Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Tom Davis:
Plant breeding is like a moving target
Lise Mahoney:
It's continuous improvement
Tom Davis:
We're trying to generate the kinds of basic knowledge about strawberry genes
and genetics and strawberry germplasm that can be used
to more effectively breed strawberries.
Lise Mahoney:
The breeding program is really two aspects: fruit quality and flower color.
The color of the fruit, the internal color of the fruit, that the fruit is
nice and firm and crisp and sweet, the achenes yellow and maybe a little recessed,
the cap on the fruit not too big, and that the fruit taste a little bit tart --
that's a really good quality fruit.
I'm breeding for flower color and that is really more of an ornamental plant.
I'm really striving for nice, dark red flower color that will also have nice fruit.
Tom Davis:
A plant breeding program is a never ending thing. It's resource intensive.
It involves hundreds of thousands of plants that we maintain in the
greenhouse facility and here at the farm.
The funding we get from the experiment station is complemented by all
of the wonderful facilities. We've been able to leverage that --
brought in over a million dollars in funding from agencies
such as the National Science Foundation and the USDA.
Lise Mahoney:
Goals for our breeding program would be to develop varieties,
release varieties, that would be profitable for growers in the region,
have nice fruit quality, be disease resistant, and day neutral therefore long-bearing.
That would make a really nice variety.