 Hi, I'm Kathy Widerholdt and I'm the Fridt Project Manager at the Carrington Research Extension Center. Today we're looking at eronia plants. Eronia is a new crop in the United States, new for about a decade, and it's attractive because it's very hardy, it grows in most conditions, and eronia was actually originally a native crop to the United States. And then in the 1800s, plants were taken back to Russia and they crossbred them with sorbus, which is mountain ash, and then it was recrossed back to eronia. So they're kind of a combo, they produce bigger fruit than the native plants do and they're a taller plant. So this is what is used in the fruit production industry in the US. Most fruit in the world is grown in Poland and then exported to the world. So we're trying to get this to be a crop in the United States. In 2010, there was only about 65 acres in the US and by 2018, over 1800 acres. So that's a pretty good increase for a brand new crop. The market for eronia is growing, it's kind of unpredictable. Because it's a new crop, people don't really know about it all the time, processors need a huge supply to be comfortable with making something. And that's where people have to get together, work together, coordinate their efforts to market and sell their fruit. That's kind of a sticking point sometimes. So while the possibility is there, it can be locally, it can be a little unpredictable. Wine makers like it, jelly makers can use them, but they're kind of afraid that their customers may not know about the fruit. But it really is good, it's not a fresh fruit. It has very high tannins and will dry your mouth out. But if you freeze the berries, it makes good juice. You can put them into things that you bake, like say banana bread, some kind of a quick bread. We put them into yogurt or oatmeal in the morning and then they don't, they're not so astringent, they're actually really good. So the thing about eronia is that it has very high anthocyanins and just the different polyphenol compounds. These are the highest of any fruit, three times higher than blueberries, blackberries, black currants. So it is very helpful for you. It has very good university research behind it. It's not just an internet phenomenon. So that's kind of neat. And like I said, just a pretty easy crop to grow. So the research center is looking at this fruit in a study. We have a grant from the specialty crop block grants that come from USDA. And we are looking at the polyphenol content of the fruit across North Dakota. We run right along Highway 200, which is where Carrington Research Extension Center is. And so we have three different elevations because the higher elevation that you grow fruit, the more anthocyanins it should have, the more polyphenols. And this is because there's more sunlight and more stress on the plant and they have to produce these compounds. So like I said, we have three sites across North Dakota pretty much in a straight line. They vary by elevation. And then we have one site we're coordinating with in South Dakota. It's 300 miles south and it's directly south of the research center. So that's a different latitude. And we're going to see how their fruit does for polyphenol content down there. We've done one year of study. We are a bit delayed in the results because of the shutdown of the university that's doing the analysis. We send the fruit to University of Wisconsin-Madison and the researcher there, his lab, has done the most cutting edge work on analyzing these compounds and these kinds of fruits. So we have one more year of data collection, which is this year and it's looking to be a good crop. There's lots of fruit on these plants this year. We're going to get them watered because we've had very little rain here in Carrington and we hope that they'll make a good crop this year. You know, if you want to grow a plant in your yard, you can grow one of these standard varieties. You can grow a smaller variety that is more ornamental, but it's still going to produce the same kind of fruit. That one is Iroquois beauty. That's the one I know of, but there may be some other ones, but they'll produce good edible fruit. One thing I forgot to mention is that in North Dakota, we have a variety called McKenzie, and that's also part of this study to show that the McKenzie variety developed at the Plant Materials Center in Bismarck has the same kind of fruit with the same good nutritional qualities that the kind of standard, the industry standard variety, which was viking. We want to show that McKenzie has the same qualities that viking does. And you know, it's probably going to be the same because aronia, all aronia plants are all related to each other. They don't genetically mix very much, so the biggest variation between plants sometimes is where they're grown. It's not the different varieties that you can grow. So I hope you'll give aronia a try if you ever get a chance. Maybe there are some products out there on the national market, and if you or your neighbors can grow some, it's a good plant. And a good bunch of berries to share with each other. Thank you.