The Rise of the Pawpaw in Modern Agriculture with Dr. Kirk Pomper

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Dr Kirk Pomper from Kentucky State University's Pawpaw Program. The Pawpaw Research Program is part of the KSU Land Grant Program and is the only full-time pawpaw research program in the world. The program focuses on improving propagation methods, developing orchard management recommendations, conducting regional variety trials, and working to make the fruit more available to the general public. Dr Kirk Pomper is a researcher at KSU who has overseen the program for over two decades. He's authored numerous publications on pawpaw, including research articles on propagation techniques and cultivar development, and has released several selections. We chat about the future of pawpaw and where the research is going today.

Andy:

Dr. Pomper, thank you so much for joining us. Could you please tell us a little bit about your background and what you're doing at Kentucky State?

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

Well, I've been a horticulturist for a long time. I actually started off and earned a master's and a doctorate at the University of Minnesota, in Oregon State, in horticulture, and so I started working in orchids and beans and hazelnuts and strawberries and a range of different crops. I think that kind of prepared me then for when I interviewed for a position here at Kentucky State University, which involved pawpaw back in 1998. And so I've been here since that time in 1998. And I was a professor of horticulture. But we're really mainly working on pawpaw, but we do work on some other native crops also.

Andy:

It sounds like you've always been kind of around food crops. I know you worked with blackberries, you've worked with persimmons, as you said, hazels, raspberries, strawberries, and a lot of American crops. Is that on purpose or is that just kind of a coincidence?

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

Just kind of a coincidence, actually. So you know, I think we're always looking for alternative crops to look at, and that's my biggest interest is if we can do new production systems with old crops. I'm interested in that also, but it just kind of has fallen that way.

Andy:

Yeah, it's a little niche space where you can kind of do your own thing and maybe find something really cool, and I think pawpaw has a lot of potential for that. And there's been a lot of breeding work that's been done and not maybe fully understood or fully valued the way it should be, from Zimmerman to Neil Peterson today to what you guys are doing. So, could you talk a little bit about where this pawpaw program at Kentucky came from and what you guys are doing specifically?

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

Sure, and it actually started. I think it was right around 1990 when Brett Calloway, who was also very interested in ornamental plants and fruiting plants and so basically went out and collected some pawpaw seed from the winning pawpaw selections at the Kentucky State Fair and planted those out, and from that, I think there were a number of fairly good releases or pawpaws that could have been released. But anyway, he did grow those out, and that kind of started the pawpaw program here at Kentucky State. And then Desmond Lane, who has gone on to be a person working with peaches for a number of different aspects of peaches. He came for about four years and then left in 1996, I think it was or 7, and then I came on board in 1998.

So we've had this, you know, now, a continuity of working with Pawpaw for quite a number of years. And basically, we're in Kentucky. We have a lot of small farmers. We've got about 65,000 farmers in Kentucky, but about 80 or 90% of those are really small farmers. About 80% of them are up to about 250 acres and then there's actually probably even there's a really large percentage of those farmers that are just growing on 10 acres or five acres. So they're really interested in alternative crops like pawpaw, blackberry and others that they can sell at farmer's markets or directly to restaurants or organic groceries.

Andy:

I think the idea of picking your own pawpaw would be really cool, but people would really struggle with it until they know what a ripe pawpaw looks like. I could see a lot of unripe pawpaws getting picked.

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

Yes, and in fact, I hate to say it. I've even seen that we have an organic grocery here in Lexington, and I've seen a lot of very hard pawpaws that I think will never ripen being sold, and it kind of horrified me.

Andy:

Yeah, u-pick would be a real challenge for folks, I think yeah, but I do think that that's the appeal because people can buy into the experience. It's just definitely difficult to kind of figure out. You know, I think normalizing the fruit is kind of that first step of getting people to say, oh, this is what this is, this is what it's supposed to taste like. If it doesn't taste that way, it's because it probably is, wasn't ripe, or something else was wrong with it, but it's not indicative of the fruit itself.

So, how has the genetic diversity that you guys grow there changed? I'm assuming you've added some genetics since those original trees.

