2012 - Washington Red Raspberry Commission

• Increasing the breeding programs and industry's ability to effectively manage our genetic
resources using intellectual property tools ( e.g. plant patenting and plant breeders rights) by
having information on a cultivar's potential well in advance of its release and patenting.
This program could support the growers by:
• Improving the quality and quantity of information they have for business planning.
• Currently, advanced selections are tested and new cultivars are released based on
limited knowledge of their overall commercial potential and viability under various
northwest growing conditions. This system forces the grower to either make a decision
to plant a new cultivar based on inadequate data, or delay a decision for years until an
adequate track record has reduced the risk level.
• Providing new communication links between the growers, nurseries and plant breeders.
• Allowing growers to actively participate in selection evaluations within established
protocols and without needing to invest their own resources to pay for the plants and all the
planting costs.
This program could strengthen the propagators and wholesale nurseries by:
• Improving their decision-making methods and reducing their risk.
• The present system puts the propagators/wholesale nurseries in the position of
guessing how many of which selections and new releases to produce. This has led to
economic losses to the nurseries caused by over and/or under production of material. It
has created a disincentive for the wholesale nurseries to make available or test new
products.
• Providing them with objective evaluations of new material under a variety of growing
conditions to pass on to potential customers.
Relationship to WRRC Research Priority(s): Priority 1 Develop cultivars that are summer
bearing, high yielding, winter hardy, machine-harvestable, disease resistant, virus resistant and
have superior processed fruit quality
Objectives:
• Organize and put in place a pilot network of regional on-farm grower trials for evaluating
raspberry advanced selections issuing from the USDA-ARS/OSU breeding program in
Corvallis and the WSU breeding program in Puyallup.
• Place trials on farms located in a variety of regional growing conditions. This network would
connect growers, commodity commission contractors, wholesale nursery propagators, public
small fruit breeders, and small fruit researchers for the purposes of:
o 1) Improving the quality and breadth of information available on advanced selections,
o 2) Improving the efficiency of this information's distribution to the grower/processor base.
The overall goal of the project is to combine public and private resources in ways that would
accelerate the commercialization of our genetic resources. All objectives are included in 2013.
Procedures:
Review of initial project guidelines
• Tissue culture plants will be used.
• Maximum of 5 red raspberry selections (processed, but could include some fresh selections).
• Minimum of 3 grower sites per selection per year.
• Site guidelines would be representative of the major northwest growing regions including:
• At least two sites in Northern Washington and one in SW Washington or Oregon.
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