> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Two People in Riverton Have Saved 400 Apple Varieties. Your Supermarket Sells About Six. - URL: https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/two-people-in-riverton-have-saved-400-apple-varieties-your-supermarket-sells-about-six/ - Published: 2026-08-27T18:31:29.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-27T18:31:29.000Z - Description: Robert and Robyn Guyton have grafted and grown hundreds of apple varieties rescued from old Southland orchards. Meanwhile the apples in the shop are licensed assets with royalty streams. Two gene pools, two very different futures. - Author: Luke Nicholas - Tags: apples, fruit, food ownership, heritage varieties, cider, seasonal produce, biodiversity Robert and Robyn Guyton moved to Southland about forty years ago, into an old house in Riverton, because they liked old things. They spent weekends poking around historic farm properties. Farmers would open the sheds and tell them to help themselves. What they kept noticing was fruit trees. Not planted rows, just survivors, tucked behind woolsheds and along fencelines. Then the dairy conversions started in the early 2000s and the old orchards began coming out. They are both teachers by trade. They taught themselves to graft. [Farmers Weekly reported in August 2026](https://www.farmersweekly.co.nz/people/south-island-apple-detectives-on-the-trail-of-heritage-fruit/?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz) that the couple have now collected, grafted and grown more than 400 apple varieties. They also say they are still working out what some of them are called. People ring up to point them at another old orchard. They sell around 800 trees a year, and their work has helped set up fourteen community orchards across Southland. I want to be straight about that number, because it moves. [The South Coast Environment Society's Open Orchard Project](https://www.sces.org.nz/open-orchard-project?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz), which is the formal vehicle for the work, has previously put the Riverton collection at roughly 790 trees carrying an estimated 250 varieties, of which about 100 had been positively identified. That's an older count. The 400 figure is the Guytons' own, as told to a journalist this month. Both can be true at different dates, and identifying an apple variety is slow work. Take the number as "hundreds, still being counted." Here is the part that took me a while to understand, and it turns out to be the whole story. ## Apples do not come true from seed Plant a pip from a Royal Gala and you do not get a Royal Gala. You get something new. Possibly something horrible. Every named apple variety in the world is a clone. Somebody found one good tree, cut a piece of wood off it, and stuck that piece onto the roots of another tree. Do that often enough and the variety survives. Stop doing it and the variety dies with the last tree. That is what the Guytons are actually doing. Not gardening. Copying. Which brings me to Johnny Appleseed, who I had filed under American children's story and never thought about again. The real man was John Chapman, 1774 to 1845\. He did not wander the frontier scattering seeds so settlers would have something to eat. He ran a chain of commercial tree nurseries through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, planting ahead of settlement on riverbanks and road junctions, then selling the trees when people arrived. He got his seed free from the pomace heaps at cider mills. And he refused to graft. He was [a Swedenborgian](https://www.britannica.com/topic/New-Church?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz), a follower of the eighteenth century Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, and he believed cutting into a tree that way caused it harm. So his apples were seedlings. Every one genetically unique, and almost all of them sour, tannic and inedible. Americans called them spitters, for the obvious reason. Nobody ate them. They pressed them, fermented them, and drank them, because cider was safer than the water. Michael Pollan's argument in [*The Botany of Desire*](https://michaelpollan.com/books/the-botany-of-desire/?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz) is that this accidental mass breeding trial is where a lot of the great American apple varieties came from. Chapman wasn't selecting. He was rolling the dice a few million times and letting the continent pick winners. A caution, since this gets repeated wrongly all over the internet: Chapman is often personally credited with Golden Delicious. Golden Delicious was a chance seedling found in West Virginia around 1891, decades after he died. The general claim is defensible. The specific one isn't. Chapman made diversity by refusing to graft. The Guytons preserve diversity by grafting. Same tool, opposite direction, and both are the opposite of what a modern commercial variety is. ## They are not alone I assumed Riverton was a one-off. It isn't. There's a whole scattered network, and most of it runs through branches of [the New Zealand Tree Crops Association](https://treecrops.org.nz/?