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

Sure, and you know, just kind of going back, you know, pawpaw, actually the original contest by the American Genetics Association back in 1917, there was an effort to find the best pawpaw, and there was a contest. People mailed in fruit, you know, and there was a winner and several good entries, but there was an article that came out and said that pawpaw would soon take its place, you know, in commercialization, and of course, that just didn't happen, mainly because it just is very perishable.

We didn't have refrigeration back then, and blueberry didn't need refrigeration, so it kind of became more popular as a native fruit. But there were people who just kept on growing pawpaws, especially the northern nut growers. And NAFX, you know, really had some good people in there that wanted to propagate Pompas. So we had folks like Corwin Davis up in Michigan who was breeding Tattoo and Taylor and a number of other selections. You had Milo Gibson select Sunflower in Kansas. So you had some, you know, you had some varieties out there, and they've survived to this day.

But then it really made the advancement when Neil Peterson went out and collected from some of the old collections, like at Blandy, and started his screening, and the selections that he's released really took us a step forward in better selections. And now I think we've also, you know, added to that then with the K-State selections of Benson, Atwood, and Chappelle. So I think, you know, with us we've tried to collect cultivars.

We've also tried to collect from the wild. I think we found it to be a real challenge in managing the diversity of the collection because when we bring up Georgia material to Kentucky right, and we have bad, hard winters, and we're trying to maintain that germplasm in the winter conditions of Kentucky, it's a challenge, right, and so it's kind of a continuing cycle in our collection. But we still have a good diversity in the collection, and I think we can continue to add to the germplasm with new releases, too.

Andy:

Yeah, and what's really interesting to me and I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, I'm sure you've probably noticed the same trend is with pawpaw. Despite it being a fruit that goes from the Mississippi East and South, there seems to be an overwhelming consistency that the named cultivars come from genetics that are west of the Appalachians, and I'm curious if you have any thoughts about that. If you've noticed that same trend, if you think it has anything to do with the fact that there was a lot more plant domestication going on, like the Eastern Agricultural Complex on that side of the Appalachians or anything like that.

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

Yeah, and it's come up in a number of discussions. I think it's been in some of the books, too. For whatever reason, a great majority of the name varieties seem to be from the Midwest or further north, anyway, Kentucky, north, and so I think you know there's some thoughts about this.

Some of the Southern selections that folks have found have been okay. But it could be that people are just paying more attention to what is out there. Pawpaw kind of drew the interest of folks further north because it stood out as such a unique fruit in that environment. That could be part of it. The last Ice Age kind of pushed Pawpaw down.

Native Americans probably carried pawpaws back up. They may have unintentionally selected for better pawpaws right that they carried north. Maybe that helped kind of change that range of where you know and so. But there are good southern pawpaws. It's just that there's a lot. There are fewer of them, and there are just more that have been selected. So it could be a combination of some of the better material moving north after the last ice age or people just noticing a very unique fruit in their forest and trying to propagate it.

Andy:

Yeah, it's really interesting. You also work with persimmons, which I want to talk about a little bit later, but it does have a very similar story with the ploidiness of the persimmon and how that's. I'm not as familiar but it's kind of split the same way right when you've got the northern, but it kind of like loops around the Appalachian mountains.

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

Yeah, there's, it's somewhat that, and it's there are some little patches, but there's some of that, and there are some little patches, but in general, yes, there's kind of the 90 chromosome race that's north and the 60 chromosome race that's south, and we actually did a ploidy study on all the varieties that are out there. We're going to Clifford England, who's got a wonderful collection and some other folks and all. But I think we looked at about 50 different varieties, I think, but only two were 60 chromosomes, and so it is just in general. Once again, the 60-chromosome race for someone further south tends not to be as big fruit and as high quality as some of the 90 chromosomes. And in Kentucky, we're kind of in that battle area.

If you want to look at it is of weather, and we have both 90 and 60 in Kentucky, and that's why we wanted to look at that with the idea that if you had maybe pollen going back and forth, that maybe you would get some fruit set but then have not viable embryos, we'd have seedless fruit and of course, like meter and some of the others persimmons American persimmons people thought would lead to more seedlessness.

