higher, than mid and late. They all declined but the decline was more in early harvested fruit. So, I guess my advice is that I would not go early as far as firmness is concerned, particularly as these fruit are due to be marketed as crisp pear, and you don't want the firmness to drop too low, otherwise they get mealy. And this is the interesting thing about these pears and it reflects back on what I said before Forelle about our why Forelle is stored for 10 to 12 weeks before it's marketed.
We found in CA that there was a distinct rise in sugar, and it peaked it at sixteen weeks. We found this over three seasons. We also found it, as you see in other varieties. The thing that we found about ANP-0118, first of all if you look at the brix, if you can read it, we're getting up over 16, and I've measured fruit that have hit brix of 18, 19, 20, there very, very sweet. And it's one of the reasons I believe this particular variety Lanya is very popular in Asia because it's low Acid, very high sugar. It's too sweet for me. It's like eating a Chupa Chup. But, for those people that like that kind of sweetness it is very good pear. So you see, in this particular slide, is a good reason why I think CA is preferable over Air storage.
This is again sweetness during storage. Looking at the difference between harvest time, we didn't find any statistical difference between sweetness, whether they were harvested early, mid or late. So you get a difference in firmness, but not in sweetness.
This is the TSS to TA ratio. I can't explain the dip in the late ones at after 12 weeks. It's just something that happens during research, but you'll see that the late harvested ones have a higher TSS to TA ratio. Mainly due to high sugar but also low acidity. So if you want very sweet fruit, and you don't mind marketing them quite early, in other word, within, let’s say, four to six weeks from harvest, late harvested fruit are fine.
This is just an indication of some of the other quality areas we look at. This is juiciness, we would spin a bit about a gram of flesh, work out how much juice was in there a percent. You'll see that the mid harvested fruit were a little bit juicer than the other two, but there's no real difference between harvest time and juiciness.
Now one of the, I would say the biggest problem that we found in all three varieties, was on Lanya and it's scold. And you'll see that, the Photograph on your left, that's mild scold that's relatively common. The photograph on your right, that's heavy scald. We only saw that in 2015, but it can happen, again in air. This is just some quick data we got from a couple of trials that we did. When does scold, when is it first seen? In 2015 we first saw it after 24 weeks. The pre?? seed post referred to early, mid and late harvests. So there wasn't really a difference between harvest, but there was in atmosphere. You would see scold first of all in air, but 4 weeks later you would see it in CA, so you saw it in both. Interestingly enough we harvested, did a large scale trial on ANP-0118 scold. This year we saw no scold. So it's seasonal like all scald. The quality of Lanya this year is exceptionally good.
We tried, again a small trial, to see the MCP had an effect on scald. The recommended doses, as I was told by Smart Fresh, for pairs is 300 parts per billion. You could see that it knocked out any scold symptoms at 20 weeks. But the scold came back with a vengeance at Twenty four, particularly at Twenty eight. It is like it was holding it back, holding it back, holding it back, then it just wore off, and the scald just went woop. So it can have an effect. Sorry, the one thing I will point out here is you will not see scald in Lanya until about 20 weeks. The earliest I've seen it is at 16 to 18. So, make a decision about when you want to market this fruit, and is it really necessary to treat with MCP, if you don't want to store it for 20 weeks. You want to see scold.
So just quickly, What we found with Lanya was that it loses firmness by about 10 percent over 20 weeks at 0.5, regardless of atmosphere. Early harvests tend to soften more. The sweetness increased by 4 to 5 percent in the first 16 weeks in CA and there's no effect of harvest time. So if you want to maximize your sweetness it needs to be stored for a round about 16 weeks under CA.
We've just mentioned scald, you want to see it for 20 weeks. If you're very unlucky, it's a bad year, you'll see it at 16. We've already discussed whether you need MCP. It depends when you want to market it.
