 My name is David Sugar. We're at the Southern Oregon Research and Extension Center of Oregon State University outside of Medford, Oregon in the Research Pear Orchard. One of the nice things as you watch the pear tree develop through the summer and then the fruit begin to weigh down the branches. The pear tree is starting to droop. Pears get bigger and bigger and the leaves start looking more and more tired. When we finally come in for harvest and the moment is right, pick the trees and then look back at the tree. It's almost as if you could feel the tree going, ah, finally. And its burden is lifted. It can catch its breath and we after harvest we give one more irrigation so it could drink up and restore itself and then get ready for winter. A plant pathologist is a scientist who studies diseases of agricultural plants. So my specialty was diseases of pears. And when we talk about diseases, really talking about infectious diseases. I had to deal with non-infectious things like mineral deficiencies and whatnot and try to learn to identify them. But as far as research went, my assignment was to work on the infectious diseases caused by fungi and bacteria that had the potential to cause economic loss in the pear industry. One of my key approaches that I'm proud of was to integrate diverse and not necessarily related ideas about how to manage a disease into a program for that disease. And in particular with the storage rot of pears. It's a variety of fungi that cause storage rot. And historically that has caused major problems, major economic losses in the Medford pear industry. And what I kind of evolved to in the course of my research was a program that involved how the trees were managed during the growing season. Being not too much vigor in the trees. Managing the fertilizer, the nitrogen to not stimulate the trees too much. Because we found that when excess nitrogen was provided to the trees, it not only made the growth excessively strong, it put nitrogen into the fruit that resulted in them rotting at a higher probability than those that didn't have that nitrogen in the fruit. And then we found that calcium supplementation by spraying calcium chloride, it's a simple salt onto the trees during the growing season would soak into the fruit and increase the calcium content. And like if people of a certain generation know this TV commercial about building strong bones with calcium. And it essentially built strong cell walls in pears to enhance the calcium. So we got minimizing nitrogen, enhancing calcium, and harvesting at a maturity level that was satisfactory for the quality, the eating quality of the fruit, the ultimate eating quality, but didn't sacrifice the storability. So there's a range of when you can harvest. And if you harvest on the early side of that acceptable range, your pears are less likely to rot. So combining nitrogen management, calcium management, harvest maturity, and then post harvest, we studied how pickers tend to injure the fruit and determine that most rots start at injuries in the fruit, physical injuries, and most injuries come during harvest. And most injuries during harvest happen from the way the fruit are handled, either in the picking bucket or in the bin, the contact from one fruit to the flesh of one fruit to the stem of another fruit, making tiny punctures provided entry points for fungi. And I did a study in the mid 90s about how pickers were paid or what incentive they had to be careful. And if they were paid by the bin, by the quantity picked versus paid by the hour and encouraged to be careful, there was a three fold increase in the number of injuries into the fruit from those paid with incentive to pick more, as opposed to those paid with incentive to be careful. So that's as one element of a complex decision on a growers part of how to pay workers. And in general, I'd say there's been a shortage of a pair of workers for some time. And so most growers paid by the quantity picked. And they're in a hurry to get fruit off. There are many who can be paid by the bin and still be reasonably careful. So there's all kinds of situations. And Harry and David pays by the hour. But they have a different economic value to each individual piece of fruit. But I didn't I didn't attach an economic value to this. I just had the percentage of fruit injured from each system of payment. So building this system of combining different unrelated techniques into a program to manage a disease. We had the nitrogen management, calcium management, harvest maturity management, style of picking management. And then chemically, for those who use fungicides, tradition the traditional fungicide is after harvest. And after the fruit have been stored sometime in our chilled down when the bin gets a chance to run through the packing house, then it gets sprayed with a fungicide. Well, we found that spraying in the one to three weeks before harvest with fungicides that were approved for that application was more effective because the fungicide was in place when that injury happened. And rather than trying to play catch up when the when the fungus was already getting a start in the wound during the pre storage before packing. So management of fungicides. And then after harvest, there is another opportunity for fungicide either through