Barns to berries

SELF

PORTRAIT

Date and place

of birth: April 13,

1957, Jackson,

Miss.

Occupation:

University Profes

sor, University of

Arkansas System

Division of Agri

culture and Dale

Bumpers College

of Agricultural,

Food and Life Sci

ences

Family: Wife Sha

ron, son Johna

than

In my garden at

home, my best

crop is sweet

corn, though I

grow an assort

ment of other

vegetables.

A place I’d like to

visit is Prague.

The song I play

best on guitar is

“City of New Orle

ans,” the original

Steve Goodman

version.

The thing about

my office is I

am often not in

it, sometimes for

days or weeks at

a time.

I’d like to know

more about:

Professionally,

molecular biology

and applications

in classical plant

breeding. Person

ally, the expand

ing sources and

recognition of joy

and happiness in

people, including

me.

My favorite use

for blackberries

is to eat them

alone if they are

sweet. Secondary

would be in a

cobbler, but I am

easily distracted

by a good peach

or nectarine.

When I was a

kid, my heroes

were my parents,

William Theodore

and Ethel Wallace

Clark, and my

grandmother Olive

Geneva Clark.

Something

people would

be surprised to

learn about me

is I made a C in

genetics as an

undergraduate.

The chore I liked

doing least as a

boy was milking

cows, even with

milking machines.

A word to sum

me up: It’s a toss

up: fortunate or

blessed.

FAYETTEVILLE - If John Clark wasn’t so successful as a fruit breeder, he’d make a great storyteller.

Maybe it’s the small-town Mississippi in him. The university professor for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture and Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences grew up in Madison, a rural community 15 miles from Jackson, in a house his grandparents bought in 1911.

John was born in 1957, when his parents were past 40, and spent his childhood on the family farm. He milked the cows, hauled the hay, drove the tractors, all those things that kids on farms are expected to do.

“Cows played a large role in my decision-making process” to pursue higher education, Clark says. “As a young person, one of my goals was to get away from those cows, [although] I wasn’t a revolutionary or anything.”

Now, the word in the Clark family is that John actually had it good; his brother, a dozen years older, has often told him their father went easier on his youngest child. John’s got no way of knowing for certain, just as he says he’s got no way to figure out whether his parents wanted a third child, or whether he was a surprise, but he sure is able to weave the chores, his roots and the circumstances of his birth into one compelling yarn.

Clark’s a master storyteller, someone who cantake a visitor from 1911 to the present before a single question has been posed.

“His metaphors, [things like] ‘That cow has left the barn,’ some of which he creates on the fly, are hilarious,” says Chad Finn of Corvallis, Ore., a small fruit breeder with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. “That’s part of what makes him so special, that particular Southern [charm]. He’s just a treat to work with, because he’s such a fun guy.”

It’s almost a shame the guy doesn’t teach more classes. Clark teaches two classes - advanced plant breeding (graduate-level) and fruit-production technology (which he co-teaches) - but only in spring of odd years, so he won’t have another class until spring of 2015.

“He speaks in analogies,” said Paul Sandefur of Pullman, Wash., who studied under Clark at Arkansas. “A lot of what we learned in his classes was based on stories. He made some of the more dull advanced science classes a little more fun.”

Clark’s not at the UA to teach, though; at least, that’s not the primary reason he’s there. He has been there since 1980 to grow and transform the world of fruit breeding - specifically peaches, nectarines, grapes, blueberries and blackberries. Last year, he released an astonishing eight new varieties of fruits:four grapes, two nectarines, a peach and a blackberry.

Clark’s blackberries have gained him worldwide renown among fruit breeders and growers.

His work with them has been nothing short of revolutionary. Clark has created blackberries that are larger and tastier and grow faster and more frequently than conventional blackberries.

“People come from all over the world to visit John, and not because he talks like a radio personality and has good stories,” Sandefur says. “Most people who know fruit breeding know John Clark, especially in small fruit. He’s the leading blackberry breeder in the world.” EARLY RISER

Clark frequently wakes up at 4:30 a.m.

Sometimes he sleeps until 5, and every now and then he’ll stay in bed a little longer. Usually, though, he’s up early, walking the miles of plantings at the UA’s Fruit Research Station, near Clarksville. Even after completing an 11-year stint as the station’s residence director in 1994, Clark has spent a large percentage of his waking hours there, routinely getting an early start on his seemingly endless work.

“His father would get up at daybreak to start milking cows, and he does the exact same thing, only he evaluates fruit,” says Clark’s wife, Sharon. “His father was born in the same house he died in, and JohnReuben is on his way to doing the very same thing. His first job was with the University of Arkansas.”

As Clark neared his high school graduation, he couldn’t wait to get away from the family farm. But, he realizes decades later, the truth is that the farm never really left him.

The Clark family farm in Madison had cows, cotton, soybeans and much more. His father was a dairy man, who got his first dairy cows when he was 5 years old, and Clark estimates that from that point until the end of his life, he had at most 20-30 days in his lifetime where he did not milk cows.

There’s a lot of Clark’s father in him. As a boy, he says, he wondered why his father was doing so many things on the farm, why they didn’t just focus on a single crop; today, he recognizes the wisdom in it, and says that “in a big stretch of the imagination,” he does the same thing by working with so many different fruits.

And just like his dad, Clark sees the value in waking up so early and getting started with the day’s work.

“I don’t get up early because I can’t sleep; I get up early because every day is really exciting,” he says. “And this is something I didn’t understand until later in life: You have to value your days.

“I strive to do the right thing, and the right way to do it is to spend a lot of time at it.”

An average student in high school, Clark attended junior college for a year, then transferred to Mississippi State University. Some of his longtime friends had a house in Starkville, and he thought it would be fun to go live with them.