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz), a volunteer body set up in Canterbury in 1974 by people interested in trees that produce something useful. Near Mount Cargill outside Dunedin, the Coastal Otago branch keeps a heritage orchard begun in 1995 by Jim Dunckley and moved to its current site in 2003\. Around 200 rootstock trees carry something like 300 varieties. It works as a living library: you take scion wood off the trees in winter and graft it onto new roots, and the variety continues. Since 2023 the collection has been getting DNA fingerprinted by an Otago PhD student, because the names on the labels came from farmers and don't always match the genetics. [RNZ's Our Changing World covered it in March 2026.](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/ourchangingworld/590415/our-changing-world-the-tree-keepers?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz) The reason the university got involved is the reason this matters. New Zealand's commercial apples come from a very narrow genetic base. A collection like that one is where you'd go looking for genes we don't currently have, including disease resistance. The Canterbury branch runs a Heritage Fruit Archive of around 200 named varieties chosen to suit the local climate, and has been testing which of them perform under a no-spray organic regime. That last bit is the organic argument in its purest form. Variety selection instead of a spray programme. Further north, [the Kōanga Institute near Wairoa](https://koanga.org.nz/?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz) holds what's generally described as the country's largest organic heritage collection: 800-plus vegetable seed lines and 400-plus fruit and berry varieties. Kay Baxter and Bob Corker started collecting fruit trees in Northland in the 1980s after she noticed the neglected settler trees around the Kaipara were outperforming everything else. And in Whanganui, [the Heritage Food Crops Research Trust](https://www.heritagefoodcrops.org.nz/?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz) screened 250 apple cultivars for polyphenol content and settled on a few, including a New Zealand seedling called Monty's Surprise. They graft and give the trees away free each winter. I'd note that the cancer research attached to Monty's Surprise is cell culture and in vitro work, which is a real result and not the same thing as a clinical one. The trust's own pages are clear about the methods. Coverage of the trust often isn't. There have also been regional efforts feeding in. Apples South, working the Catlins from 2006, blind-tasted fruit from 222 orchard trees and 80 roadside trees, and sent the best material to Riverton to be held there. So: several hundred to a thousand-odd varieties, held alive across four or five sites, almost entirely by volunteers and small charitable trusts. ## Now count what's in the shop Go and look. You'll find Royal Gala, Braeburn, Granny Smith, a Jazz or an Envy, maybe a Pink Lady, maybe Rockit in a tube. Six-ish, depending on the season and the store. Every one of those is a variety. Most of them are also an asset with an owner. If you read [what I found when I counted up the bread aisle](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/burgen-is-gone-two-companies-own-nearly-all-the-rest/), the shape will be familiar. New varieties out of Plant and Food Research are licensed through Prevar, which is owned 45% by Apple and Pear Australia, 45% by Pipfruit New Zealand and 10% by Plant and Food itself. ENZA holds global rights to Jazz, Envy and Pacific Rose, and that IP sits inside Turners and Growers. Rockit, the small apple in the plastic tube, has been reported as owned by the private equity firms Pioneer Capital and Oriens Capital, with around 950 hectares licensed here and more offshore. You cannot plant these. Not legally, not without a licence and a royalty. That's the entire point of them. Plant variety rights exist so that somebody who spends fifteen years and a lot of money breeding an apple can earn it back, and that is a defensible thing for the industry to want. But notice what it produces. One gene pool is owned, funded, legally defended and will be maintained indefinitely because there's revenue attached. The other one is maintained by retired people with secateurs. And notice who the owned one is built for. [New Zealand grows a great deal of good food it doesn't eat](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/why-new-zealand-doesnt-eat-its-own-organic-food/), because the best of it is aimed at a buyer somewhere else. With apples that logic runs back further than the freight schedule. It runs into the breeding programme, which is choosing what gets planted here decades ahead of anyone tasting it. ## The bit I keep turning over There is a large Hawke's Bay grower whose parent company is called Johnny Appleseed Holdings. You'll know its consumer brand, Yummy. It's the Paynter family, five generations, growing in New Zealand since the 1860s in Nelson and in Hawke's Bay since the early 1900s. Around 700 hectares, more than 100 full-time staff, up to 300 seasonal, and something like 19 commercial apple varieties. John Paynter, the fourth generation, founded Yummy in the mid-1970s and Johnny Appleseed Orchards in 