Project summary

Starting in the summer of 2022, the InnOBreed project will promote and aggregate Innovative Solutions (IS) focused on the participative development of fruit varieties dedicated to the organic farming system. The project’s emphasis is given to social innovations, new ideotypes and new methods for screening resilient cultivars and genitors with larger genetic bases for fostering organic fruit breeding, and to their application for the improvement of the whole Organic Fruit Chain.

The Innovative Solutions will be targeted and developed on participative, multi-actor and multi-trait based approaches and then applied for evaluating underutilized Fruit Tree Genetic Resources (FTGR), pre-breeding and advanced material. With the aim of supporting the activities of the project, as well as testing and validating the Innovative Solutions identified, 12 case studies have been selected representing different regions and species.

InnOBreed is dedicated to fruit perennial species including citrus, grape, pome fruits (apple, pear), and stone fruits (peach, almond, apricot, Japanese plum, European plum, cherries) with a focus on apple and prunus species. The project aims to improve the whole fruit chain through the implementation of an Organic Variety Testing Network of actors.

The following activities and tasks will be conducted during the course of the project and throughout nine different workpackages:

  • Identification and definition of current lock-in in organic fruit farming systems (OFS);
  • Co-designing new ideotypes fitting with local OFS;
  • Identification of performant IS already available;
  • Development of new climate change IS, but also IS for fruit quality, pests and diseases tolerance, low input fitness and robustness, and their application by FTGR curators;
  • IS’s validation process and implementation by several public-private case-studies in different regions for evaluating their efficiency; and
  • Checking sustainability and consistency with actual regulations before being disseminated for maximizing IS impacts on the value chain.

Besides a clear technological and scientific ambition, at the organisational/socio-economic level, InnOBreed plans to gather national and EU stakeholders of the fruit chain, including breeders, evaluators and FTGR collection curators, innovation providers, farmers, and consumers, in order to ensure the pertinence and durability of the project, and in particular to:

  • Capitalise on already available innovative solutionsand on the case studies able to be implemented by the innovation providers;
  • Identify on participative bases the most suitable accessions/varietiesfor the fruit organic sector at local and regional levels, also to anticipate the impacts of environmental changes;
  • Ensure that the requirements of the fruit sector, consumers and civil society are integrated in the project’s approaches; and
  • Highlight the practical and technological conditions for implementing the different innovative solutions (technological and social/organisational).

InnOBreed is strongly connected to other running initiatives, projects, programmes and resources involved in OFS, organic fruit participative and classical breeding fostering FTGR uses by fruit-chain, scientists and stakeholders.