Two apples were placed on a table at a Midwest Apple Improvement Association board meeting in January of 2009. One, a GoldRush, looked like a mummy, Bill Dodd remembers — brown, rotten, bad.
The other looked like a typical apple, red and crisp. Its name: EverCrisp.
Both of the apples were picked at the end of October in Indiana, explained their grower, David Doud. He told the fellow board members that he had stored them on his kitchen counter, unrefrigerated, for three months. EverCrisp immediately won over the room.
“Everybody at the table said, ‘How soon can I get some trees?’” Dodd remembers. “That was the moment.”
EverCrisp, a cross between Honeycrisp and Fuji, is the star of MAIA, the apple breeding organization that started in the late 1990s in Ohio. Trees have been patented, commercialized and sold to both local and global growers.
MAIA trees started with Midwest intents, but today, they can be found as far away as Chile, Italy, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.
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Dodd, the president of MAIA, regularly welcomes some of those international growers to his Dodd’s Hillcrest Orchards in Henrietta, Ohio, where they can taste the carefully bred apples, fresh from the tree. The fruit grow in tight, high-density rows of small trees protected by netting. There, you’ll find EverCrisp, plus other MAIA cultivars like LudaCrisp, Sweet Maia, Rosalee, Sweet Zinger and the new Red Zeppelin. They grow alongside old favorites like Gala, McIntosh and Honeycrisp.
(Photo by Annie Nickoloff)
Each new discovery arrived through careful breeding programs, with growers hand-pollinating different apple types to achieve the best characteristics: color, crispness, ripening time. Dodd hosts plenty of test plantings in his orchard.
“Ninety-nine percent of them are crap. They’re terrible. They’re god-awful,” Dodd says. “It’s a numbers game. So the more crosses and the more seeds you plant, the more chances that you have planted something spectacular.”
MAIA evaluations determine which apples might have promise. Dodd calls them “elites.”
“Those are things that are interesting,” Dodd says. “As soon as we recognize something as elite, we start building up the budwood supply, in case we’re gonna launch it.”
(Photo by Annie Nickoloff)
MAIA has, by 2025, launched 10 official apple cultivars. The organization continues to experiment, and more are sure to arrive, appealing to evolving tastes.
Meanwhile, Dodd works to keep up with the growing interest in local pick-your-own apples every fall.
On a tour through the orchards’ grounds, Dodd points out the children’s playgrounds, corn pits, concessions stands, tricycle rides and apple cannons available for visitors to enjoy while picking apples every fall. There’s a corn maze with a different theme each year. (This year, it’s in the shape of the Goodyear blimp, in honor of its 100th birthday.) There’s even an idyllic wedding venue, with a grassy aisle surrounded by rows of apple trees and a nearby barn reception hall, which came about after Dodd’s daughter’s wedding in the orchard a decade ago.
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(Photo by Annie Nickoloff)
Dodd’s Hillcrest Orchards, for its first century, operated as a wholesale apple business that sold to major stores like Walmart and Kroger. That changed in the late ’90s when a hailstorm destroyed the crop and pushed the business to instead shift into a pick-your-own business model.
Today, there are plenty of apples. Dodd estimates that he grows about 10,000 bushels per season, give or take, well over one million apples every year.
That’s because after the hailstorm’s damage, Dodd modernized growing practices to emphasize density, growing 1,250 trees per acre (formerly, 150 trees per acre).
Dodd, who took over the orchard business in 1985 at 26 years old, hopes for his children and grandchildren to continue for many more generations. His son’s family lives nearby, and his daughter’s family lives in the old farmhouse next door to the orchards — the same home that he, his father and his grandfather were raised in. They’re already active and involved in the family business.
Similarly, generations of new apples grow at Hillcrest, as MAIA pushes to find healthier, more interesting fruit.
While touring the orchard, Dodd heads down an unmarked, unnamed row, arriving at a specific MAIA experiment. He plucks an unassuming red fruit from a branch and hands it to me, waiting expectantly with a mischievous smile.
I take a bite and pucker. It’s punchy and sour. I look at him, confused, until he motions down at the apple in my hand. In the bite, I see a reddish-pink flesh, continuing all the way through the apple. An anomaly, Dodd says. Something special.
It could be the next big thing, Dodd explains, if he can figure out how to make it a little sweeter. It’ll take a few more generations to figure it out.
(Photo by Annie Nickoloff)
Four MAIA Apples to Try:
EverCrisp
This sweet, crispy apple ripens in mid-October and has a long storability. It’s a cross between Honeycrisp and Fuji, and it’s MAIA’s first major success in breeding.
Sweet Maia
A cross between Honeycrisp and Winecrisp, this bright red apple ripens in late summer and offers a crunchy, sweet bite with a delicious flavor.
Ludacrisp
Tropical and fruity flavors are abundant in the juicy Ludacrisp, which ripens in late fall. It was first developed from an open-pollinated Sweet 16.
Red Zeppelin
An open-pollinated Honeycrisp in MAIA led breeders to find the Red Zeppelin, a crisp, storable apple with firm, deep red skin, perfect to bite into now or later.
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