Frugal, multi-actor and decentralised cultivar evaluation models for organic agriculture: methods, tools and guidelines.

Summary

The new Organic Regulation EU 848/2018 recognises the priority of developing cultivars suitable to organic agriculture.
When the use of external inputs (mineral fertilisers,herbicides and pesticides) that can mitigate environmental stressors and buffer environmental variation is excluded or limited, cultivar choice is the key crop-specific decision organic farmers can make.
Cultivar adaptation to farming systems, the environment and the market in which farmers operate can only be ensured by an optimal information flow about cultivars’ performance under organic conditions. Such flow of information can be enabled, in turn, by appropriate cultivar evaluation. In conventional agriculture,post-registration cultivar evaluation is mainly performed on controlled experimental sites and its results are used by extension services to provide variety recommendations for farmers. This system requires a great investment in terms of logistics and infrastructure, and is extremely labour and cost intensive, while providing information of limited relevance to organic farmers.
Since organic agriculture only represents a fraction of the whole agricultural sector, few cultivar evaluation programmes dedicated to organic agriculture exist in Europe; most of these follow the same architecture used in conventional systems, and are limited to few major crops. Therefore, they are far from responding to the complex information needs required by the highly diverse organic
systems. To overcome this lock-in, radical innovation pathways are needed, to explore innovative models for cultivar evaluation under Organic Agriculture.