Maybe that could be induced by pollinizer relationships, too. But we did actually look at the fruit. We did find, at least in the forest we did find some seedless fruit, but that could have been a result of some 60 and 90 pollen transfer. But it is interesting, you're right; it does kind of mimic that situation, although pawpaw is diploid and has a stable chromosome number from north to south, as far as we know. So we don't have the 60 and 90 situation. But once again, maybe the warm temperatures, the greater variability, has kind of selected for certain strains of pom-pom and persimmon and, just you know, the survival selection process for their north is just biased toward bigger fruit or something like that. You just never know what has caused some of these things, too.

Andy:

Yeah, you also see it in groundnut as well, where you've got the northern groundnuts that are supposedly genetically identical, and then the southern, which seems to cut off around, at least on the coast, Delaware-ish. And it raises an interesting question that you've kind of hinted at: how many of the wild plants we see today? How are actually passively selected, right? How much of the fruit and the nuts and the edible tubers and all these things? How much different would the landscape look if indigenous people hadn't been here 15,000, 20,000 years ago? I don't know if we have an answer, but it does raise some interesting questions about what our responsibility is for these plants that we passively enjoy, maybe forage, what responsibilities we have to perpetuate their existence on the landscape, continue to improve them, them, and so on.

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

Right, yeah, I think I think Michael Pollan kind of hit that in his Botany of Desire book a few years ago that we plant, we tend to select plants because they give us something, and then we like what they give us, so we tend to propagate more of them of that particular quality. And I think he used apples, potatoes, and marijuana as crops to kind of demonstrate how humans might desire certain things. And then they propagate them, and suddenly, they're all over the place.

And so yeah, certainly animals or humans are going to find certain characteristics of plants that they prefer, as maybe a food source or a taste, or because they survive when there's drought conditions or something, and they're going to have an impact, I think, on them, the spread and the survival of certain characteristics. And so I think, yeah, I think humans probably have had a fairly, potentially fairly big impact on especially fruiting plants because we're going to eat them, then we're going to leave the seeds, and we are going to transport them around. So I'm guessing there has been an impact by Native Americans and then, past that, on different plants.

Andy:

Regarding the persimmon, you said that the hexaploid seemed to be showing bigger fruit, and I believe that's where most of our commercial selections come from. How's that impacting the research you're doing? Are you guys working at all with persimmon?

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

We do have a persimmon collection, and so at this point, we've just really been trying to establish about a dozen cultivars, and we do have some kind of unique crosses with some other material that we've gotten from Clifford England, who's truly an expert in persimmons and pawpaws, and he's got some very interesting material we've got. We do have some crosses between oriental persimmon and American persimmon and some of those crosses are really quite interesting.

And so I do think, you know, persimmon has some of the same benefits or potential that pawpaw has and also some of the same drawbacks, right, because of the harvest issues with persimmon and just the processing issues we have with persimmon kind of similarities to pawpaw, and so I think pawpaw is actually further ahead in some of those areas now than American persimmon in terms of how we can process and also harvest the fruit.

But both of them have a lot of potential. They've been around for a long time and can be made into a lot of great products. I'd like to see people growing more American persimmon, too, because I do think it's a very interesting crop.

Andy:

it just occurred to me as you were describing them Americans just don't really like soggy fruit. I think that's what it is when you think about those two fruits, and they're not appealing. The way like a crisp Apple is right, but we just don't like that type of texture, I guess.

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

Yeah, I think. I think, yeah, they definitely. At least they have some firmness, even like a kiwi right is fairly firm, or a mango, at least there's some firmness there. You know, when you look at pawpaws, you know there is some variation in firmness. In fact, we'd like to have even firmer pawpaws right because we could ship them better, maybe at least some that would not bruise as readily. And if you look at Susquehanna, it's probably the firmest pawpaw variety we have right now. And then mango might be one of the, I guess, least firm, I will say, and it's kind of mushy, and that's why I think some people really like mango, but it is really truly like a bag of custard compared to Susquehanna, and so I think that's why so many people like Susquehanna because it is firm. So I agree, I think folks in the United States tend to gravitate more toward crispier fruit and so, but they are willing to try other things though.

