Albert Etter

Albert Etter (1872–1950) was an American plant breeder best known for his work on strawberry and apple varieties.

Albert Felix Etter was born near Shingle Springs in Eldorado County, California, on November 27, 1872. He was one of ten surviving children of the Swiss-born Benjamin Etter (d. 1889), all but one of whom were boys. Around 1876 the family moved to Humboldt County, where Benjamin acquired a farm near Ferndale and became the first person to grow lentils in the county.

Albert's German-born mother, Wilhelmina (Kern) Etter (d. 1913) was skilled at cultivating plants, and Etter showed a talent for hybridizing plants in childhood, working with apples, peaches, dahlias, and strawberries by the time he was twelve. He attended public school and by the end of his teens was looking out for a site where he could continue his plant-breeding experiments. On a fishing trip to the Mattole River Valley, he found a section of land above Bear Creek and in 1894 he staked a claim to it. This area along the Pacific coast in the King Range has wet winters and hot summers, and Etter later attributed his success partly to his choice of location. The site where Etter developed his ranch was subsequently named after him, first as Etter and then as Ettersburg.

Etter managed the ranch with three of his brothers, George, Fred, and August; and another four of his siblings also lived nearby. While Etter focused on plant breeding, his brothers oversaw other kinds of farming and stockkeeping operations. The ranch holdings, operated under the business name Etter Brothers, eventually reached 800 acres in size. Although the Etter Brothers firm and the Ettersburg Experimental Place became internationally known among plant breeders, and Etter renowned as "the Luther Burbank of Humboldt County", they never made more than a modest living from the land. For one thing, they were far removed from the main trucking and rail routes, and for another, new plant hybrids were not protected by the patent system until 1930.

Etter became known for his insistence on the value of using unimproved parent material, often taken from wild strains, and he frequently made 'wide' crosses between widely divergent genetic types. In his work with strawberries, he showed other breeders the value of the beach strawberry (Fragaria chiloensis) as a source of germplasm conveying vigor, productivity, flavor, and disease resistance. He also worked in a more minor way with F. virginiana species.

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