Final Report: Coordinating Organic Breeding Activities for Diversity - COBRA

Summary

Plant breeding is crucial in creating organic crop production systems that can better cope with interacting stresses such as pests and diseases (especially seed-borne diseases), weeds and the increasingly erratic and unpredictable variation in climate and weather. In this context, COBRA aimed to support and develop organic plant breeding and seed production with a focus on increasing the use and potential of plant material with high genetic diversity in cereals (wheat and barley) and grain legumes (pea and faba bean), through coordinating, linking and expanding existing breeding and research. Although systems based on high, within-crop diversity have shown promising results in organic systems and are now subject to intensive research, their benefits cannot be exploited currently, due to agronomic, regulatory and other hurdles. Also, it is currently unclear which plant breeding approaches, high diversity or otherwise, are most efficient to breed varieties for organic agriculture.
COBRA's work was arranged in five thematic sub-programmes, details of which are presented:
(1) To improve methods ensuring seed quality and health Progress was made in handling individual seeds in terms of their actual and potential resistance to seed-borne disease;
(2) To determine the potential to increase resilience, adaptability, and overall performance in organic systems by using crop diversity at various levels;
(3) To improve breeding efficiency and to develop novel breeding methods to enhance and maintain crop diversity;
(4) To identify and remove structural barriers to organic plant breeding and seed production;
(5) To improve networking and dissemination in organic plant breeding.