Breeders aim for bigger, sweeter blackberries
Over the past decade the annual output of Scottishgrown soft fruit has doubled to well over £100 million, which puts its sectoral value alongside big players such as potatoes and production of lamb.
This week a leading player in the soft fruit sector expressed confidence in the market continuing to expand, adding that the James Hutton Institute (JHI) would be instrumental in fuelling this growth.
Jamie Smith, business manager of the commercial part of the JHI, outlined a number of initiatives which will help the research station bring more new cultivars to the market.
There had, he said, been a double-digit increase in sales of blueberries and blackberries (brambles) last year, alongside continued market growth in more traditional fruits such as raspberries and blackcurrants.
A multinational breeding consortium has been established to bring new blackberry varieties to the market, he told delegates at a soft fruit meeting outside Dundee.
The aim of this programme would be to bring bigger, sweeter blackberries to the market. While there has been no blackberry breeding programme at JHI for a number of years, the institute had previously brought out market leaders such as Loch Ness.
That variety had now been superseded and was no longer “cutting the mustard,” he said, and there was a need to search the institute’s blackberry germ plasm bank to bring forward a new generation.
He was confident new varieties could be bred much more quickly than previously, using techniques such as gene marking. “We are not starting from scratch. We already have seedlings in the pipeline.”
This breeding programme will join the blueberry one established last year where, again, a number of other breeding institutes have combined to find new varieties to help meet the burgeoning demand for the fruit; UK blueberry sales rose 36 per cent last year but only 5 per cent of the sales came from home-grown fruit.
On more traditional soft fruit, the JHI has just launched a raspberry variety, Glen Carron, which is claimed to suit both growers and consumers.
For the former, it is highyielding and has low input costs, while for the buyer the attractions are listed as large, sweet fruit.
Pointing to the long time it has traditionally taken to bring a new raspberry variety to market, JHI soft fruit breeder Nikki Jennings said Carron had originally been crossed in 2004 and had gone into trials in 2010.
Meanwhile, yet another soft fruit with a healthy “super-berry” reputation – the honeyberry – will be coming onto the market in commercial quantities for the 2020 season.
The chairman of the nine-strong growers’ group, Stewart Arbuckle, said they hoped to appoint someone to provide husbandry advice on this newcomer to Scotland as well as help with marketing.
The aim, he said, was for the fruit to be used in value added products rather than sending it onto the retail market.