Page 225 - Breeding and regulatory opportunities, Renaud

General Discussion

suitability for organic systems for ield pea in Northern Italy. Lammerts van

Bueren et al. (2012) created a crop ideotype for onions through farmer ield

trials and Osman et al. (2008) through interviews with breeders. Wolfe et al.

(2008) took the organic crop ideotype concept one step further and included

the analysis of the marketplace and divided the ideotype into market segments

for wheat by including the requirements of retailers and processors.

Preferred traits identiied

During the Oregon broccoli trials in July of 2007 and 2008, organic and

conventional growers were invited to attend the variety trial locations and to

identify their top ive best performing cultivars. Farmers were also surveyed

through a questionnaire for their preferred broccoli cultivar traits and their

standard broccoli cultivar choice (Renaud et al., 2010). The organic growers

tended to focus on fresh market production and thus sought broccoli cultivars

that provided a primary harvest and a continued harvest with side-shoot

development. While both the conventional and organic growers prioritized

‘head size, head weight and overall yield’, conventional growers ranked

‘uniformity in maturing’ and ‘capacity to harvest mechanically’ higher than

their organic counterparts. The grower survey results indicated that the organic

growers prioritized ‘abiotic stress resistance’ and ‘disease resistance’ higher than

their conventional counterparts. Factors more important to organic than to

conventional growers included broccoli cultivars with vigorous growth in soils

with potentially low or luctuating mineralization rates of nutrients, and the

ability to tolerate weeds. In both the interviews and the ield discussions, the

organic growers expressed interest in knowing about the cultivars with higher

levels of nutritional quality so that they could translate this information to their

customer base and incorporate these cultivars into their production systems

(Renaud et al., 2010).

In addition to the interviews (Renaud et al. 2010; Chapter 2), the results of the

ield trials and a literature review were used to develop a broccoli crop ideotype

trait list in which the relative importance of traits is compared between organic

and conventional production systems. Traits identiied can be grouped into

three categories, based on the scoring (indicating importance for conventional

and organic systems, respectively) shown in the last two columns of Table 6.1.

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