Monheim, Germany
September 2, 2010
Source: Bayer CropScience Editorial Service - Issue 17
Deutsche Version
A feast for the eyes: carrots in yellow, white, purple and orange. This brightly colored mixture of root vegetables is currently taking the fresh vegetable counters in American supermarkets by storm. In Denmark, too, there are sweet-tasting snack carrots in handy 100 gram packs. Plus a range of different varieties to grill, braise or cook in a wok. Where tomatoes have long led the way in terms of variety of color and taste, carrots are now following suit. As well as tomatoes and carrots, a variety of melons and lettuce with curly or smooth leaves are now tempting customers on the vegetable shelves. Then there are peppers, with their traffic light colors gleaming between orange pumpkins, green zucchini or the red flesh of water melons cut in half.
Brightly colored carrots, seedless water melons or sweet tomatoes: the consumer’s vegetable wish list is long and varied and seed producers and plant breeders want to meet their requirements. Using traditional and modern breeding methods, they ensure a brightly colored diversity on the vegetable shelves. It isn’t only consumers’ wishes that have to be considered, however. The needs of farmers and wholesalers are also key concerns of the global vegetable business: for example, research is being carried out on seeds which produce a good yield despite adverse external influences, and on improved storage and transport qualities. Nunhems, Bayer CropScience’s vegetable seed business, is one of the world's leading suppliers in this business.
The “no tears” onion
Apart from appearance, the authentic taste of the individual varieties of vegetable is also crucial to a balanced and healthy diet. For breeders this means that they always listen closely to what consumers want: sweet cocktail tomatoes that should disappear with a single bite and heart-shaped tomatoes as a favorite party treat. Tomberries, measuring less than a centimeter in diameter, have now set a record as the smallest tomatoes in the world – and are advertised as “tomato caviar.”
The trend towards single-person households in the big cities is also not without repercussions for vegetable varieties: water melons for the small refrigerator are just as much in demand as the bright salad mixes which are on sale on the supermarket shelves pre-washed, chopped and ready-to-eat. A new product line for the food-processing industry in particular is “multileaf”, a lettuce head which with a single cut falls into many equal-sized leaves. The “no tears” onion, which is still at the development stage, is also likely to be a runaway success, not only amongst amateur cooks. Vegetable varieties are therefore being continuously developed. “We are constantly breeding new varieties, as on average the market only stays interested in a product for four years,” says Ko Remijnse, Managing Director Marketing & Sales at Nunhems. New varieties are the result of a process of crossing and selection which can often take over ten years. Seed breeding is as old as agriculture itself; farmers have always selected the best plants, collected the seeds and so adapted plants to changing environmental conditions.
Breeders and plant researchers moving closer together
At Nunhems, the key is integrated breeding: a concept which makes research considerably more effective. A multidisciplinary team of plant breeders, molecular and cell biologists, plant pathologists, seed technologists and bioinformaticians work on each of the 28 crops, all of which have their own separate requirements. “By means of integrated breeding, we can select those plants with the desired characteristics from amongst thousands at an early growth stage, without first having to let them mature,” says Roger Muren, Head of Cell Biology at Nunhems in the breeding center at Davis, California.
What this means is that breeders and plant researchers are increasingly working closer together: thanks to molecular analysis in the laboratory, scientists can now determine more accurately and more quickly what distinguishes a plant from others of the same species. And in this way breeders can more selectively choose the crosses that have particular quality characteristics. Once they have been identified, such characteristics can also be diagnosed in future in other plants – and provide valuable pointers for breeding. “This not only saves us years of development work, but we can also respond even more specifically to farmers’ needs by breeding new and improved varieties,” explains Muren. Vegetables should be easy to grow, as resistant as possible to diseases – and preferably give an even better yield.
Breeding stations around the world
Plants now also have to be able to cope with the consequences of climate change. Cabbage in Asia, for example, needs to be able to withstand severe flooding, and tomatoes in India need to be able to tolerate higher temperatures than is necessary in Europe. Since conditions vary from region to region, Nunhems breeding stations are operated in the most important vegetable-producing regions around the world. There, the new varieties are adapted to local conditions and requirements.
Practical and tasty – Sweet melon Magenta
A uniform appearance is especially important for vegetables which are to be processed by machine later. For example, the machines which cut water melons and honeydew melons into bite-size cubes for pre-packed fruit salad are only efficient if the fruit are of a consistent size and shape. In the case of melons, breeders have recorded other positive results: for example, they have succeeded in growing seedless water melons and developing a cantaloupe melon with the name “Magenta” which has particularly sweet orange flesh.
However, it is still a long way from a successful harvest to having the vegetable on a plate. Researchers are focusing more on the entire product chain. Nunhems’ "Intense" tomatoes are especially suitable for a healthy sandwich as a snack: they are very easy to slice without losing a lot of juice. “We try to combine all these requirements in our varieties and then bring the seeds to market as quickly as possible,” explains Remijnse.
From the field to the shopping basket - a race against time
Vegetables have to be easy to transport and store, as they continue to “live” even after they have been harvested: Valuable constituents are broken down and mold infestation can lead to a loss of quality long before it is identified by brown marks or soft spots. It is a race against time for the retailers and logistics. A new system that researchers are developing at the Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering, Potsdam-Bornim, could make quality control easier during the journey: information such as temperature or storage time is recorded and analyzed at a central point. As a result, strawberries from Spain, for example, can be sold at another place on the transport route in time before they go moldy.
