How the watermelon got transformed

By JIM DOWNING
Sacramento Bee
Saturday, July 21, 2007

Robert Ramming palmed a Bambino watermelon on his organic farm, plunged his pocketknife into it and handed out slices dripping with juice.

"This is called field research!" said his wife, Debbie, slurping the flesh.

Robert had picked right: This little melon was ready for market.

Fifteen years ago, seedless watermelons were a relative novelty, and 5-pound "mini" versions like the Bambino didn't even exist.

Since then, though, the summer staple has undergone an extraordinary transformation.

Marketers discovered that people would buy more watermelons if the melons were seed-free and a lot smaller. Big seed companies poured money into breeding varieties that matched those traits. And a sleepy corner of the fruit-and-vegetable business became a fast-growing sector that rolls out slick new products virtually every year. Sales volume for watermelons nationwide grew 15 percent from 2003 to 2006.

Much of the innovation has come out of Woodland, Calif. Not far from Ramming's farm sprawl the nation's two largest watermelon breeding operations -- barbed-wire-fringed complexes run by seed giants Syngenta Seeds Inc. and Seminis, a Monsanto subsidiary.

Benito Juarez, the watermelon chief at Seminis, said the area around Woodland has a combination of elements that make it a perfect site for melon R&D: good soil; hot days and relatively cool nights that promote healthy seed development; and a lack of big commercial watermelon farms, which reduces the chance that a wandering bee will drop pollen where researchers don't want it to be.

In acres of test fields and greenhouses, each company cultivates hundreds of different watermelon varieties.

"There are so many undiscovered traits," said Xingping Zhang, the head watermelon breeder at Syngenta, pointing out a baseball-sized melon growing on a vine that snakes up one of the hundreds of twine ropes hanging from the ceiling of a greenhouse.

In the past several years, new research techniques have allowed plant breeders to better focus their hunt for desirable traits without using controversial genetic engineering. Those methods have expanded the breeding possibilities for many crops, but in watermelons the progress has been especially rapid, Zhang said. It should continue apace, he said, because breeders still have a broad, unexplored gene pool to draw from.

In the future, Zhang expects to create melons with flesh that is at once juicy and firm. He would like to make bright red melons even redder, a sign they carry an abundance of lycopene, an antioxidant that, like other antioxidants, may help prevent damage in the body's cells. And further crossbreeding should yield a range of melon sizes and colors to rival the iPod.

Ramming, 51, is far from the commercial farming mainstream. He cultivates less than 20 acres, sells his organic melons and vegetables only at farmers markets and promotes a return to a 19th-century style of community-oriented farming. But he has been an eager participant in the modernization of the watermelon.

At the head of one of his 400-foot rows is a patch containing one of Juarez's latest creations. It's a seedless variety with sweet yellow flesh, known only as "5919."

Ramming grows a handful of heirloom variety watermelons -- the long, slender Georgia Rattlesnake, the orange-fleshed Tendersweet and the Ali Baba, a native of Iraq. But he makes his money on the small, seedless and sweet varieties released in just the last few years.

While he and his children once grew an 80-pound Carolina Cross for the county fair, he now concentrates on the smaller varieties that a shopper can reasonably lug back to the car. They taste better, too, he said.

"There's a good reason they hybridized 'em," he said.

Juarez agreed, giving credit to the marketers who spotted an untapped market for the smaller melon. "Watermelons used to be like a turkey project -- this big thing you want to do only once a year," he said.

In just a few years, the seedless watermelon has come to dominate the U.S. market, with 83 percent of sales in 2006.

California, Georgia, Texas and Florida all grow roughly equal quantities of watermelons each year -- around 700 million pounds each.

Jim Downing can be reached at jdowning(at)sacbee.com. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com