The orchard and vineyard industry depends on a key foundational aspect: good rootstock. And the process for growing out rootstock hasn’t changed in years. The system of a nursery delivering a bundle of pencil-like sticks with a few root hairs ready to plant is familiar to any orchard-running reader. That could be changing with a new process being pioneered by Phytelligence, a Washington-based agricultural biotech firm.

“A way to frame our business is to say we’ve disrupted the nursery process,” says Tim O'Brien, chief revenue officer at Phytelligence. “Traditionally, rootstock is grown in stool beds or layering beds and, has to be dug and replanted. What Phytelligence has done is taken a different approach by utilizing our improved tissue culture and greenhouse technologies we call MultiPHY.”

Tissue culture, the process of growing out plants from parts in a sterile medium, works well for creating disease-free rootstock, but until now that approach was too slow and too expensive for tree fruit and other food crop species.

O'Brien explains that Phytelligence’s founder, Amit Dhingra, a professor of horticulture at Washington State University, worked with researchers at the university to develop a series of protocols for large-scale tissue culture propagation of tree fruits and other food crops.

“We’re working with the Geneva series of apple rootstocks that are in huge demand by growers, but traditional nurseries  struggle to propagate these in the field. This is a high-dwarfing variety with valuable disease-resistance properties, but it’s been challenging to get significant numbers produced via traditional nurseries,” O’Brien says. “We’ve changed the game as far as the protocol.”

What buyers get
Rather than providing a crate of “pencil-like” sticks to plant and grow out, Phytelligence is delivering something different. “We deliver an actively growing, 18- to 24-inch tall rootstock that’s a quarter inch thick, that’s potted with a full root system, that you plant in the spring and grow out in the field,” O’Brien says. “You can graft your preferred variety of crop onto the rootstock in August of the same season. Most growers are used to growing out that stock for a year or two. From a return-on-investment standpoint, we’re cutting development time by at least a year.”

Many growers contract with Phytelligence to graft the rootstock and deliver it to them as either a spring budded rootstock or a finished whip, ready for planting.

And the Phytelligence process offers another benefit over the traditional method. O’Brien notes that inevitably, when farmers plant rootstock and grow them out, at some point in the growth cycle they see that some plants don’t look like the others.

“On average, 10% or so of rootstock sold are labeled incorrectly by nurseries or get mixed up in the bins or field,” he says. “These are sorted and graded in the winter when they’re merely pencil sticks. There can be mix-ups, and no one does it on purpose.”

O’Brien says a Phytelligence guarantee is that the company offers DNA-level certification of true to typeness of the stock. “We monitor and ensure that our stock does not get mixed up,” he says.

He explains that the company starts its cultures from mother plants that come from national clean plant centers, which are repositories of certified virus- and disease-free plants. “Because we are sterile in the [tissue culture] lab, we can maintain a disease-free, virus-free environment, unlike a field nursery,” he adds.

Value proposition
There is a price difference for these taller plants. On average, orchards buying traditional rootstock pay between 90 cents and $1.50 for each plant. “With our product, the cost is $1.95 per rootstock plant. We do the math for customers on losses due to virus, disease, time and type issues. Their net result is they’re paying $4 for traditional rootstock," O’Brien says.

The company is currently producing clean rootstock for apple, cherry, pear, nut and citrus trees and grapes. Phytelligence offers “finished” products in those categories too, where it does the grafting. Phytelligence offers strawberry, blueberry and raspberry plants as well. The company is setting up more greenhouses, including new facilities in Florida to meet that state’s requirement for in-state provisions for citrus rootstock.

As for popularity of the product? O’Brien sums it up: “We’re sold out for 2019, but we’re taking orders for 2020. Our company is young, but we’re in a massive scale-up mode, on track for producing millions and millions of plants over the next several years.”

You can learn more at phytelligence.com.