CA resulted in very much better quality fruit after 7 days at 18 degrees, so I would strongly recommend we go with CA storage rather than air. And we stored Lanya for, and I can update this slide, because I've just done the stats on this year. We stored it for 24 weeks. Got very good results this year. The quality of the fruit was very good when it went in. So the quality was better when it came out but unfortunately a colleague of mine was going to bring some fruit up, so that you could see it but he couldn't make it due to illness. But we pulled fruit out a couple weeks ago and it was good as gold, so it can store very well.
Now, moving on to ANP-0131 Deliza. This is a different kettle of fish, in that, as far as I'm concerned Deliza's a cricket ball ..... it ends up coming out terrific. Again, it didn't produce ethylene, before or after harvest, so you can use the DA as an indication but we can't set harvest classes. What that means is that you still need to do the old school firmness testing. We found that Deliza is a later pick. This year we harvested for example, the last week in March. I wanted to harvest then late to see what would happen, and I will tell you what happened later on. They'll crop around about the same time as Packhams, but at a higher firmness. Around about 5 - 5.2. 5.3 is fine.
Just quickly again, whether they are in Air of CA they lose firmness, but there's not a real difference, even though, you'll see that 16 to 20 weeks the air look like to be firmer but statistically it's not significant. I didn't put in a graph about the three harvest times because they're all pretty much the same.
Sweetness: the two things to note from this slide is there's no difference between the AIR and CA as to how sweet they get in Deliza, but look how much they put on. The sweetness rockets along up until 24 weeks. So, putting them in storage reduces mealiness and makes them much sweeter with this particular variety. Here's a graph of whether there's any difference. As far as harvest time goes there's not. They all go up very nicely. This is the TSS - TA. You see again late season pick much sweeter, a better taste because they are sweeter and the TA's quite low.
This is juice. There's no real difference between harvest time, as far as juiciness goes. As far as the storage summary goes, they lose about 9 percent of firmness over 28 weeks. Couple of years ago we went through to 36 weeks and we got about the same result, and they were still good. We could have kept going but we ran out of fruit. Again, sweetness increased, but this time by up to 10 percent in the first 20 weeks storage, and then stabilized. So the longer you store them the sweeter they become. No disorders. The only disorders that we have observed with Deliza is rots and we had a bad year this year. I think mainly because we had an attack of piercing insects, and then we harvested late, mid to late March and it was a very high brown rot risk period. It was very very wet rain all day, high humidity, despite the fact that we dipped in scald before they went into storage, and we did that with all our fruit. We found quite a lot, of up to 40 percent, of the fruit were badly affected by rots. But it does store very well- 8 to 10 months at least, providing it's picked fairly firm - 4.7 to 5, around about 5 KG, I think is an ideal harvest time for Deliza.
Now this is the ANP-0534. The variety has not been released yet. Some of you might be aware of it. It's a very interesting fruit. Very yellow background colour after its ripened. But when you pick it, the background colour's green.
Again we did not find any ethylene produced by this fruit, so you can't use the DA meter alone. We also found with this particular variety a very poor correlation between firmness, in kilograms, and DA, because of this change in background colour. Basically what happens is that when you pick it, it's very dark green with a red blush. Even after 4 weeks of storage, about 30 - 40 percent of the fruit were going yellow. So if you're only going to store them for a short period of time, you get quite a variable out turn based on colour.
So a look at the firmness, they are a very firm, crisp fruit. We could have waited and waited and waited for these things to soften on the tree, but that they didn't. So we recommend that you harvest them at about, around about Seven. This is about the same time as the Deliza.
You'll see that they do soften during storage. Doesn't matter whether they're in air or CA. And this is the most interesting thing. Look at the increases in sweetness over the first 8 weeks of storage. They really rocket up from 14 to just under 17. Again this is another fruit that's very sweet. I've seen it in 20 brix. You do not get a difference in the increase in sweetness due to atmosphere.
This TSS to TA, again the late harvested fruit are a little bit sweeter. They have a lot of TA at harvest, so they tend to score higher. This sort of graph, when I look at it, I think you should really be harvesting mid to late fruit. I don't think early is any good.
