How to optimize fruit and berry cultivar selection for organic farmers ? A comparison of European approaches.

Summary

Most of the currently grown commercial fruit cultivars remain unsuitable to low-input or sustainable organic farming systems. The major reason is that they have been developed and selected under high input cultivation, and without sufficient attention to susceptibility to pests and diseases. Some of these cultivars are nevertheless marketed as resistant because they carry genetic markers for major resistance genes but these are unfortunately prone to break-down (most of apple resistant cultivars relay only on the Vf). As a result, new fruit cultivars tend to reveal unexpected and often undesirable traits when grown in commercial organic orchards, and thus fail to bring about the much needed expansion in organic production and market availability. However, research is ongoing, and some institutions in Europe have established specific approaches in their breeding programs for testing new selections and cultivars under entirely organic conditions – sometimes including also evaluation of storage capability, consumer acceptance or suitable characteristics for juice and cider processing.
This paper gives an overview of approaches developed in some European countries, their characteristics, objectives and results. It shows a number of different ways to address a difficult topic. We conclude that it is very desirable to – on a European level – exchange results and ideas to further improve the testing systems, and to increase the distribution of promising cultivars for the European organic fruit sector.