a spray, like I was just mentioning, or in the storage room as a gas or a smoke essentially. And there's also the opportunity to apply biological controls. So we spent a lot of time comparing and looking for new organisms, microorganisms that could serve in that role. And in general found that yeasts were better than bacteria in that role. And yeasts under a microscope, yeasts are big, huge creatures compared to tiny, tiny bacteria. And that may be part of it, that they simply occupy a lot of space. But they also consume a lot of sugar and other nutrients in the wound and out compete the pathogen, the fungus. And to the best of our knowledge, that's the main mode of action, simply occupying space and eating up resources that the pathogen might have used to neutrify itself in rotting the pear. So by and large, the biological controls were not as effective as fungicides, but they were of significant effect. And a couple of products have been registered for use, mostly organic producers that use them to the best of my knowledge. And they are of benefit. But the thing I wanted to emphasize in many of my talks to growers was that when I presented all these different things, I didn't want to present it as a menu and choose what you're going to do. I wanted to present it as a program that contains all these diverse approaches that are really independent of one another. So if one doesn't work in a given year, the others are not brought down with it. But think of it as an integrated program. And that was kind of a buzzword in plant pathology during most of my career, the integrated approach, just like in pest management, IPM, integrated pest management. So integrated disease management involved putting together everything that can contribute to managing the disease effectively. So one of the great pleasures of being stationed at a remote station away from the university and essentially becoming a member of the community of pear growers was the relationships with the pear growers and sharing in their successes, as well as feeling their pain during their failures. I certainly worked with the big companies, Harry and David, and a succession of orchard directors there and the Namas family. And I started with Joe Namas and then Mike and his cousin Pete and his sister Sue. Ed Ernest was very important to me and his daughter Laura, who became a Namas. Those were very important people because I learned a lot from them and I tried to be a good listener. I kind of thought of myself as a college boy coming into a farm community and not having any farm background really had to learn the basics. And over time, I felt like I became on a par with the growers as far as our connection to the orchards, to the land, and to the whole process of producing pears. I have to include Ron Meyer, a huge factor in the pear world and someone who's outstanding in his generosity about his knowledge. And so I remember in the late 70s, spending a day with Ron Meyer and his dad, Joe, learning how to prune peaches. And again, their generosity to take a day out and teach me and a couple other people how to prune peaches was tremendous. And all through in much more detailed situations about pears and pear disease, it was the first orchard that I did trials in a commercial orchard. And it was in Central Point somewhere. Maybe his name will come to mind by the time I stop talking. But where I first placed, I sprayed calcium. I identified certain trees to receive calcium and to not receive calcium, but I wanted it to be commercially managed so that there wasn't an over layering of how we managed our trees here at the experiment station. So he allowed me to do that and to call me the day before he's going to commercially pick so that then I could pick my samples and get the studies run on them. And that kind of cooperation was very important to the success of programs. And that wasn't the only place, you know, over the years, many, many commercial orchards made their space available to me and to, of course, others at the experiment station to carry out experiments under commercial conditions. There were times when they forgot to call and I would go out there with my crew and picking buckets and find the trees had been picked. So those were the minority of times, but there were certainly those kind of disappointments. But that's the way it goes. Well, we're looking at a BOSC pair and specifically a variety called Golden Russet BOSC. And it's an interesting historical situation that there used to be just one BOSC and it was green during the growing season and as you approached the harvest, it would get more and more Russet and with a golden background color. However, in some of our competing districts of pair production, Hood River and California, Northern California, they tended to stay green and not get this golden background color. So Medford had an advantage in producing a BOSC that was golden and preferred by the buyers. But in, and I can't remember the year now, either in the, I think it was late 60s, maybe early 70s in Hood River, the first known mutant BOSC that had a natural Russet was found and called Golden Russet BOSC. And it kind of took away the advantage of the Medford district in producing this golden color. And several other mutants have been found. They're just