Andy:

Yeah, the tide's changing. I think people realize that their diet is boring, and they want to try something exciting, and they go to the grocery store, and it's the same 12 fruits that they've had since they were kids, barring maybe blueberries or strawberries, which are relative newcomers on the fruit world. Pawpaw could very well do that, and one of the things you guys are working on is storage for Pawpaws to make them shelf-stable and more accessible to more people. So could you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

Sure, and so we've gone through a number of different things. With pawpaw it's really we've got that fresh market right now where you can go to a farmer's market or you can sell at a smaller grocery store. So there's that niche. But then the next niche would be value added also. So the question is, can we extend that opportunity to sell the whole fruit?

And so I've actually done a lot of things already with trying to halt the ripening process using certain plant hormones, but that has really not been very effective. And so now I've got actually a graduate student looking at controlled atmosphere storage and trying to do it, though on a scale for small farmers, and so trying to limit basically the amount of oxygen where the pom-pom fruit is stored so it reduces its respiration rate and hence doesn't ripen as fast.

And so we've got some interesting experiments going on with that, and we also have ethylene scrubbers that you can buy really cheaply now in with the fruit, as we're trying to store it, trying to reduce or at least lengthen that time we can store it to sell it as a fresh market fruit. So I think we have some experiments that have shown some potential for extending the storage life in fruit for a fresh market. I do think the value-added market is kind of the next step, though.

Andy:

Yeah, I know there's been a ton of research, including yours, on freezing and working with the material after it's been blended or, almost like to your point, a secondary product that you could put in smoothies or, I know, jam has always been one of those fallbacks for a lot of fruits when they're new. I know that Beach Plum is also working on trying to become more normalized as a jammed fruit to integrate another native crop. That is kind of a niche fruit as well. Do you suspect that that's something we'll see in the next decade or two, that pawpaw will become available to somebody like me living in New England?

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

I hope so. I think for processing right now, what we have is the ability to separate the pulp from the seeds, and we've got a number of different devices that do that very effectively. The biggest problem right now is separating the skin of the fruit right, and so I really need to find some additional food science people to work on that because right now, everything we've tried has always left a little bit of skin or blended a little skin into the pulp, and it's bitter, it's really bitter. There must be some type of enzymatic reaction if you leave a little skin in. So I think the processing market to be able to provide products out there like the smoothies and the ice cream, which is, you know, such great products for pawpaw, is to try and get that next step if we can find a way to commercially separate the skin.

Otherwise, it’s cut it in half, scoop the pulp and the seed out, then use a food processor to separate the pulp and the seed, and we actually process a lot of pulp that way right now. Right now, the biggest market for pop-up pulp is probably the distilling industry. Right, we've got a number of folks here in Kentucky working on pawpaw brandy or selling pawpaw brandy, and then we've got many folks producing pawpaw wine and pawpaw beer, and so those are like the biggest commercial markets right now. And then baked goods, of course, and jam and ice cream. But the faster or more effectively we can actually process that fruit, the bigger the commercial potential for some of those other products will be.

Andy:

That's awesome. Have you tried the brandy or the wine?

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

Yes, I actually purchased a number of bottles. I think it makes a great dessert wine. It's usually a very sweet wine and the brandy has been very good. There are a number of distilleries where you can find, either Pawpaw, moonshine, or Pawpaw Brandy right now, and so if you go out and search on the internet, you will find them. The one thing I will say is, especially with the wine, if you start with wild pawpaws, they have a bitter aftertaste, which sometimes we find as genetics about it will be captured in the wine, and so it is going to be very important right that people use high-quality pawpaws to make the wine because it will capture that oh, that's no fun.

Andy:

I'd be really mad after a year of fermenting and finding that out the hard way. Yes, so you guys are also working on looking more into pollinators for the pawpaw because it does have this very simple narrative of you've got these flowers. They co-evolved when meat was rotting on the ground, so it just draws in what would also be attracted to rotting meat and that's been kind of the narrative until now. You could say you guys are finding out about pollinators and kind of what we may have overlooked.

