Ways To Keep Pace With Changes in the Berry Market
April 5, 2022 Several plant breeding trends are upon North American berry markets, according to Michael Dossett, a Breeder and Geneticist with BC Berry Cultivar Development Inc.
His advice to berry growers, including those in attendance at the annual conference of the North American Raspberry and Blackberry Association, is to take a proactive stance on the most significant of those trends — the ever-increasing competitiveness within the breeding landscape.
“The pace of variety release has been very aggressive, and I expect to see that continue,” Dossett says.
Dossett expects many new varieties to be tested locally; near in proximity to where breeding programs are located. Release decisions will be made based on those tests rather than many tests over a widespread geographic area, he says.
“I do think that there is more risk to the grower adapting to a new variety than there used to be,” Dossett says. “I think this is going to continue.”
What should growers do?
“I would encourage them to basically have a place on their farm where, every couple of years, they can put in a row or two of new things so they can trial them,” Dossett says. “When they’re ready to get rid of something or get out of a particular variety, they have some experience and some idea of what’s new and what’s available to them.”
OTHER DEVELOPMENTS
In a related trend, Dossett expects to see an increase in the penetration of European cultivars in North America. “We’ve started to see some of that with the raspberries, with the advanced berry breeding varieties ‘Mapema’ and ‘Kwanza’,” Dossett says. “There will be more to follow.”
One is ‘Delniwa’, a Polish variety that breeder Agnieszka Orzel, during her NARBA presentation, said is currently the most profitable variety for mechanical harvesting. Nourse Farms grows the cultivar, Dossett says, and is expected to begin selling it in the near future.
Another trend revolves around increasingly complex and/or expensive models for access. It used to be that all varieties were open and free, Dossett says. Some varieties then became patented, meaning growers had to buy them from a licensed propagator, with a per-plant royalty, Dossett says.
“Now we’re starting to see increasingly complex or expensive models for access
to varieties — annual-based fees on pro-duction area or even yield-based royalties rather than a one-time-per-plant royalty,” Dossett says. “That’s a trend that I really expect to see continue. That’s something that started in other fruits and kind of shifted over into berries. I don’t see that reversing course anytime soon.”
BERRY GENOMICS
Finally, the industry is “on the cusp” of genomics-informed caneberry breeding, Dossett says. Some of the bigger proprietary programs, such as Driscoll’s, are already implementing the technology. Dossett’s company is starting to “dabble” with markers in its smaller programs, he says.
Although the genomics infrastructure has been lacking in the past, a project led by North Carolina-based Pairwise is using CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) gene-editing technology to change the DNA of blackberries and black raspberries.
“That’s really changing things,” Dossett says. “Five years ago, a black raspberry draft genome was sort of our first Rubus draft genome. Now, there are a couple of blackberry draft genomes out there. With this Pairwise project, there are hundreds of genome sequences that haven’t been sequenced high depth, but they’ve been sequenced deep enough that there is a lot of marker information that we can mine from those resources.
“We’ll be starting to use that in the coming years, and that’s really going to aid in the breeding process and knowing what we’re selecting for. I think it will help with the pace of making advancements in breeding, especially as genotyping costs come down for things like genomic selection and highly quantitative traits.”
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