spontaneous individuals on a branch with otherwise green pears. One would have a golden russeted color and grafting from that little bud would then produce more trees. And now I think that the BOSC pair production of the U.S. is predominantly the Golden Russet BOSC. I don't know that for fact, but I believe certainly that of the trees planted in the last 20 years, that would be the case. And it's a grower friendly pair in that this color, the golden color and the russeted surface hides minor imperfections that, for example, in the Comise pair with its smooth green skin shows up tiny imperfections, which aren't significant for eating quality, but can affect the market desirability. So BOSC hides a lot of imperfections, which is a good thing because they're not really meaningful. It's very productive. It tends to have a long neck, characterize it in a long stem. The colder the spring, the longer the fruit. So there's a hormone produced called gibberellic acid produced in the fruit that tends to be suppressed by heat. And this 2016 April was particularly warm. And so looking at these BOSC pairs, I think that they're showing the effects of the temperatures in April by being shorter than they otherwise would. If the April had been cool, they would be longer. And the longer, again, it's not significant for eating quality, but the market desirability, there's an elegance to the long BOSC. And so I think that's less prevalent this year. But you also see a district by district, California pairs in general tend to be shorter in more squat than Northwest pairs. And canners for Bartlett pairs, I'm told, have historically preferred Northwest pairs because of the long shape. And California pairs aren't as nice when in the final product. And then if I look in the market and I see Chilean or Argentine pairs, which are often, especially Argentina, often hotter climates in spring, they tend to be short compared to what we see here. So okay, so we've got BOSC pairs. They feel completely hard. But I believe that if I was here three weeks ago and did this, they would feel the same. But if we actually mechanically test the firmness of the fruit, there's a big difference between today and three weeks ago. So as fruit are aging, they produce an enzyme internally that breaks down gradually the glue that holds cell to cell that binds one cell wall to its neighbor cell wall. And that softening is an indicator that it's also moving into the maturity phase. And maturity means, in this case of pairs, if a pair is mature, if when harvested and taken off the tree, and given the after harvest conditions that it might require, more about that in a moment, will ripen. So if a pair is immature and it's harvested, no matter what you do, it won't ripen, meaning soft into a nice juicy, buttery eating quality. Most pairs require some exposure to cold temperatures after they're harvested in order to achieve ripeness. So we harvest when mature, based on the mechanical testing of the firmness with a firmness tester machine, harvest the pairs, put them in cold storage. And the length of time in cold storage varies with the variety. And then when they come out of cold storage, they're packed, they're stored again till they're sold, but they would have the capacity to ripen when the consumer buys them and puts them at room temperature for five to seven days, typically. One of the areas of research that we did was questioning the temperature at which pairs had to be chilled in order to achieve ripenability. And we store pairs for the long haul at 29 to 31 degrees. So let's say 30 degrees is a classic temperature in the storage room to long term store pairs. And they won't freeze until 28 and a half or so, depending on the sugar content, but usually 29 to 30 degrees is a safe temperature, they won't freeze. So the assumption was out there that, well, we chilled them after harvest at that temperature and Comise pair needs 30 days, Bosch pair about 15 days, Bartlett pair about the same 15 days. And pairs sold before that time would not be likely to ripen for the consumer. So one area of research we did was examining all the temperature possibilities with a bank of temperature cabinets in the laboratory here at the experiment station. And we identified that 50 degrees Fahrenheit or 10 degrees Celsius was actually the most efficient temperature for inducing the capacity to ripen in a pair picked when mature. So that had the potential to shorten the period of time substantially. But what was even more dramatic was we know that the ripening process is triggered by the gas hormone, natural hormone ethylene inside the fruit. So across fruit that ripen, ethylene is the trigger. And when a pair is harvested mature, given enough chill, and then brought out to room temperature, it's been stimulated to produce its own ethylene. However, you can put them in a chamber, a room, and then introduce ethylene gas into the room. And that can shorten the length of time even more. And if I remember my data correctly, with chemist pair, if harvested mature, given 48 hours in ethylene, and then stored at 50 degrees for another two days, that would be sufficient to induce the capacity to ripen. So this may be too technical, but it was important that in particular, in a big crop year, when the life of chemist