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

Well, we really really wanted to know, you know, which are the major pollinators? And it's true there's a lot of folks, and we've talked about it ourselves. Do you put down roadkill or chickens or fish or whatever people would leave in the orchards to try and attract flies as pollinators? And we really weren't sure whether there were other insects that were maybe equally or more important than flies for pollination, kind of cages around the flowering and non-flowering branches of various varieties and coated those with tanglefoot so that they will capture the insects that are flying toward the flowers.

And so he's been going through and identifying all these, and it's true that a great majority probably flies, but we find a lot of beetles also. In fact, we've got nice photographs. A lot of folks probably see this too as lady beetles; they're just covered with pawpaw pollen and visiting the flowers, both male and female stages, and so it does look like there are rangers, a number of other insects that also visit in ants, that visit during pollination. But we really wanted to kind of figure out what this composition is. So he's repeated that he's analyzing the data right now. So we'll probably have a paper released about that and an extension article about that next year.

But you know, it does kind of confirm some of the things. We suspected the flies, but lady beetles are a huge contributor also. And also, we find predators. We find a lot of spiders, you know, that are trying to eat the insects that are visiting. So we still don't really know whether there are other nighttime pollinators, right? So, people have talked about bats. I don't think it's a bat flower, but there you go. But other folks have talked about moths and shown pictures of moths, especially at night, visiting the flowers. So we don't really know about that yet, but I think we do have a much better picture of what is visiting the flowers. And then the next step will be how we could attract them, right?

Andy:

I know you don't have an answer for this, but do you think that there may have been specialized pollinators that we've since lost over history, given that this flower is so old, right?

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

It's very possible, and you know, we look at the kind of pollination issues that the pawpaws have, right, and that's really probably not the case. With pawpaw, we are getting a lot of insect pollinators visiting. We've looked at the fruit set. Sometimes, we will get a 20% fruit set. The biggest problem is whether the tree will retain all the fruit afterward, and we will find seeds in the fruit that are aborted. So I think with pawpaw, maybe Asemina triloba anyway, the fruit that is aborted, so I think with papa, maybe a similar triloba anyway, has evolved this mechanism to really attract more pollinators than some of the other anonas, right, and that's maybe what's going on. And so it's still important. I think, especially, we don't know the pollinizer relationships. We don't know which varieties should be planted, which other varieties, which varieties should be planted which other varieties.

Another student actually did crosses, and we looked at also selfing between sunflower and Susquehanna because the question has always been, is sunflower self-fertile? There have been articles about that, so we wanted to know, and it's true that we do find maybe about 10% of the seeds in the fruit are the result of selves, but the great majority of fruit is a result of cross-pollination. So we're using DNA markers for that. We gather the fruit, grow out the seedling and look at the DNA markers. So we know that there's some selfing, and some people will find isolated trees that do have a lot more fruit than others, and so there is some selfing, and some people will find isolated trees that do have a lot more fruit than others, and so there's some self.

It's just that I think Pawpaw probably should be classified as kind of self-unfruitful. It will have some fruit, right, but it'll have a lot more fruit if it cross-pollinates, and so I think cross-pollination is really important. The question is which varieties will be the best pollinators for which you know others. We don't really have that right now, so we always talk about, you know, planting at least three varieties to make sure that you've got good pollination, and I think that's really really the best thing yet, but hopefully, we'll have some more recommendations as we keep going down this road of which trees might be the best pollinizers for everything.

Andy:

Yeah, I do find that with the anachronistic plants Kentucky coffee tree, pawpaw, and osage orange, despite being these ancient trees, I feel like we know less about them than newer species that haven't been here nearly as long. And given that pawpaw also provides food that we can very readily eat, it seems surreal that it has been on the landscape this long and we know this little about it.

