Dakota Gardener: The Best New Fruit for the Dakotas

Jun 06, 2025

By Tom Kalb

NDSU Extension

It’s fun to grow new fruit crops.

Common fruits like apples and strawberries are okay, but there’s nothing special about them. It’s more exciting to grow and tasten an exotic, new fruit.

I have seen lots of promising fruits over the past 15 years in North Dakota. These include seaberry, silverberry, lingonberry, goji berry, goumi, kiwi, blackberry, mountainash, pawpaw, and the list goes on.

They all disappoint. Many of these crops can’t survive our cold winters. The other crops ripen too late or grow on branches with vicious thorns. A few of the crops grow well but taste terrible.

One new fruit crop has stood out in our gardens. It is easy to grow and tastes delicious. This fruit is the haskap, also called honeyberry.

It’s easy to grow haskaps. They can survive our worst winters. They have no major insect pests or diseases. Haskaps thrive in our prairie soils.

Millions of haskap shrubs are grown in the prairie provinces of Canada. Any crop that can survive the Canadian prairie will survive in the Dakotas.

Source : ndsu.edu

Video: Democratizing Gene Editing - Pairwise’s Vision for the Future of Agriculture

Pairwise has built its business around an idea that runs counter to how many companies approach innovation: make transformative technology easier to access.

In this Seed World interview, CEO Tom Adams discusses why broader access to gene editing could speed crop improvement, expand innovation opportunities and help agriculture address emerging challenges. He explains why Pairwise believes no single company can solve all of agriculture's problems alone—and why making advanced breeding technologies available to more organizations could accelerate progress across the industry.

The conversation explores how consumer trust influences technology adoption, why innovations like pitless cherries and seedless blackberries matter beyond convenience, and how future crop improvements could help address labor shortages, automation, harvest efficiency and other production challenges. Adams also shares his perspective on what the industry may be underestimating about the next wave of gene editing innovation.

Watch the full interview to hear why Pairwise believes agriculture is approaching an important inflection point for gene editing, and why the pace of innovation over the next decade could surprise the industry.

Topics Covered:

o Democratizing agricultural innovation

o Consumer trust and technology adoption

o The business case for sharing innovation

o Expanding innovation beyond major crops

o Next-generation breeding technologies