Beans and corn bread are a Saturday night staple in many parts of the country. But who really cares beans about this homely, low-cost food? As Americans have become more health conscious, we've consumed more beans. Today, we eat almost 8 pounds per person each year. Pinto and navy beans account for 5 of those pounds, eaten mostly as refried beans (pintos) or as canned pork and beans (navy). In all, U.S. growers harvested over 3 billion pounds of edible dried beans in 1998, worth over $600 million. But despite beans' familiarity and popularity, few of us are aware of the surprising amount of science to be found in an inexpensive can full of convenience and nutrition.  
Key players in this science are the plant breeders who painstakingly work at developing new varieties with characteristics important to growers, processors, and consumers. North Dakota State and Michigan State universities have the two largest such programs in the country, both breeding varieties in all market classes of U.S. beans. But they are two of just a few bean breeding programs. "We're lucky if there are a half-dozen centers in the United States," says Ken Grafton, a breeder at North Dakota State. Nevertheless, in any large supermarket, shoppers should be able to count at least 10 different kinds of beans-known in the bean world as market classes because each has its own distinct market and uses-small white, black, cranberry, dark-red kidney, great northern, light-red kidney, navy, pinto, small red, and yellow eye. Even smaller supermarkets will have close to 10-some of them in packaged mixtures, like a colorful, dry minestrone soup mix with small reds, great northerns, and light-red kidney beans.  
At the Bean and Beet Research Unit's Quality Laboratory in East Lansing, Michigan, Agricultural Research Service geneticist and breeder George L. Hosfield has been upgrading the color, canning quality, and other quality characteristics of beans-as well as their nutritional value-for the past 24 years. If the small reds in that bag of minestrone mix are LeBaron Red, a variety recently released for the Pacific Northwest, they are the first upright small reds bred for superb canning quality and resistance to bean common mosaic virus, a major bean disease. Hosfield transferred the genes for erectness, canning quality, and virus resistance into red bean germplasm, which Phil Miklas, an ARS geneticist in Prosser, Washington, then used to create LeBaron. LeBaron also has other desirable and unique characteristics for red beans. For one, it grows so quickly that farmers in certain areas can plant it after early-grown vegetables like peas for a second crop in the same season. "LeBaron is part of the first wave of red beans emerging from Hosfield's germplasm," Miklas says. "Because of its unique disease resistance, exceptional seed appearance, and canning quality, I'll probably never release another small red variety without using germplasm that Hosfield developed," says Miklas. Smaller than kidney beans and shaped like pintos, 90 percent of red beans come from Washington and Idaho. Prosser is one of four ARS centers for bean breeding research; the others are in Maryland, Michigan, and Puerto Rico. Hosfield and three other geneticists from ARSone at each centerdevelop germplasm that provides a good starting point for breeders. 