The BRESOV project would like to thank the European Commission’s H2020 programme for funding this great project which conducted research for the development of organic agriculture with specific focus on three economically significant crops: broccoli, green bean and tomato.

We would also like to thank all the partners for their proactive participation and invaluable contribution to the achieved results, which include the development of new resilient cultivars and crops with improved organoleptic and nutritional qualities, as well as the creation of advanced tools to control the sanitary quality of organic broccoli, snap bean and tomato seed lots.

Professor Ferdinando Branca, BRESOV project coordinator, summarised the project results and shared his personal take on the project in his farewell note:

“The 5th annual meeting which took place from the 27th to the 28th April 2023 in Catania, followed by the BRESOV Final Conference from 29th to 31st in Agrigento, demonstrated that the Consortium of the project partners have shown great collaboration efforts reaching the foreseen goals of the Grant Agreement 774244 of the EU project.

Within the lifetime of the project, more than 2500 accessions of broccoli, snap bean, and tomato have been genotyped and phenotyped providing important information related to the QTLs, genes, and SNPs of interest for the crop resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, controlling and mitigating their effects, and increasing the organoleptic and nutraceutical traits of the products. The genes, SSRs and the SNPs are of great interest for the marker assisted selection (MAS) of the three crops speeding up the organic breeding programs.

The elite breeding lines of broccoli, snap bean, and tomato will be the basis for the next new organic cultivars that will support the achievement of the EU Green Deal target to increase organically managed farmland to 25% by 2030.

For the three crops researched within the project, the protocols for producing high amount and quality of organic seeds have been improved, individuating promising data regarding sowing, crop density and organic nutrition. Some microbial consortia and natural compounds that have been evaluated by seed priming and soil drenching reduced the incidence and severity for several diseases. The multi-location trials provided additional indications about the most promising cultivars of broccoli, snap bean and tomato evaluated in several EU countries and beyond.

I have been very lucky to have had good colleagues and friends to develop all the tasks of the BRESOV project with a view to supporting the agroecological transition from the farm to the fork of the EU Green Deal. All the BRESOV Work Package, Tasks and Crop Group leaders have supported me in reaching all the deliverables submitted and the outcomes provided.

Many thanks to all the BRESOV partners, stakeholders and EU officers to have offered us the opportunity to learn a lot and enlarge our knowledge of organic breeding and farming! We hope that our project outputs will contribute significantly towards developing context-specific climate-resilient organic production systems in the face of the imminent climate change scenarios!”

Sincerely,

Prof. Ferdinando Branca

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