A Better Balance In Quantity And Quality: Opportunities For Vegetable Varieties Bred For Quality And Taste

Summary

Various trends shape organic agriculture. One trend is that organic consumers value product quality more and more. Another trend is that conventional breeding increasingly focuses on the use of molecular tools, F1 hybrid breeding and patents. For organic traders and farmers this means an alternative approach in breeding becomes more urgent: a breeding approach that meets economic, societal and nutritional values in a balanced way. One option is to develop varieties that have a good balance in storability, taste and nutritional value. To better understand whether hand how such balance is possible, field trials were conducted for two years with three vegetable crops (pumpkin, red cabbage and carrots) with five varieties per crop, on two bio-dynamic farms with different soils (clay and sand), using two harvest moments. Measured traits were yield, storability, taste (at three moments after harvest), and nutrient quality (dry matter percentage, Brix and content of eight minerals). A general conclusion is that it should be possible to breed for crop varieties with a good balance in yield (fresh), dry matter yield, taste, nutritional quality and storability. All these aspects should be taken into account at the start of the breeding process. The research showed clearly that in the context of bio-dynamic farming, open pollinated varieties can have similar yield and storability as F1-hybrids, although they are often lower in uniformity. How the balance in yield, taste, quality and storability should look like exactly for each of the crops should not only be discussed with farmers, but with the whole value chain including traders, processors and consumers.