The strangest thing, the avocado, but has a complicated and fascinating story.

We've got some fun telling it.

[music] That story properly begins long ago when avocados co-evolved with the giant ground sloths and other megafauna that once roamed the Americas.

These were creatures large enough to swallow the fruit whole and disperse its oversized seeds across the landscape.

Yet when those animals vanished, the avocado somehow persisted, becoming what scientists today call an evolutionary ghost.

It survived because humans intervened, cultivating it across Mesoamerica for thousands of years before it made its way up north.

Today I'm driving with D.J.

Waldie, one of Southern California's most perceptive chroniclers, who wrote about the history of the avocado in his latest book.

His essay traced how this ancient fruit, once dismissed as the ungainly "alligator pear," was transformed by California growers into something you spread on your morning toast.

There is one we need to talk about who created the avocado that we really know today and put it on our plates and on your produce stands.

Exactly.

An unassuming mailman, Rudolph Hass.

Rudolph Hass.

In 1926, a postal worker named Rudolph Hass pooled his savings and borrowed money from his sister to buy a one-and-a-half-acre avocado grove in the Harbor Heights.

One tree on that property would go on to change everything.

Hello.

Rob Brokaw.

Thanks for having us.

Nice to meet you.

Good to meet you.

Is the tree in here?

The tree is inside there, yes.

Let's take a look.

Want to take a look?

Here we go.

Wow.

This is it.

The most important tree in the history of avocados.

From this tree, a global industry developed, yes.

Anybody who's had a bowl of guacamole or avocado toast, those avocados probably descended from this tree.

Most likely, yes.

It almost didn't happen.

There are a couple of different versions of the story that vary in different details.

History often is that way.

I don't quite remember it [laughter] but the genesis of it all is a guy named Albert Rideout, who was my great uncle's brother-in-law.

He was also a nurseryman, a breeder, and an avocado enthusiast.

What he would do would be to sprout avocado seeds that he got almost anywhere, any seed, and sell those seeds to people who were planting orchards.

Those seeds would be planted in the orchard, as was the case with Mr.

Hass's orchard.

They went ahead and performed that grafting on the trees, and one of them failed.

The tree actually produced some very strange fruit.

Mr.

Hass's kids loved the fruit, so they asked him not to graft it.

He eventually decided to patent the variety and commercialize it.

The issue there, of course, was that the fruit, as it ripened, turned black.

That's right.

All of the avocados in the markets in those days were green colored, and they were differently shaped than the hass.

This was a new wrinkle in the industry, and change isn't always the thing that markets really look for.

To the untrained eye, it might have appeared like a dud.

Yes.

Well, the black fruit was associated with rot.

The question is, why are we looking at this pile of what looks like firewood?

Mr.

Hass's original tree lived for many, many years, but it eventually was infected with a fungus that attacked its roots and started to die.

My father, who had his own nursery at that time, took it on himself to try to nurture that tree and help it out.

Finally, in I believe 2002, he lost that battle.

Nathan, this is like a shrine.

It really is like a shrine, right?

This is clearly a well-loved tree.

Basically has an entire barn to itself, right?

Yes.

It is, yes, the barn's purpose.

Yes.

A short drive down Highway 126 took us to the Brokaw Nursery, which produces hundreds of thousands of avocado trees a year, many of them a direct genetic descendant of Mother Hass.

Our shoes are going to take a decontamination bath.

All right, show me the drill.

Okay.

We are now decontaminated.

Now it's the Jeep's turn.

Okay.

[music] Wow.

Just love the light in a greenhouse.

Yes, it's always nice.

Here we are at the nursery.

Now this is where we reproduce the trees.

We make about 300,000, 400,000 avocado trees a year.

The central operation here is grafting.

What we do is we get seeds, and we grow up those stems, and we graft.

We take a little twig from a hass tree, and we splice it into the stem of a seedling.

Then everything that grows out of that bud on that little twig produces fruit that's exactly the same as the tree that we took the twig from.

We have one really special grafter that we want you to meet, and that's Consuelo over here.

Consuelo has been working with us for, we figured out just now, 56 years.

Wow, more than half a century.

More than half a century.

That's a lot of avocado grafting.

Yes.

She worked alongside my father back in the day.