pair in particular only goes till late January, and there may not be the potential to wait 30 days and then begin selling them and try and sell them all before the end of January, the use of ethylene and the 50 degrees induction temperature can be useful in getting pairs ready to market sooner after harvest and start moving the crop out in order to utilize it all. Okay, what else are we seeing here? Well, as someone who studied storage decay and rot, let me see, here's, I don't know, is this in the picture? So this is next year's flower bud for the bosque pair, and it's particularly sharp, tipped, much more so than any of the other pair varieties. So if we harvest, we're harvesting pairs and, you know, moving quickly, there's some likelihood that a pair is going to contact the bud on the tree, and we do see them months later. You can see the evidence of a puncture that's just right for having been caused by next year's flower bud or a scratch that's just in the line that the pair must have gotten pulled right past the bud, and that's one source of the little wounds that end up getting infected by fungi in pairs. And bosque pair is typically the worst pair for having problems of storage rot. Here's another bud. It's a very sharp point at the end that can easily puncture a fruit with any contact. And also, when you harvest bosque pairs, if you're not wearing gloves, the back of your hands will be all scratched up from those buds. And that doesn't happen in any other varieties. Okay, some of the other things we're seeing is this, I don't know, are you seeing the structure these pairs are growing on? There's a post, and there's wires here, that this tree, this block of trees, is being grown on wires. And part of the phenomenon that that is taking advantage of is that when a branch of a pear tree is growing upright, it tends to want to just grow vegetatively and produces fewer flower buds than if the branch is bent. So being bent to say 30 to 45 degrees is optimum for getting that branch to not grow vegetatively, but to produce a lot of flower buds along the way, and hence have a more productive tree. If you go below horizontal, it's counterproductive because then strong sprouts tend to come further back on the branch. But having some kind of wire structure facilitates having as many branches bent as possible. So we've bend the branches and and clip them onto it or tie them onto the wires with little clips, and it tends to make for a more productive tree and helps to keep the tree shorter and more readily accessible by the pickers and by whatever management is going on during the growing season. So you can't see it on this individual, but these all pear trees are grafted. Any variety with a name has to be perpetuated by grafting because the seeds inside the pear would have had two parents. We don't know who the pollen parent is that fertilized the flower on this basket tree or this individual, but the seeds in here would come up as a new a new type, and that can be desirable or not in the development of new varieties. But to perpetuate BOSC or to perpetuate Bartlett whatever name variety, we have to graft them. So there's no transfer of pollen involved. It's just taking vegetative shoots and grafting them onto a root and that brings up the issue of what to graft them onto. And while there are many types of pear that have been examined for being providing the roots for for pears to be grafted on, one particularly advantageous root is the quince. And the quince is a totally different fruit within the the apple pear group within the rose family. But quince will dwarf the tree and make it much easier to manage and induce flowering very early in the life of the tree. So in the second year you could expect some flowers and increasing the third year and significant production by the by the fourth year in a commis pear on quince rootstock. So this is a commis pear tree was grafted onto a quince rootstock. So the quince has smooth bark here. The pear has rough bark just for identifying them, but at at the time of planting they would have been very, they would have looked very similar. You'd only see a little line where they were grafted. And the purpose of grafting is that the quince will make the pear be a smaller tree. So it's dwarfing for the pear and it makes it produce flowers earlier in its life than if the pear were grafted onto another pear. Well the traditional pear rootstock was seeds were taken from the canneries because the canneries would produce millions of seeds as as a byproduct and the nurserymen would take the seeds from the canner plant them and grow up pear trees that would then be grafted. They would make a very big tree that took say eight to twelve years typically to start flowering. So the use of quince as a rootstock for pear really makes a huge difference in getting the orchard bearing more quickly and allowing more trees to be put in a given space which is more efficient use of the land. Unfortunately some of the other big time varieties, Bosque and Bartlett, are not compatible with quince. For unknown reasons, quince and quince have a harmonious matrimony that is used to the advantage of Harry and David and other producers of quince pear where almost all of the quince pears in this valley would are growing on quince