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

Yeah, and also, pawpaw’s survival mechanism is not just sexual reproduction; with the massive amount of root-suckering and clonal propagation that it does itself really is probably the biggest survival tactic, and so it's a very interesting plant, it's not. It's not like some of the other plants we work with. It has a interesting history that I think we'll find out more about as we keep working with it, but it is very unique in terms of a fruit crop, for all these characteristics, being an old plant really a very primitive, more primitive plant and you know, primitive, more primitive plant.

Andy:

Discovering new things seems like, well, everything that's like “easy” to discover is like, unless you're a rocket scientist, way up there, like everything's been figured out, and then you learn about this kind of stuff. You're like, why is nobody looking into this? Very simple studies like what you're doing, not that it's simple, but like the idea of, like, okay, we're going to take a look at what's pollinating this plant that's been on the landscape for hundreds of thousands of years.

You have to know what you're doing, but it's not like it's inaccessible to dedicated and motivated people. And I think it's really inspiring for people who say, “I want to work with plants, but I don't want to just go work at Monsanto or you know,” Right, there is a lot of opportunity to do this type of research, and that should be really exciting.

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

Yeah, and it's important. You know, as a horticulturist, it's not all about molecular biology, right, it is also understanding how a plant has evolved or interacts with the environment and these pollinator relationships. And it just, yeah, there's a lot to look at and because pawpaw it's is kind of we've ignored it. You know, we would walk by it in the forest, but now when people realize that it's actually a really interesting fruit crop, then the interest grows, and so, I agree, we, we, we tend to not be as observant as we should be. Yeah, so that we have to do these. They are simple studies, and we just don't know. The answer to simple questions is really what it comes down to, and we need that to be able to if we're going to make the next step if we want to actually manage Pawpaw in the best way.

Andy:

Absolutely. You can't really grow it at scale if you don't know; it's pollinating it. Yeah, you guys are also; as you said, you've named a few cultivars already: Atwood, Benson, and Chappelle. Can you talk a little bit about those? And then, what are you guys doing with the Fifth International Pawpaw Conference?

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

Yeah, absolutely, and we're fortunate that we've had a long-running program because we've had material. It does take a while to screen material and propagate material. You know it used to be. Folks would say it takes 20 years to release an apple variety, from the first cross to the end release. It's a little faster for us when we're not trying to do crosses, but in the beginning, and this is the way it was with Neil, too, we're going out and collecting and kind of screening more than we're actually screening crosses.

We're screening material and that's kind of how we started. Screening crosses, we're screening material and that's kind of how we started. And so KSU Atwood, you know, we know that it has material, genetic material that basically is from the Peterson pawpaw program, tube, and other areas. And KSU Atwood was our first release, really a nice kind of later season pawpaw, very mango-like, and it doesn't have a color break. That's something.

Also, if you want the short list of what we'd like in Pawpaw, we'd like to have higher production. We want to have a color break. If we could, we'd love to know if it's starting to turn if it's starting to turn yellow and if it's ripening. But we don't really have that right now with most varieties. We also don't want it super sweet, right, we'd like to run around maybe about 20, 25 brix. We don't want it higher than that. We want good flavor, no aftertaste, and we'd like it to be firm and we want it to be at least over 120 grams on average so we can process it easily.

And for those who don't know this, if you see a pawpaw that's very long, that probably means it has a lot of seeds and not much pulp. If you see something that's more egg-shaped, that means it's got a lot of pulp, probably in relation to seed, and we really want about 5% seed or less, if we can. So KSU Atwood really has been a good release, and then we went on with KSU Benson, which is an earlier ripening pawpaw than that would, and then KSU Chappelle, which is very, very productive and it's a vigorous tree with kind of mid-season fruit.

So we do have two more that we've kind of talked about before, which is 7-1 and 1-4, which we are going to name and release next year, which are also, you know, large fruit, have really good fruit quality. They've been propagated and tested out with other spots, and so those, those are the next, but then there's a whole another next generation of crosses that we have are just starting to fruit now started fruiting last year, and those are the results of direct crosses between ciscohanna and sunflower and also a number of other varieties. I really like sunflower as a parent because it's very productive and has a good quality fruit, and Susquehanna is probably it's one of the best-flavored fruits. Everybody loves Susquehanna as a large fruit, but the knock against Susquehanna has always been it's a light producer, right. It just doesn't produce the yield of some of the other varieties.