We just did the numbers, and we tried to figure out how many trees she has grafted in that time.

It came up to 9.1 million.

Oh, heavens above.

I'm afraid to say this, but it actually looks simpler than it sounds, but I'm sure it's not a simple task to perform.

You're about to find out.

Okay.

Good.

You'll provide some encouragement?

Or first aid, depending upon what happens.

That's right.

Cuatro plantas para aquí.

Okay.

Four of these?

Yes.

These are really baby avocado trees.

Yes.

These are the little grafts that we harvested this morning or yesterday from the hass trees in our orchard.

Okay.

There's-- Sorry.

Oh.

There's a [crosstalk] A little more.

There.

Yes.

Okay.

Now, this is the part that I'm not going to be able to do.

Pull hard enough to get it to shoot.

[chuckles] Right.

Pull just right.

[laughs] Yes.

I'm not really helping much here, am I?

See, the problem is it's really easy when she does it.

You make it look easier.

[Spanish language] Okay.

Yes.

There we go.

[laughs] It's a thing of beauty.

Okay.

We're going to put a little X on that one, and we'll send you a picture in three weeks.

This is about five weeks later.

Oh, five weeks.

Okay.

It takes about three weeks for those cut surfaces to come together and heal, and the sap starts flowing across there.

It fuels the development of those buds, and you see that nice growth coming out.

Look at those beautiful leaves.

Yes.

Let's unravel this- Oh, wow.

-thing and see if we can see what the bud union looks like.

Bandages come off.

Yes, showing the scars.

Very little trauma.

A little bit of scar tissue down here at the bottom, but that's fine.

It'll grow right over it.

That tree is on its way.

I don't know how many places you can see this many varieties of avocado.

It's astonishing, really.

Yes.

We have about 200 different cultivars planted up in our orchard.

That way, we have a bunch of different genes over here.

Maybe you could explain what a cultivar is.

Cultivar, it's a genetically different avocado, like one from another.

For example, one of the avocado cultivars, the Hass, it's the most common, that's what's being sold nowadays.

We've also gone through a lot of different cultivars or selections in the past.

The Fuerte here was one of the initial ones in the California industry.

Then we have Bacon.

That's a pollinizer cultivar.

They all have different characteristics and different flavors.

This doesn't taste like bacon, though, does it?

No, unfortunately, it does not.

[laughter] Now, Prop 2, I don't remember voting on that one.

That's still a secret.

It's a new one that you might be seeing in the industry in the future.

Okay.

Just don't show anybody on TV.

I'll cut one of the Fuertes.

If you were eating an avocado in 1920, it would have been this.

That would have been the avocado.

In California.

In California.

Oh, that looks like an avocado.

Oh, yes.

Do you want to try some?

Yes, of course.

[chuckles] I've never had a fuerte avocado.

Oh.

I don't believe I have either.

Big occasion.

[?]

It's very good, but different from the Hass.

It is different.

Yes.

Mr.

Brokaw, you're following in the line of cultivators of avocados going back 12,000 years.

Indigenous people in Central Mexico and Central America and Guatemala, they brought together some of these cultivars and made some of these avocados possible.

Your family's been innovating for a long time, and there's evidence of that right here.

The innovation goes on, though.

Yes.

The Hass has been around for a century now.

We know that we need new varieties, and so we're trying to identify some new varieties that might be acceptable for entry into the commercial realm.

[music] Up the hill from the nursery, Rob and Consuelo maintain an orchard of some 200 cultivars, a living laboratory that just might produce the next Mother Hass.

Got it.

Okay.

That might be the avocado of the future.

You never know.

You never know.

If in the greenhouse you were coddling the avocado trees, out here you're exposing them to the elements.

Now they're at war.

Yes.

They're challenged.

We do what we can for them out here, and we can give them very precise doses of water and fertilizer.

We can prune them, but we can't fully protect them.

They have to do their part.

It is quite spectacular to see all of this work done on this land, the work that you and your family have done over many, many years.

Consuelo has done.

To be on this hillside overlooking the Long Valley is just an amazing experience.

It all ties back to Mr.

Hass and his leaving the graft off of that tree and enabling everything that we've been able to do since.

That amazing, unexpected chance discovery.

[music]