roots. And even among quince there are selections that are different and late in my career I started to evaluate some quince selections that I had heard about from Europe that were said to induce larger fruit size in comise pears. So one of my last projects involved that and we indeed identified that a new strain of quince could produce larger fruit not not excessively large but a larger portion of the crop would be of large size than the traditionally used varieties of quince. And that has been evaluated in other locations as well but comise pear is not as important anywhere else in the U.S. than Medford. Well certainly my sense of pear industry was as people who are all in it together to a certain extent. I mean they had their private businesses of course but the people who wanted to work with OSU tended to be people who also wanted to work with one another and that was both at the local level and I would be for many years attended the meetings of the fruit growers league and while that was often about political issues or regulatory issues it was also a time for sharing their view on situations in the in the horticulture of pears or the management of problems. And then that evolved into the weekly meetings at the experiment station or bi-weekly meetings which has continued for many many years where Rick Hilton the entomologist and myself would give our assessment of what's relevant in this little window as far as management of the diseases or the insects that we are working with. But it was also a time when the growers who were gathered would share their observations and ask one another you know what are you doing about this and what are you doing about that and you know I tried that and I didn't think it worked and that kind of back and forth which was both educational for me and my colleagues as well as kind of community building and there was a sense of we were all working towards getting a successful crop produced and then on a larger level the US producers which are Washington, Oregon and California would gather at least annually for meetings and it was a little more you know large scale with with speakers but there would be the hallways would be rich with growers sharing with one another their views and their experiences and then likewise on the international level which you know fewer growers from here or from the northwest would participate in but there were some who were keen on participating in the international meetings and sharing that kind of information. For the many years that we had no wine grape researcher here I took on some wine grape projects but I wanted to keep them small enough that they weren't interfering with my pair work and I felt like my my mandate and my personal passion was for pairs and so in a sense the grape work that I did was I gave short shrift to the to the grape work but we wanted to keep something going until we had a dedicated pair researcher so I did some variety trials and some clonal trials and I was careful not to go beyond that and I would have had to educate myself and you know become uh you know enough cutting edge in grapes to have something new that wasn't being done somewhere else already and I wasn't prepared to go there with my dedication to the pair work. About the major challenges I think of as a plant pathologist in terms of disease epidemics and there were over the the 37 years that I worked here there were years when either the amount of storage rot was clearly going to be uh worse than would be tolerated within the making that year's crop profitable despite what we had learned to that point and trying to implement what we knew and there were years when fire blight disease a bacterial disease was so bad that uh despite all we knew about its management it was going to be devastating and pair scab a fungus disease uh likewise it was that it rained so much that control was not reasonable not possible it was would be rarely uh more than one disease that would be epidemic level so one of the key roles that I saw myself in was to during the spring when control of scab and fire blight are essential trying to assess daily the risk and that in terms of where the the parotry was in its development and what the forecast was for weather and where the pathogen was in its development so uh many many spring mornings on my way to work from Ashland I would take the back roads stop at certain orchards and just kind of sniff out all the information that I was going to need when I got here on what the trees were doing and the any appearance of the pathogen and then likewise here where I knew trees that had not been sprayed I had you know dedicated trees that if they're gonna disease is going to appear they're likely to appear here I uh I would uh examine and report when I saw the first incidents of the pathogen report by sending an email to the list of growers that I maintained putting that together with the state of the trees and the weather forecast and try to put in reasonable words how I saw the risk without telling growers you should spray or you should not spray uh I tried to make a an assessment that would would define the level of risk in terms of these factors the tree condition the pathogen condition and the weather conditions so I hope that that was helpful I believe it was helpful but uh