Just another Summary: They lose between 16 to 20 percent in firmness over 28 weeks, but there's nothing effect of harvest stage. The sweetness increases by up to 20 percent in the first eight weeks. This is a fruit. If you pick it straight from the tree and try to eat it, it's quite a flowery. It’s got a starchy taste to it. But even after four weeks, at 0.5C, it sweetens up beautifully. We have not observed any disorders, but the background colour can be a bit of a problem in the first four weeks of storage, because you will get fruit that will come out that look, that have a green background and you'll get fruit that come out right next to them, same room same tub, and they're yellow. So it depends. There's some marketing needs to be done. What do the public want. There might also be a case, we found after eight weeks you didn't get this variability in background colour because they all came out yellow, so maybe we just store them for 8 weeks and they all come out looking the same.
I'm going to finish up here, steeling a bit of Bruce's thunder. Bruce Tomkins is coming in November to give a more in-depth talk about consumer preference studies we've done with these Pears in Indonesia and Thailand. We did this last year. We did them with a Commercial Market Research Company called Colmar Brunton that have offices right throughout Asia and they're very professional at running these trials. What we did is we got 150 urban consumers, who regularly buy Western fruit, put them in a room and we gave them Deliza - Hard, which is DelH. Deliza soft, Lanya Hard, Lanya Soft. We asked them a whole series of questions. Bruce will have all the details about what we found. This is just an indicator of how they preferred there fruit. The question was would you definitely not, probably not buy this fruit. Are you unsure about whether you'd buy this fruit. The bars I want you to look at, are the clear and the black - probably would and definitely would but this fruit. And you can see that in both cases DelH, which is hard, crisp was preferred over soft, by a little bit, by about 5 percent. Lanya, is in general terms, preferred over Deliza, and hard again crisp fruit was preferred over the soft. Now the fruit that we presented them had been stored for more than twelve weeks, so it reached its maximum sweetness, and it was in very good condition.
This is Bankok. Now I put this in because it shows that there are quite significant differences between countries about what they prefer. In this particular case, you'll see bottom one, Lanya Soft - Thais did not like that at all, which is an interesting result. But as far as Deliza was concerned, they pretty much liked them whether they were hard or soft. I should say the hard were around about four, four and a half. The soft were about one and a half to two kilograms, so they were about twice as soft. So they are quite happy with Deliza whether it was hard or soft and they actually preferred Deliza to Lanya which was a little bit different from Thailand.
Bruce will talk more about this in November. The reason I put it in is because, we know from work that APAL did, I think about 2016 with Sweeney that Deliza and Lanya will be fairly popular with Australian consumers. We've done the studies here. We thought, well why don't we have a look at what's going to happen in Asia. And we were advised by APAL that the top two possible export destinations for this fruit are Indonesia and Thailand and we found that yes they very much preferred them. And they would pay a fairly good price for Them. Bruce will go into that.
Again, I'll just finish up with this one. This is really a direct comparison between Lanya ANP-0118, and Packhams, and Deliza ANP-0131 and Packhams in Indonesia and Thailand, and you can see both were very much preferred, particularly, as I just mentioned, that Deliza in Thailand, 78% said they would buy that over and above Packhams even at a premium of 25%. So there's a market there.
So in conclusion, we found these 3 varieties stored very well as you would expect with pears. The only down side was with Lanya - may need MCP if you want to market them, after say six months of storage. If you want to market them direct, straight out, I don't think you'll need it.
There well liked in Jakarta and Bangkok as a crisp pear, and they market well after 6 - 8 weeks cooling to maximize sweetness.
With Deliza ANP-0131 we stored them up to 10 months. I believe you can store them for longer than that, and we had no problems, as longs as you got rots under control, before they go in, they'll go a very, very long time.
Deliza, as far as I'm concerned it would be a 12 month market. I think Lanya would be a seasonal market. You can have a short period of time where you can get the fruit out in top quality before it shows problems, whether they be rots or scald. But Deliza will go forever. It's also well liked in Jakarta and Bangkok, and you can market all year after about six to eight weeks of cool storage, in CA to maximize sweetness.