Bayer CropScience with its "Food Chain Partnership" program gives all those involved in the food chain transparency all the way to the shopping basket. Consumers as well as transporters, distributors and farmers benefit from the more than 200 projects which are now running in over 40 countries. In a pilot project in the Indian province of Punjab, for example, the entire food chain from cultivation to sale was optimized: in co-operation with the Joint Venture Bharti-Walmart, all the stages from the correct seed and fertilizer selection to effective crop protection and transport and sale of the goods came under scrutiny. By the end of the project, the farmers had increased their income by 35 percent - and the customers of the Bharti food markets were able to buy fresher and healthier vegetables.
In Mexico, too, local fruit and vegetable producers have received support. In a partnership with Mexico Calidad Suprema, one of the leading certification organizations, farmers are learning to meet the requirements of the global export markets – in particular North America and Europe. “The task of our Food Chain Manager is to get all those involved on board and to support them with integrated solutions, training and modern technology, so that they, too, can achieve these quality goals,” says Dr. Rüdiger Scheitza, member of the Board of Management of Bayer CropScience. “The co-operation of all partners in the value added chain - industry, farmers, certification authorities, wholesalers and retailers - is necessary in order to be able to implement international quality standards.”
Different regions – different tastes
Just as the challenges for vegetable cultivation vary in the different regions of the world, so, too, do tastes: for example, both Indians and Mexicans like hot varieties of chili and pepper, in Asia there is a general preference for pink tomatoes and children in the USA enjoy their snack carrots during break at school. But what exactly makes up the flavor of a plant? Staff at Nunhems’s food laboratory in Davis, California, are looking for answers to this question, examining in particular the constituents of a vegetable that affect their flavor and storage quality. Their findings so far are helping breeders to work specifically towards the desired characteristics.
Like customers, plant breeders also enjoy having a wide variety to choose from: the art of successful breeding involves maintaining and constantly extending positive characteristics. Hardly any of the vegetable varieties enjoyed today would exist without human intervention - even though the multicolored carrots may appear strange at first sight, the new varieties actually lead the vegetable a step closer back to its roots. This is because today’s crop probably originated in the Middle East and Egypt - as a cross between white carrots from the Mediterranean area and yellow and reddish purple turnips from Afghanistan.
| Horticultural and culinary history of the tomato
“Tumatl” was the name given by the Aztecs to the red fruit of this member of the nightshade family, which spread from Venezuela and Northern Chile to the lower Andes regions of Peru and ultimately to Mexico. Even today, the widest variety of cultivated tomatoes is found in Central America, where they were already being grown about 200 years BC. Christopher Columbus brought the first tomatoes to Europe in 1498 – initially merely as ornamental plants. Whilst the Italians started using tomatoes in their cooking as long ago as the early 18th century, and were soon followed by the French and English, the Germans only acquired a taste for them in about 1900.
Tomatoes owe their red color to lycopene, a carotinoid which also colors rose hips and ladybirds red and is used as a colorant in foods and cosmetics. Lycopene is an antioxidant and is considered to be a radical scavenger. There is evidence to suggest that lycopene reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes. In African folk medicine, fresh tomato leaves are used for eye disorders and in India for the treatment of influenza.
All about seeds
- A kilogram of tomato seed contains about 300,000 seeds.
- The largest seeds come from the Seychelles palm: its nuts – also known as “Coco de Mer” - are 30 to 50 centimeters in diameter and weigh ten to 22 kilograms.
- The smallest seed in the world is that of orchids: it is only 0.25 to 1.2 millimeters long, 100,000 orchid seeds weigh just 1 gram.
- The seeds of a date palm lay buried deep below the rubbish of the former Jewish fortification of Masada for a good 1,900 years. Now there is a date palm growing out of them.
- There are some very dangerous seeds with a poisonous shell: a few seeds from the ricinus plant, for example, can kill an adult.
- Located about 140 meters deep in an Arctic mountain on Spitsbergen in Norway, the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT) collects seeds from all over the world to prevent the plants from dying out. Up to 4.5 million seed samples, or about 95 per cent of endangered crops, have a place in the bunker.
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There is more information on the subject of colored carrots at http://www.coloredcarrots.com
All about water melons, with and without seeds.
http://www.watermelon.org
More information on global crop diversity can be found on the GCDT website.
http://www.croptrust.org
For detailed information about individual vegetable varieties, visit the website of the vegetable seed producer Nunhems.
http://www.nunhems.com
Other Bayer CropScience “Food Chain Partnership” projects can be found on the following webseite:
http://www.bayercropscience.com/bcsweb/cropprotection.nsf/id/FoodChain
The International Seed Testing Association ISTA provides background information on the subject of seeds.
http://www.seedtest.org
The German Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection publishes statistics and agricultural reports from the Ministry’s various areas of responsiblity.
http://www.bmelv-statistik.de
Fruit and vegetable industry trade fair: Asia Fruit Logistica on September 8 – 10, 2010 in Hong Kong
http://www1.messe-berlin.de/vip8_1/website/Internet/Internet/www.asiafruitlogistica/englisch/index.html
Photos copyright Bayer CropScience AG
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