for pear scab for example if during the young foliage period uh it rained for trees were wet for five six days in a row there there was no hope if you had sprayed just before that started it would keep it down but that much wetness and wetness was essential then uh we were gonna have a problem despite all these efforts fortunately one of our characteristics here is it doesn't rain that much and uh most years you could look at the weather forecast and make a reasonable decision that if the trees were in a susceptible phase and if the pathogen was present and the forecast was only for a shower or two it probably isn't going to stay wet enough or long enough perhaps a spray wasn't necessary so that's the kind of information I tried to put out in a kind of decision-making process I tried to engender and like with the fire blight which different factors you have to have open blossoms and heat and if the uh condition of open blossoms and heat were there we'd assume the pathogen was there because the bacteria you can't see until it's too late uh you see the symptoms when it's too late and uh so then it would be a much clearer thing we have conditions ripe for a serious fire blight infection you know uh you know treatment if applied should go on within the next 48 hours so that kind of more direct uh message but tailored to the specific disease next morning coming into work in specific orchards I could see the sprayers starting to go out when I really thought that was appropriate even though I had framed the words in a more of a just suggestive way uh I would always feel quite satisfied that yet they're doing what had to be done and that's that's great one issue that I had was if we're going to manage these diseases so specifically with daily assessments and not acting unless risk was significant enough then you had to have the capacity in the orchard to respond to it so uh I once gave a talk in Argentina called seven habits of successful pair growers and I don't I may not remember all seven right now at this distance but one of them was having the ability to apply a treatment in the orchard within to finish within 48 hours of starting and partly the pair industry getting big here was built on economies of scale and a couple of the big companies did not have the capacity to fulfill that 48 hour requirement it might take them a week and with fire blight in particular it was too late if didn't get to a specific orchard until three or four days after the the trigger event for the recommendation happened it was as good as not doing it so I've encouraged that having that uh capacity and often the question is asked by growers how many tractors per acre or how many acres per tractor and I don't I haven't ever calculated how this would translate to it and orchards are so different from one another and how quickly they can be treated but I said whatever uh infrastructure is necessary to cover your acreage within 48 hours of starting to treat and uh you know as far as I know there's still variation among operators in whether they have that capacity or or not uh but that's how I would approach it the gross changes that I've seen in my time here were the drop in the number of growers of course and the acreage I think when I started in January of 1978 I think there were 11 to 12,000 acres of pairs in the rogue valley and uh at my retirement in 2014 probably in the five to six thousand acre range so it was uh significant very probably dropping by half in acreage on the other hand in the early days of driving around orchards and once I came to know orchards a little better there were a lot of bad orchards who were in in that in that 11 to 12,000 number and their uh removal didn't necessarily impact the the value of the industry that much so getting rid of of bad orchards was probably a good thing it was a waste of resources and poorly managed orchards tend to be uh refuges for pathogens and insects that can uh put more pressure on the well-managed orchards um the innovations as far as weather monitoring were huge with respect to plant pathology because uh you know as a knowledge base about each disease has grown uh we've had greater ability to evaluate uh conditions and evaluate risk which was part of my uh how I dealt with these diseases so uh when we managed pair scab and when I made decisions on how to communicate with the industry about pair scab a fungus disease I would have a uh electronic grid laying on a pear tree that would simulate a leaf and when enough water droplets were on that electronic grid it would trigger electronic signal that would then I could detect on my computer and uh I would know that leaves are wet this is based on a small sample but uh we could we could know when wet periods started what the temperatures were during that time and then with the computer programs integrate that information when I started working here we had uh tables printed out tables that at a given temperature say 50 degrees leaves would have to stay wet for say 19 hours for a scab fungus to infect a leaf but conditions in the orchard aren't steady you know it's cooler at night it's warmer during the day uh things dry out they get wet again uh and these uh programs were able to integrate that information and so the accuracy of our assessment of whether or not