Page 28 - Breeding and regulatory opportunities, Renaud

Chapter 1

value-added commercial opportunities to commercial seed producers, the

food industry, and an added value for the organic seed market.

Some studies published before the start of the work presented in this thesis had

compared organically versus conventionally grown broccoli, in ‘market basket’

investigations, i.e. these studies were intended to relect the nutritional quality

of the crop as received in the consumers’ ‘basket’ of produce (Wunderlich et

al., 2008; Koh et al., 2009). The studies did not consider cultivar, soil quality,

irrigation, climate, harvest stage, or post-harvest practices. No ield studies

comparing organically grown versus conventionally grown broccoli for the

form and concentration of various phytochemicals have been performed.

A further limitation of many of the studies available at the start of our own

work was that the number of cultivars studied was too small to generalize the

results (Harker, 2004). While a few research studies had compared cultivars

based on their release date, data on the cultivar and production system (soil

quality, temperature, rainfall) was not available (Davis et al., 2004). No research

had investigated how open pollinated and hybrid cultivars of broccoli grown

in diferent regions, under organic and conventional production systems, may

vary in performance for horticultural traits and phytochemical concentrations

at the onset of this study.

1.3.4 Breeding for organic systems

In addition to the fact that the organic sector remains of limited size, breeding

for reliable varieties adapted to low-input, organic agriculture raises regulatory,

technical and institutional issues that hitherto have not been discussed fully in

the scientiic literature. For instance, breeders interested in the organic market

question whether direct selection under organic, low-input conditions is

necessary to arrive at suitable cultivars. This would increase the breeding costs

for conventional breeders because it would require maintaining two types of

selection ields. Breeders alternatively could consider which traits to select in

the speciic target environment and which of the required traits are heritable

independent of the environment, and therefore could select indirectly under

conventional conditions. Could a breeding strategy for broccoli be developed

in such a way that it combined selection under conventional systems in the

earlier phases, with evaluation in organic systems of advanced breeding lines

at a later stage of the breeding cycle? These models have been elaborated for

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