Grape news! Arkansas researchers secure grant dollars to grow a better muscadine

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The Division of Agriculture of the University of Arkansas won a $7 million competitive grant from the United States Department of Agriculture to enhance disease resistance in grapes.

The funding was part of a $121 million investment to “advance research and Extension activities that aim to solve key challenges facing specialty crop and organic agriculture producers,” the USDA said.

University of Arkansas Professor Renee Threlfall will lead the project, called “Through the Grapevine: Developing Vitus x Muscadinia Wide Hybrids for Enhanced Disease Resistance and Quality” with Margaret Worthington, a plant breeder at the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station.

Margaret Worthington (left) and Renee Threlfall (right) are two University of Arkansas scientists who received a grant from USDA to increase disease resistance in grapes. The grant will fund a 32-person team working across the nation to combine traits from muscadine and table grapes, with the goal of boosting disease resistance to make the crop easier to grow and market.

Muscadines are a species of grapevine native to the South that thrives in hot and humid climates. Their unique texture and flavor, along with their large, uncouth seeds, have prevented them from becoming very popular outside the South.

Worthington explained that while table grapes are susceptible to many diseases, muscadines are not. So the project’s goal is to breed the two fruits together to make a more disease-resistant table grape, or a muscadine with a flavor and texture more akin to a table grape.

“The goal of the project overall is through fruit-breeding, we will combine positive traits from Vitis vinifera and muscadines to create hybrids,” Threlfall said, using the scientific name for common table grapes. “A lot of this is about changing climates and changing disease resistance, changing cultivars that grow in the area.”

Climate change is impacting fruit and vegetable production throughout the United States. California grows around 94% of the total U.S. grape crop, according to the USDA. But grape acreage has declined in California over the last three years, and reports show that climate change is posing challenges to the state’s grape industry.

The challenge of breeding muscadines and table grapes is that the two plants have different numbers of chromosomes, making it very difficult to breed a hybrid.

Along with making grapes more resilient, Threlfall and Worthington hope the grant will help them grow the Arkansas muscadine industry.

“I’m an enthusiast of the fresh market muscadine, but we need to do some things to take it national beyond something just Southerners love to something even a yankee could love,” Worthington said. “Making it thin-skinned, making the flesh less eyeball-like, and making it seedless. So there are a lot of quality traits that need to be improved in muscadine.”

Threlfall estimates there are around 600 acres of grapes growing in Arkansas, with most of those acres being muscadines.

“Muscadine is sometimes like cilantro, you know, you have haters and you have lovers,” Threlfall said. “You have groups that are just, like, ‘Not for me.’”

Part of the grant will fund research on how to develop national interest in muscadines. Melinda Knuth, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University, will lead marketing efforts.

The University of Arkansas’s Fruit Research Station in Clarksville will serve as home base for the breeding portion of the project. Threlfall emphasized that the breeding program being in Arkansas farmers’ backyards will help growers start producing more muscadines.

The university has seen great success with their blackberry breeding program, and Worthington said the program’s contributions to the blackberry industry serve as a blueprint for how muscadines can expand as well.

“There is value for Arkansas, because I really think there is an opportunity for a bigger fresh market industry here,” Worthington said. “Fresh market muscadines are well adapted to Arkansas, and there is an industry already in North Carolina and Georgia. It’s easy to grow and a local product. I, as an Arkansan, want to see muscadines in the supermarket, and I know many Arkansans do as well.”

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Grape news! Arkansas researchers secure grant dollars to grow a better muscadine

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