conditions for infection were happening had happened were likely to happen was much uh much improved by that I used to have a meter that had a there was a little box with a with an arm sticking out and a string on it and the string pulled on a pen that was attached to a circulating chart and when the string got wet it would let's see when it gets wet it contracts and that would pull up the pen and so the line would go up on the chart and when I'd come in the morning I'd see the chart well when did it start being wet and when it dried out the string would expand and the pen would come back down and that was pretty good technology at the time but uh it wasn't that very dependable and it would it would uh often malfunction you'd have to remember to wind up crank wind up the essentially like watching winding a watch each night to get it to run and uh you know the water wouldn't necessarily wet the string very efficiently so this was a big improvement with the same general concept uh and uh it was a big improvement to have it electronic and uh you could have the information readily and in a communicable form and uh I wasn't the only person with access to the information growers could personally access the information but I believe it was helpful to have someone with my training uh assess the information as well not just putting out the raw information but assessments of risk which are which are more complicated and kind of involve uh you know the psychology to a certain extent trying to speak simultaneously to those who are more risk averse and those who are more risk tolerant uh and and provide fair information for everybody generosity and wisdom of harry and david uh led them to installing 10 monitoring sites in their orchards and because their orchards are so scattered around the valley you could get a representative view of the valley uh there were also some individuals who had stations that would come online and be accessible so I could make an assessment based on what I was seeing at the experiment station and say it also appears that the east side of the valley was less likely to have spent this much time wet so it's likely that risk is less on the east side of the valley the individuals families and companies that I've worked with that are still in the game of pair production I believe are very sincere about wanting to be successful and continue going and I I see no reason why they shouldn't be successful in continuing I don't see it as likely on their current conditions that very many new pair growers with new orchards on on new land should appear uh you know I think the economics are still marginal enough that it's hard to this it would be hard to decide to buy land and plant pair trees and raise a family on the income because of all the all the time required until production was sufficient and the unpredictability of the production so long-standing companies and families here are in a different position where the land is long-owned the trees are mature and the infrastructure and the marketing is all established it would be very hard to to start that from scratch for somebody so I see continuity for those that are here now but I don't see much new it could be that some new variety some new approach to pair marketing resulted in someone getting started from scratch but I don't expect it what I expect from a new person coming in to start work in 2016 who's had their training uh in the new millennium let's say uh is the ability to apply molecular techniques to identify things event identify events in the development of disease that I was dependent on my eye or the microscope taking samples back and looking under the microscope and or culturing fungi on petri dishes and waiting until they grew to identify so I would expect that a new person coming in would have the opportunity to apply uh molecular based skills for monitoring diseases for early detection and action before I would would have been able to to identify action as being necessary and to know more about the nature of the pathogens which culturing in the petri dish and look examining under the microscope in the in the ways that I was taught and had been used for hundreds of years uh is great but it's very time consuming and it's not conducive to uh rapid action so I would expect that to to change oh clearly the the new plant pathology position includes wine grapes and pears uh with respect to plant pathology so and that's I think it's very timely you know the only pear cooking that I do regularly is to make a pear custard tort which uh at the Christmas potluck was always my signature contribution uh real nice with with kameez pear sure I love to eat pears uh I particularly like uh a juicy pear with a very smooth texture so kameez pear uh the the harry and david royal reviera is is kameez and uh that's a wonderful pear one thing that that challenges my ability to uh be tolerant of different people in different approaches is people who eat pears unripe that it just is it's painful for me to uh to think that they're giving up the opportunity to have the aromas develop and the juiciness and the texture that i that unique texture of a properly ripened pear is wonderful and to give that up and just say I like them crunchy no that's that doesn't doesn't cut it with me it's broken