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)
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