Kanza
‘Major’ × ‘Shoshoni’, crossed 1955
The record
- Parentage
- ‘Major’ × ‘Shoshoni’, crossed 1955
- Origin
- Louis Romberg, USDA pecan breeding programme · Crossed at Brownwood, Texas · crossed 1955; released 1996 jointly by USDA-ARS and the Agricultural Experiment Stations of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas
- Rights
- freely propagated — A public USDA-ARS release. No patent, certificate, or trademark found in the sources consulted.
- Also known as
- USDA 55-11-11
- Scab
- Excellent resistance; consistently among the lower-input cultivars in Kansas State trials
- Pollination
- Type II, protogynous
- Nut
- About 74 nuts per pound at 52 percent kernel; thick shell, clean-cracking, round well-filled golden kernel
- Hardiness
- Cold hardy; the standard northern commercial cultivar
Description
The northern grower’s default, and a good illustration of what a breeding programme is actually for. ‘Major’ brought cold hardiness and disease tolerance out of a Kentucky woodlot; ‘Shoshoni’ brought compact nuts and earlier ripening. The cross was made in 1955 and the cultivar released in 1996 — forty-one years, which is the honest timescale of nut tree breeding.
Read the kernel figures next to the scab rating rather than on their own. Fifty-two percent kernel is respectable rather than exceptional, and the shell is thick. What makes it the northern standard is that it fills early, cracks clean, and does not need a fungicide programme. In a short season, a cultivar that reliably finishes beats one that theoretically yields more.