1981\. He was the first grower here to put stickers on individual pieces of fruit. He spent about twenty years on the Apple and Pear Marketing Board and then the ENZA board, chaired the Fruit Industry Plant Improvement Agency, served on the board of Plant and Food Research, was founding chairman of Zespri, and was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2000\. His 2016 industry honours writeup describes him as the original architect of ENZA's global variety development programme. That's the machine. That's the thing that produced Jazz and Envy and the licensing structure around them. His son Paul, fifth generation, is general manager of the business. He has also, since planting his first trees in 2006, been running [Paynter's Cider](https://paynterscider.co.nz/pages/story?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz) out of the same family orchards. The cider is made from Kingston Black and Tremlett's Bitter. Bitter, tannic, knobbly, useless for eating. Spitters, more or less. Their own marketing says so: these are not apples you'll find in the fruit aisle. Nothing in the supermarket carries that structure, because nothing in the supermarket was bred for it. Sweetness, crunch, colour, storage life. Tannin is a defect if you're selling an apple to eat and the whole point if you're selling it to drink. Those are the same two varieties [Peckham's in Upper Moutere](https://www.peckhams.co.nz/?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz) names, on an orchard of around 6,000 trees across roughly 30 varieties gathered from old orchards and nurseries around New Zealand, some of them brought here by settlers specifically for cider. In an interview with the American growers of one of the varieties they license, Paul Paynter said the family likes the Johnny Appleseed story and shares his enthusiasm for planting apple trees. He didn't mention that Chapman wouldn't graft. I'm not scoring a point here. The Paynters have been open about the whole thing, including how badly Cyclone Gabrielle hurt them, and they're growing old cookers like Ballarat alongside the licensed varieties because Paul rates them for pies. The reason I keep turning it over is that one family holding both ends of this is the clearest possible demonstration of the actual situation. The two gene pools aren't enemies. They're two different economic logics. The proprietary one needs IP to fund the breeding. The heritage one survives because a few people want the flavour, and because you cannot make a decent cider without tannin. Only one of them has money. ## Which is a succession problem The Coastal Otago collection's own people have said plainly that they're getting older and are looking for somebody to take up the work. Jim Dunckley, who started it, has died. Peckham's has already passed to the next generation. Kay Baxter has been at it since the 1980s. The same thing is happening overseas. Tom Brown, a retired chemical engineer in North Carolina, has tracked down more than 1,200 lost varieties across Appalachia since 1999, mostly by talking to old people and finding orchards that have gone back to bush. The Lost Apple Project in eastern Washington and Idaho works from county fair records and nursery ledgers. Figures for how much has already gone vary and should be treated loosely, but the shape is consistent: somewhere in the order of 14,000 to 17,000 named varieties in America historically, and a few thousand known to survive. Nobody is funding any of this. There is no national heritage orchard, no Crown research institute holding the collection, no budget line. There is a man in Riverton who pruned eight trees back hard, roots and top both, and bundled them so tightly they came out looking almost like a guitar case, so a woman who had flown down from Wellington could carry them home in the cabin. That is the infrastructure. If you want to do something about it, the options are unglamorous and cheap. Join [your local Tree Crops Association branch](https://treecrops.org.nz/about-treecrops/branches/?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz). Buy a heritage tree from the Guytons' annual sale, or from Kōanga, or ask the Whanganui trust for a Monty's Surprise, which they'll send you for the cost of the courier. Plant something that isn't in the shop. Or just buy a bottle of proper cider. It turns out that's been keeping these varieties alive for two hundred years, entirely by accident, in two countries, and it's the only part of this system that has ever paid for itself. Drinks tend to do this. [The one corner of New Zealand where organic is genuinely winning is a wine region](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/whats-in-your-glass-the-one-corner-of-new-zealand-where-organic-is-winning/), and I suspect the reason is the same. When flavour is the entire product, how you grew it stops being a cost and starts being the argument. --- **Before you go** If you found this useful, [sign up free](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/#/portal/signup) and I'll send new pieces as they go up. If you'd like to chip in towards the research, [you can leave a one-off tip here](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/#/portal/support).