Get the latest local business news delivered FREE to your inbox weekly.

Clemson's Bruce McLean talks about this season's crop of heat-resistant butter beans being grown at the Pee Dee Research and Education Center.

Butter beans, seven varieties of them, have sprouted on about 16 acres at Clemson's Pee Dee Research and Education Center near Florence.

FLORENCE — For about 10 years before his death, Tony Melton worked to find a heat-tolerant butter bean. This year his labors will bear fruit, er, rather, bean.

The beans, seven varieties of them, have sprouted on about 16 acres at Clemson's Pee Dee Research and Education Center just over the Darlington County line.

"This crop right now looks fantastic," Clemson's Bruce McLean, area commercial horticulture agent for the Pee Dee and surrounding counties, said in June.

"We've made some modifications to our planter. In the past we've had issues with getting a good stand. We made some minor modifications and it worked like an absolute charm. We have what I would consider a full stand," McLean said as he stood amidst the plants.

The plants are the product of about 10 years of cross breeding to highlight desired traits and to remove the undesired one.

"We can be talking a decade or more (of development time), even with an annual crop like this," McLean said.

That's if the weather cooperates, which it did and did not this year.

"The crop is a little late compared to prior years. Some of the weather variability we had earlier in the spring. It seemed like every time our soil would reach an optimal temperature a cold event would come along and drop us back," McLean said. "Unfortunately, we did have to wait a little late. They like warm soil."

The beans were finally planted in May on a field that does have irrigation.

The late planting will give McLean and others at the REC a good idea of just how heat tolerant the beans are.

"Because where we did get a slightly late delayed start it will realistically bloom and set pods right during the heat of the summer and we'll be harvesting in the heat of the summer," he said. "It may push harvest back a couple of weeks. Our harvest time may actually be in the mid-August time frame. When we do our second planting we may have a second planting going in before we've harvested our initial planting."

"It really will give us a good idea on pod set, flowering, yield and overall potential right in the dead heat of summer," McLean said.

The stand will produce four varieties of green/white Lima beans and three varieties of speckled butter beans.

The beans will also face another challenge this year — one that comes with seasoned pork and cornbread.

"The thing is that we're wanting to come in and look at how well does it taste. You can have the best-looking bean in the world, the highest yield in the world and the greatest heat tolerance in the world but if it doesn't taste right, what's the point?" McLean said.

The plan is to take some of them to full maturity, to a dry bean, to see how they hold up tastewise there as well.

Dry beans, he said, offer a seed source as well as a food source.

The quest for a heat-tolerant butter bean started when Melton noticed that the seeds farmers were getting weren't as heat tolerant as they had been in the past.

"A lot of it was where a lot of our seed production for beans is grown on the West Coast," McLean said of what Melton deduced. Because the seeds are produced in areas that don't have high heat, natural selection bred heat tolerance out of the crop.

"We are reintroducing some kind of heat tolerance into a crop we considered to be heat tolerant to begin with," McLean said.

By breeding heat tolerance back into the crop McLean and Clemson researchers will produce a resilient crop that could be a boon to countries far from the Pee Dee.

"Beans are a nutritional powerhouse," McLean said. "This is something that has so much potential for feeding people. A lot of the work we've been doing has a global effect."

While the seeds may be ready for farmers next spring, McLean said the project is far from done.

"This is going to be an ongoing project for us. We still have a lots of work to do on this. There's a lot of work we're looking at in the future. This may be something we get far enough along and pass the baton to the next batch of folks," McLean said.

McLean said he hopes to be able to name one of the bean varieties after Melton.

"We're hoping we can do at least one in tribute to him," he said. "I have one or two in particular I could see being called the Melton bean."

"The varieties we have look really good so far," McLean said. "Trying to clean up the seed. In situation like this we have a bit of stray seed, stray genetic material that is still in it and we'll be focusing on cleaning that up over the next little bit."

Next season, McLean said, Clemson will get some help with the beans as it distributes seed to select farmers to see how well it performs in their fields.

"We know the crop performs well, all seven varieties perform well. Two or three of them are real standouts," he said.

Denise Attaway reports for Public Service and Agriculture in the Clemson University College of Agriculture, Forestry and Life Sciences.

Get the latest local business news delivered FREE to your inbox weekly.

Emerging Scholars, one of Clemson University’s most impactful outreach programs, is celebrating its 20th anniversary Saturday. Since its found…

Clemson's Bruce McLean talks about this season's crop of heat-resistant butter beans being grown at the Pee Dee Research and Education Center.

Butter beans, seven varieties of them, have sprouted on about 16 acres at Clemson's Pee Dee Research and Education Center near Florence.

Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device.