Cloning sweet trees.

[Haynes Forest Products]

I was reading the Maple News and there is an article about cloning sweet trees. Now I have no problem with GMO's or cloning. I wonder if cloning and then selling sweet trees from cloning is possibly setting up producers with a labeling problem. Will people that use these trees be required to label their product with "made from GMO trees". Reading about how the EU is hyper sensitive about GMO's and labeling.

[Michael Greer]

A cloned tree is not "genetically modified". Nothing has been re-arranged, or even copied. Trees are "cloned" by taking cuttings and grafting onto root stock. All apple trees are "cloned" but they don't call it that.

[buckeye gold]

I agree Haynes, I don't shy away from GMO either. I guess that is because I have been a part of a project to genetically modify an organism. What a lot of people don't understand is science is not creating new life forms or monsters as you see in the movies. They are simply trying to select the most desirable features of a plant or animal. In stead of using selective breeding they are trying to accelerate the process by gene modification. we worked on creating a population of all female fish to get bigger fish that live longer. They would still be the same species only all female genetically. In the farming world GMO grains are resistant to disease and chemicals. This allows for more grain to be grown and very select chemical use. If we had to go back to only the old varieties of corn, soybeans and other grains the farmers would struggle to raise enough food to feed the growing world. Food prices would soar. My father spent a life time developing hybrid seed corn and soybeans that were better producers and disease resistant. It took him years to develop one variety. GMO science can cut that timeline significantly. It is till corn or soybeans, it's just a better plant. The organic make up is the same. GMO science is also used in treating many horrible diseases. I also think the organic food fad is a lot of baloney. I know people who do the food safety testing in our state and they will tell you that when you blind test food you can not tell organic from regular food. They all are contaminate free. Organic is no more safe or less likely to be contaminated that traditionally produced food. The main difference is you pay substantially more for the organic. It's a sales gimic as much as anything.

[DrTimPerkins]

A cloned tree is not "genetically modified". Nothing has been re-arranged, or even copied. Trees are "cloned" by taking cuttings and grafting onto root stock. All apple trees are "cloned" but they don't call it that.

Cloned trees are definitely not genetically modified. As Michael says, they are typically made by taking cuttings. Sugar maple cuttings can be grafted onto root stock, or can be directly rooted (induced to form roots directly from the cuttings), but it has to be done correctly (it's not like Willow where you can just push a stick in the ground and it'll sprout). There is also tissue-culture, but that is even more problematic to get them to root.

There was a great deal of interest decades ago in selecting/breeding sweet trees. A lot of that was done by the U.S. Forest Service. Thousands of trees were tested for sugar content all across the range and sweet candidate trees were identified. Clones were made of some, seed was collected from some. There are about a half-dozen sugar maple plantations of various sorts spread around the northeast (a couple in VT, a few in NY, Mass, Ohio). We have one here at UVM PMRC in Underhill, VT. Most have been neglected or abandoned due to lack of continued interest. After RO was introduced, it no longer made a big difference if trees averaged 2.0 Brix or 2.3 Brix like it did back when everyone boiled raw sap. With our "plantation maple" sapling project, we redid some of the cloning work to see how difficult it is to clone sugar maple. In that case, planting thousands of small trees that are of higher sap sugar makes a lot of economic sense.

[Haynes Forest Products]

Thanks for the replies and correction. I have always wondered about the hypersensitivity of the misinformed and what their end game is. Traveling thru southern Minnesota and into Nebraska I was struck by the shear expanse of the corn and bean fields. Speaking with the farmer that I'm buying the tank from who farms 2,000 acres of corn and beans its fascinating how it all works. Plant a field with corn and rotate to beans and a few vagrant corn plants will sprout up. They don't mature into corn stock just a wimpy weed without seeds/corn.

I for one would love to see rows of sweet trees with higher sugar content and then a next generation of SWEETER trees and so on and so forth. I had two people at a BBQ say that they thought that the sap coming out of the tree was much thicker almost like syrup. I have to laugh at the conception people have. But maybe some day :lol: