Roots of resilience: the experts working to bolster apples against the climate crisis

Geneva Apple Rootstock Breeding Program at a research station in Geneva, New York. Photograph: Allison Usavage/Courtesy of Cornell

Terence Robinson still remembers the Valentine’s Day Massacre – of 2015, not 1929.

For the Cornell University horticulture professor, the term doesn’t conjure up Tommy guns and Al Capone’s Chicago. Instead of a gangster, the culprit in Robinson’s massacre was the weather. And its victims were the apple orchards of the north-eastern United States.