Hacker News Reader

Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

SnapDragon is a vastly improved version of Honeycrisp anyway. The only real issue with it is that only growers within New York State are allowed to grow it, so it's not nearly as available.

View on HN

Curious, is that something that can be enforced?

They likely have a patent, although searching "apple snapdragon patent" mostly gets results involving Qualcomm.

Edit: found the patent https://patents.google.com/patent/USPP22228

Looks like Cornell owns the rights to the apple and are working exclusively with a NY apple growers collective to commercialize the apple.

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2013/08/snapdragon-and-ruby...

Doubtful?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proplifting

Apple trees aren’t grown from seed because the offspring will have huge genetic variability and won’t resemble the parent. Instead they take a hardy rootstock species and graft scionwood from the fruit producing trees on to it. Once the apple variety is grown, repeating it without the graft is impractical and you can't just save seed from store bought apples and expect to get the same thing. An entire variety might be cloned from a single tree that produced the best fruit out of hundreds.

For new designer varieties getting commercial access to the grafts usually requires signing contract that you won’t create and sell your own grafts so the creator can control who gets it.

Oh man I found these once and just LOVED them.

Yeah, as a resident of NY apple country (I'm ~20 minutes from Beak & Skiff, frequently voted one of the best orchards in the country), SnapDragon is the way to go.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com