Five new disease-resistant strawberry varieties

UC Eclipse, UC Golden Gate, UC Keystone, UC Monarch and UC Surfline are available for sale to California nurseries from Foundation Plant Services.

Roughly 88 per cent of strawberries grown in the nation come from California. Fusarium wilt is one of the most common reasons for crop loss and death, yet 55 to 59 per cent of cultivars planted in the state since 2014 have not been resistant, according to UC Davis research.

This is the first release from the UC Davis Strawberry Breeding Program where all the cultivars have Fusarium wilt resistance. They are meant to replace susceptible plants on the market such as Monterey, UCD Royal Royce and UCD Valiant.

Monarch was also developed specifically as a prototype for mechanical harvesting – another first out of the breeding program, which dates to the 1930s and has released 72 patented cultivars over the decades.

“These provide the same yield or better and they are Fusarium resistant,” said Steve Knapp, a professor in the department of plant sciences and director of the UC Davis Strawberry Breeding Program. “They have a better collection of traits. They’re superior.”

Dangerous pathogen

Fusarium wilt didn’t present much of a danger to U.S. strawberry crops until after the fumigant methyl bromide was phased out of use in the United States in 2005. But the pathogen had always been in the soil, and cases of wilt appeared a year later and increased over time, leading to concerns that a Fusarium wilt pandemic could destroy the crop in California.

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Photo by David Boozer on Unsplash

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