As he flipped through the course catalog and worried about how he would keep up at a university, Clark’s life began to find its direction.

WORKING HARDER

College was supposed to be difficult.

Really difficult, Clark was warned, much harder than a junior college. If Clark was going to make it at Mississippi State, he was going to have to push himself harder than he had ever done. So Clark bore down on his studies, and by the end of his sophomore year, he was making great grades, much better than he had at the junior college.

He chose to major in horticulture, having been intrigued by the field when he was flipping through a course catalog.

“It wasn’t going to be cows or any animals, it wasn’t going to be cotton or soybeans, but I had an interest in agriculture,” he recalls. “I felt it, but I didn’t know how to articulate it. At our home we’d had a small [mostly vegetable] garden, so I thought, ‘That sounds interesting.’”

Believing that students should take heavy courseloads, Clark sailed through college. He earned his bachelor’s degree in December 1978, and went straight into earning his master’s degree at MSU, focusing on the science and culture of grape vines.

By the time he was 23, hehad a master’s in horticulture. He and Sharon also had a son, and so John knew that if he was going to further his education, he needed to go to a place where he could make a little money.

A friend from Paris (Logan County), who was studying at MSU, recommended Clark look at Fayetteville. The city had a great music scene, which intrigued Clark, who had begun playing guitar in high school. (He still plays it, and recently provided the intro music to several of the Division of Agriculture’s You-Tube videos highlighting their work.)

Clark looked into the University of Arkansas, and James Moore, a UA professor known as one of the world’s leading fruit breeders. He liked what he saw, and moved to Fayetteville in July 1980, to work on his doctorate in plant science and work as a research assistant under Moore.

“His hard work ethic is the main thing” that led to his success, Moore says. “He was always a good student from the time he first came here, and he paid attention to everything about the profession.”

The job paid what Clark considered “big money” - $12,000 per year. It was a fulltime position, primarily managing the university’s plantings on its farm in Fayetteville.

Clark was determined to get his doctorate quickly, though, and cut back his appointment to three-quarters time, allowing him to take two courses a semester. To keep the family afloat, he did odd jobs on nights and weekends, planting and maintaining people’s gardens, cutting lawns, even hauling hay a few times.

Clark doesn’t need to do that anymore, but still puts forth that sort of effort toward the fruit that grows at the research station.

“He knows that to succeed in the fruit-breeding field, you have to be pretty on top of things,” Sandefur says. “It isn’t really being master of one thing; it’s master of all. You have to work long enough hours to let the people [you manage] know you’re serious.”FINER FRUITS

In 1983, the Clarks headed to the research station.

The station began in 1948, to assist farmers in the peach industry. It expanded when Roy Rom began the crop diversification in 1958, and again when Moore arrived in 1964 and started the fruit-breeding program.

For 11 years, the Clarks lived in a house in Ludwig, some seven miles north of Clarksville. Clark’s primary job was to carry out the workload for Moore’s research, and once he was comfortable there, he established his own research program.

“He would mow the grass on the station after work, because he didn’t want to tie up the tractor they used to do work,” Sharon Clark says. “He was familiar with farming and managing, because his family had managed a farm.”

In 1994, Clark returned to campus and into a regular faculty position; he had previously commuted back and forth to teach classes. Two years later, Moore announced his retirement, and Clark was offered his position.

Clark speaks glowingly of his predecessor, who offers the same kind words in return. Moore notes Clark’s work with the American Society for Horticultural Research, including a term as the chairman of its board of directors (2009-10) as one of the many ways his successor has contributed to the field.

“He’s done an excellent job as leader of the program,” Moore says. “It shows in the performance, in the number of new cultivars that have originated under his leadership, and in all the professional leadership positions he’s been selected for.”

One issue facing the fruit-breeding program has been generating support for it. The fruit industry in Arkansas is small, Clark says, and lacks a central organization to collect and distribute funds.

So Clark has built upon an innovative program started by Moore, involving patents and intellectual property rights. The UA began obtaining plant patents in the early 1980s under Moore, and it has grown under Clark. (The patents are issued to the UA board of trustees, with Clark listed as the inventor.)

Licensing these plant patents to growers outside the state has proved lucrative for the university, and led to fruits originally developed in Clarksville being grown all over the world. Ouachita Blackberries, for example, are grown across the United States and in England, Japan, Australia, and many other countries.

“It’s crazy to have one of the premier berry programs in the state of Arkansas,” Finn says. “There’s not a huge berry industry there, but the berry industry benefits tremendously from having him there.

“[His work] has put him on a world stage; he’s extremely well-known around the world. He’s been a leader in trying to have a lot of people pay for a research program in a state where growers can’t afford to support a program.”

Though he insists Arkansas has “some of the finest peaches and nectarines around,” Clark knows that what has garnered him the most attention is blackberries. Today, Arkansas is home to the world’s largest blackberry improvement program, where the goal is developing plants that produce better fruits - bigger, more flavorful and more durable.

A major breakthrough came with the development of primocane-fruiting blackberries. They were the first of their kind developed in the world, fruiting twice a year, once in the early summer and again in the fall. Blackberries traditionally fruit in the summer.

“It’s still blackberries, but it’s a whole new beast,” Finn says. “It’s a whole new crop that makes people a whole bunch of money, just incredible.”

Growing fruit is a slow process, Clark says, so an idea he had in 2012 might not result in a new variety of peaches being released until 2022.

This is why Clark, 56, has no intention of stepping back from his work anytime soon. He’s in this for the long haul.

“He would say, ‘Why would I give up all this fun, all these opportunities, all this joy?’” Sharon Clark says. “He really wants to see things through. I can’t see him ever retiring, he’s so interested in it.”