Response to the Letter to the Editor of Crop Science from Donald R. Davis Regarding Our Research Article Entitled “Mineral Concentration of Broccoli Florets in Relation to Year of Cultivar Release” Published in Crop Science (2011 51:2721–2727)

present.” In the process of analyzing our data, we deemed that ‘Waltham 29’ was an outlier, and decided that by excluding it, we could more sharply focus attention on the timeframe (1975 to present) when broccoli consumption by Americans increased dramatically. Additional reasoning for excluding ‘Waltham 29’ was stated in the following text: “Waltham 29 and other broccoli cultivars grown through the middle of the 20th century are representatives of a vegetable crop that was not widely consumed in the United States during that era. Waltham 29 does not meet current quality standards for broccoli and it would not be saleable in today’s market. It has a head mass less than half of most hybrids released since 1975 and a bead size, a trait closely associated with modern quality, significantly greater than 1.75 mm (Table 4). In our plots, no heads from this cultivar were rated as marketable.” Thus, based on our data, we concluded: “For broccoli cultivars grown during the past 35 yr, during which time hybrids became the standard cultivar type, we found no evidence that mineral concentrations significantly declined.” We also state in our manuscript that: “With most minerals, there was no clear relationship between floret concentration and year of release.” With our statement, we simply meant to infer that much of the compiled data for a given mineral Dear Editor: