Research and Development Strategy

Soft Fruits

Despite being one of the smaller sectors Panels of the HDC, accounting for 9% of the annual HDC income, soft fruit is a steadily growing industry. The sector encompasses strawberries, raspberries and blackcurrants and all other ribes and rubus species. Research on blackcurrants is chiefly arranged in conjunction with Glaxo SmithKline.

This sector has been successful in attracting additional funding from both UK, notably from DEFRA, SEERAD and LINK, and European sources, which has helped to build a wide ranging R&D programme for the UK industry. Similar collaborations will be encouraged in future to ensure that the industry derives the maximum benefit from combined funding sources.

With the continued loss of pesticides as the result of the current EU and other reviews, it is essential that carefully targeted work is undertaken that will enable fruit growers to control the key pests, weeds and diseases of fruiting crops and in propagation. This involves the SOLA programme, but there will also be increased emphasis towards finding non-chemical crop protection agents and improving the effectiveness of crop protection programmes through improved monitoring, biocontrol, forecasting and prediction techniques.

With the increased area of soft fruit crop being grown under protection (mainly Spanish tunnels) new opportunities exist for increased quality, consistency of supply and season extension. Understanding best practice in these new systems is the current focus of much of this Panel’s research programme.

The development of new varieties offers many potential benefits to growers and consumers, including increased yield, quality, flavour, shelf-life, season extension and resistance to pests and diseases. In addition, well-presented fruit can greatly assist harvesting efficiency and may offer the potential to increase mechanisation. For this reason, the Soft Fruit Panel will continue to support fruit breeding and variety trialling work.

Labour costs are estimated to be 50% of the total cost of production across the soft fruit sector and as such innovative projects that work to reduce this cost will be given high priority.

Nina Chantry
Technical Manager

Download R&D Strategy Tables for Soft Fruit (excluding blackcurrants) (PDF - 50K)

Download R&D Strategy Tables for blackcurrants (PDF - 85K)