Mark Russell grew up in suburban Rochester, N.Y., and majored in English at college. Upon graduation, he decided to go to work on his dad’s fruit farm.

“None of the big English companies were hiring,” he jokes.

Now Mark is older, wiser and a lot more tan. He runs Whittier Fruit Farm, which includes four orchards in upstate New York.

Seven years ago, Mark started hearing about an amazing new apple variety being developed at the University of Minnesota. He took a trip on a Labor Day weekend to Pepin Heights Orchard in Lake City, Minn., to check out the variety then known as “MN 1914” for himself.

“I tasted some fruit off a test tree,” he said. “It was quite good. It had a really good mouth feel to it.”

That first apple was so tasty, Mark says, that he grabbed another one. That’s when Dennis Courtier, owner of Pepin Heights Orchard, chimed in.

“Hey, stop eating all my test fruit,” Dennis told Mark.

“But it’s so good, I can’t help it,” Mark replied.

Mark’s foray to Minnesota eventually led him to join Next Big Thing, the cooperative of orchards that grows and markets SweeTango.

The University of Minnesota played into Mark’s life in another big way.

“As it so happens, I met a woman, who I later married, who was working for the University of Minnesota Extension Service,” he said. “She knew the test program and the trees and I was able to establish this was a quality piece of fruit and I knew I’d want to be involved in it.”

Together, Mark and his wife, Jill MacKenzie, decided to dedicate a sizable portion of their land to SweeTango.

“It’s a very big risk to put in a big planting of a new apple that doesn’t have a name and nobody knows anything about it,” he said.

The risk is paying off. SweeTango has earned a reputation as a superior apple.

“People have been working for decades and decades to make apples harder and harder and harder,” Mark said. “But what you get with a hard apple is an apple so hard you can hardly bite into it. And what actually is more more enjoyable to me is a crisper apple, a crisp and juicy apple. And that’s what I get with the SweeTango apple.”

A recent September day found Mark and Jill working diligently to harvest this year’s SweeTango crop at one of their orchards in Niagara County, not far from the shore of Lake Ontario. Jill’s father, a retired airline pilot, rolled by at the helm of a tractor, moving apples bins into position.

“Our goal is to put the best piece of fruit into that box that we can,” Mark said.