So, crossing those two, they're good parents, and I'd like to try and look at them. And then we do have some other Chappelle crosses and some other things we're looking at with crosses. But I do think that we'll have some really interesting material out of there, just based on what we already have seen. I do think that we'll have some really interesting material out of there, just based on what we already have seen. So, yeah, you know Pawpaw.

I hope other folks you know, you see Project Pawpaw and some other folks out there working on Pawpaw now. I'm glad that that will continue and hopefully we will continue here a long time, even after I retire at some point. But I do think, a lot of interest in Pawpaw. In fact, you know, even this last ag census had pawpaw on it for the first time ever the 2022 ag census, and so now we actually have at least some folks declaring as commercial pawpaw growers across the United States, and that was really good to see that just that raise increase in interest across the US Now with all of the crosses you guys have been doing.

Andy:

I know Neil has talked about the biggest challenge being that the seed size is in direct correlation to the fruit size, but there seem to be some anomalies to that. I don't know if you've seen that or if you can speak any more to that.

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

I've seen some where that doesn't maybe hold, and Jerry Lehman has some releases or some material to these. I've seen some where that doesn't maybe hold, and Jerry Lehman has some releases or some material to these, where he's got some nice pop-ups that he released before he passed, but they tend to be a little seedier and have larger seeds, but they're still higher seed content, right or percentage. So I think I think, like anything else, there are probably exceptions to that, but there are general rules. But no, general rules are never absolute rules, so I would say that.

So I think the biggest thing is we're looking for, we'd like to have fewer and larger seeds. That's not a bad trade at all because we can get rid of them easily, but the main thing is the percent seed, the seed to pulp ratio is the biggest thing, and so that's we. We do a lot of that with our students, cutting open fruit and weighing the fruit, cutting up the seeds and weighing the seeds and coming up with those numbers for some of the selections we're looking at numbers for some of the selections we're looking at.

Andy:

Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned now two prominent persimmon growers who also were interested in pawpaws. So there's such an interesting overlap between the people that are into native fruits and where their names end up kind of popping up here and there. Yes, absolutely.

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

Yeah, I guess kind of the same track of interest.

Andy:

Yeah, so for folks who want to know more about what you guys are doing, does Kentucky State have a separate website for this program? Do you guys have social media or something similar?

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

We have a Facebook page, so that's probably the best way to kind of find out what we're doing and when we're having our field days. We always have a September workshop. On the third Thursday of September, we have a pawpaw day, a field day where you come out and also taste pawpaw. Now, this coming year, 2025, we're actually organizing the fifth International Pawpaw Conference, and that will be on the 9th, 10th, and 11th of September.

There's actually a Louisville Pawpaw Festival now that started in Louisville, Kentucky, and that's going to be the weekend before that, and then we're going to have the conference during the week, and then on Friday night, Saturday, you can drive up from Frankfurt, Kentucky, here to Athens and go to the Ohio Pawpaw Festival. So, if you really want to have a week of pawpaw, you can drive up from Frankfurt, Kentucky, here to Athens and go to the Ohio Pawpaw Festival.

Andy:

You’ll never want to eat it again.

Dr. Kirk Pomper:

That's right. But we'll have a, you know, the Fifth International Pawpaw Conference. It's going to be a range of entrepreneurs, nurseries, and scientists, and again, so it'll be, I think, a really, really well-attended and interesting event, and then we'll also officially release those two varieties at that time. But Facebook is probably the best way to follow us on a day-to-day basis. And then we do have material on our KSU website. We actually had to merge into the Kentucky State University website, so we're a little harder to find in there, but if you look, you'll find it, and you can always email us, of course, either Sherry Crabtree or myself.

Andy:

Dr. Pomper, this has been fantastic. I appreciate your time, and I'm looking forward to the new cultivars.

To listen to this interview, tune into episode #233 of the Poor Proles Almanac.