Idaho Breeders Press Ahead With Quest For ‘Perfect’ Bean Growers Trying To Satisfy Consumer Appetite For Diversity

Open a can of snap beans, and chances are you’ll soon be up to your incisors in a vegetable whose beginnings trace right back to an Idaho seed field.

Rae Tway, administrator of the Idaho Bean Commission, estimates that 80 percent of the snap bean seed sold in the U.S. and Canada is grown in Idaho’s Magic and Treasure valleys.

Gary Petersen, president of the Western Bean Dealers Association, says 30,000 acres are devoted to bean seed statewide, 75 percent of it in southcentral Idaho.

The state’s dry climate inhibits bacterial and fungal diseases, and “that makes the seed that we produce very clean seed and very high quality seed,” says Jim Myers, University of Idaho bean breeder in Kimberly.

Sold worldwide, Idaho’s snap bean seed is “more cosmopolitan than just about any other seed,” he says.

Like other public breeders, Myers concentrates on dry edible - not snap - beans. George Kotch, snap bean breeder for the Asgrow Seed Co. in Filer, says an international meeting of the world’s snap bean breeders could be held at his home around a table for ten.

The intensity of competition forces the handful of private firms in the business to be more creative, Kotch says, because success often falls to the one who gets there first. While the product generally needs to be a disease-resistant bean growing on an upright, machine-harvestable plant, consumer preferences diverge sharply from there.

Europeans like their beans small and fine. Americans - long fond of thick, deep-green beans horizontally cut into 1-1/4-inch segments - are flirting with 4-inch whole beans and vertically sliced french cuts. Traditional Japanese markets demand round, bumpy pods, while the Thais want handpicked pole beans. In Mexico, the emphasis is on shippability - while a persistent Canadian segment favors yellow wax varieties.

At Harris-Moran Seed Co. in San Juan Bautista, Calif., breeder Steve Magnuson says the “ultimate” bean is highly disease resistance and constructed so that it is perfect for machine processing, and breeders need to achieve all that with limited impact on yield.

But he doubts breeders will reach perfection in his lifetime.

“Just about the time you think you have the perfect snap bean, the processors or consumers put in some other need,” Magnuson says. “They really don’t need it, but they want it, so therefore you have to breed for it.”

One trend is a slow leak of seed acreage from Idaho to Washington’s Columbia Basin, where the growing season is longer and the fields larger.

At Harris-Moran in Nampa, plant manager Lavern Hanssen says there are simply more acres available there so grower willingness to produce snap bean seed has shifted a bit.

“Fifteen years ago, you could have said Idaho produces 100 percent and been accurate,” Petersen says, “but Washington has been increasing in garden bean seed acreage a little bit every year.”