Researchers at UC Davis released new varieties of strawberries for the first time in several years in July—some that are specifically designed to flourish in the Santa Maria area while helping farmers manage diseases and cut production costs.
The Public Strawberry Breeding Program at UC Davis has long been working to identify and produce strawberry plants that are resistant to certain diseases, and it received a $4.5 million U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to continue that work in August 2017. Since then, researchers have developed and now released five new strawberry varieties, all of which are resistant to some diseases and are expected to produce higher yields of berries using less water and fertilizer, and fewer pesticides.
The beauty of the Public Strawberry Breeding Program is that it helps local farmers while also advancing plant and breeding science, according to Glenn Cole, field manager of the program.
“We’re informing others about the ways to get at the problems,” Cole said, “and that’s a big deal.”
The objective of the research is to help local strawberry growers struggling to battle soil diseases without the use of many once commonly used fumigants. As widely used fumigants have been banned in the U.S., farmers have had to turn to alternative disease-and pest-control measures, Cole said.
While all the new strawberry varieties are disease resistant to some degree, each is unique and will thrive in certain growing conditions.
“They all have niches of value,” Cole told the Sun.
Three of the new varieties—Moxie, Royal Royce, and Valiant—will perform well throughout the long, warm days of summer. Two varieties—Victor and Warrior—are bred for cooler climates from Santa Maria south along California’s coast.
Warrior is most resistant to Fusarium wilt, a common fungal disease that poses a major threat to strawberry farms. Cole said that Santa Maria native Dominique Pincot, who is now a graduate student at UC Davis, was central to advancing strawberry resistance to Fusarium wilt. While working on her master’s thesis project, Pincot identified a Fusarium resistant gene that only some strawberries carry.
Moxie and Royal Royce could save farmers up to $5,000 an acre in labor costs because they sprout fewer runners, the vine-like fingers strawberries send out that produce roots and develop into duplicate plants. Runners are handy when propagating strawberries, but farmers have to continually cut them back during the growing season to help plants conserve energy for increased fruit production.
Carolyn O’Donnell, communications director for the California Strawberry Commission, said that while growers are excited to see the new berries, they won’t have any real presence for at least a year or two.
Strawberries aren’t grown from seed but from plants, O’Donnell said, and the plants used to grow berries first have to be grown in nurseries rather than on farms, a process that takes some time.
UC Davis plans to release two additional varieties in 2020.
—Kasey Bubnash
This article appears in Aug 1-8, 2019.