Dole UK Limited

The UK raspberry industry is seriously impacted by the cost of production. The price of raspberries over the last 20 years has grown by 232% (Defra Horticultural Statistics 2021). This increase in the price per kilo mainly reflects the changes in production systems (eg. programmed plant propagation, polytunnels, irrigation and fertigation, substrate use, ...

The Challenge: To meet global and local climate targets, industries must radically transform to more efficient and sustainable ways of working. **GyroPlant is addressing some of the inefficiencies in Total Controlled Environment Agriculture (TCEA) and has developed an innovation to deal with growing waste in indoor farms.** TCEA is the practice of growing...

Flavour is a complex trait under large environmental and seasonal effects which already poses a challenge to breeders and will be more problematic with extreme weather events and climate changes. Conventional breeding and selection techniques are slow and hindered by seasonal and environmental variation with QTL mapping also varying with the environment. ...

There has been increased demand for blueberries in recent years fuelled in part because of their many recognised health benefits. Development of new blueberry cultivars with high fruit and nutritional quality combined with early and late ripening and appropriate climatic adaptation is needed. With the availability of more genomic resources, marker-assiste...

In the Northern Hemisphere with damper conditions, Phytophthora root rot is causing a rapid decline in raspberry plantations grown in soil and also greatly decreasing the life span of production of raspberries grown in substrate with negative environmental consequenses. Plant based resistance is the only way forward and limited material exists that consis...

The food retail industry is experiencing increasing demand from consumers for UK grown fresh produce and would like to substitute imports with home produce. The demand for home grown plums cannot currently be met due to unreliable and inefficient cropping systems. This collaborative project will develop integrated new technologies that will address the ma...

New crop varieties that can tolerate abiotic/biotic stresses are essential for maintaining crop productivity in current and future growing environments. Breeding stress-tolerant crop varieties, however, is limited by the precision and throughput of plant phenotyping. This project will develop and apply a novel tractor-mounted platform for precise and high...

Plums and cherries are among the favourite fruits of the consumer, but currently much of the demand is met by imported fruit. With new plum and cherry varieties and new production techniques the UK industry has the potential to increase production. However, post-harvest losses can be significant due to fungal rots and rapid loss of fruit quality. The obje...