The crops grown there include apple with ca. 5,000 ha, followed by sea buckthorn and Japanese quince (for processing to chips), strawberry, red and black currant, cranberry and blueberries as well as ca. 5000 ha vegetables.

Janis Lepsis has been a visiting scientist to Klein-Altendorf in the past since 1998, documented by a range of publications both in English and German in refereed journals. Dr M. Blanke acted as external examiner of his PhD thesis at Pure.

The work at the Latvian Institute of Horticulture in Pure includes selection of scab-resistant, highly aromatic old apple cultivars from their gene bank of ca. 100 apple varieties for cultivation under the harsh Nordic climate; climate change led to an increase in hail storms and summer drought.
The Institute in Pure is a popular partner in EU projects, which constitute ca. 95% of its revenues. The Nordic climate also provides many certified organic horticultural products for the European and particularly German market.

The meeting was led by Professor Karl Schockert, president of the GKL society, with Martin Balmer (DLR-RP) and Michael Blanke (University of Bonn) attending as KoGa members.  The two day meeting covered the whole range of (micro-) plastics in horticulture from its use in fruit and vegetable crops, means to increase its longevity as well as ways of collecting and recycling used horticultural plastic waste (polyolefines) into new products.

At sunny temperatures above 35°C visitors were informed about tomatoes coping well under both water and nutrient shortage as well as optimal growing conditions. To visualize differences between plants that grow better under water/nutrient deficit compared with plants doing worse, fluorescence measurements were shown. Based on this technique, accessing the fluorescence signal of the green leaf component ‘chlorophyll’, plant fitness can be quantified. In the context of TOMRES, scientists use this method to select tolerant tomatoes to make tomato production more sustainable.

In excess of 200 participants from 20 countries met at this year’s BLE workshop 25-27 March 2019 on fruit marketing standards at Stresemann Institute in Bonn. This year’s 32nd workshop was organised and led by Dr. Bickelmann and her team. The topics ranged from means of reducing food waste and plastic packing to internet food sales. The topics were chosen in response to public criticism on excessively strict, cosmetically-oriented marketing standards, which restrict the harvest and sale of class II fruit and can lead to waste in the field and the fruit supply chain. Alternatives, presented at the meeting, to plastic packaging included laser-lettering of fruit.

More information is available under https://www.ble.de/EN/Topics/Nutrition-Food/Quality-Control/International-Meeting/international-meeting_node.html

The first newsletter of the TOMRES Project can now be accessed through the project website: https://www.tomres.eu/newsletter/. Read about the activities of project partners and early achievements.

The newsletter also contains a link to a European consumer survey: https://unimivespa.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bae42FtTD9QfSBf. Please take the time (10 minutes) to respond to the questions and thus contribute to the development of resource-efficient tomato varieties.

In the first week of March, 277 horticulture scientists met for the annual congress of the German Association of Horticultural Science (DGG) at the historic Humboldt University in Berlin. The congress offered a record of 89 lectures and 45 posters. The Horticultural Sciences Department of KoGa-partner University of Bonn contributed 5 lectures and 5 posters to this meeting and provided four section chairs. Particularly the master students did very well and presented two talks, Florian Gierling on Carbon Footprint of German wine and Patrick Hess on plastic reduction potential in horticulture. The posters of Christa Lankes on specific apple replant disease, of master student Maike Schüsseler on non-invasive russet detection and Louisa Schmid on protected cultivation of sweet cherry as well as of master student Laura Hillman on endogenous plant frost protection mechanisms received great attention. The abstracts (in German) can be downloaded here: http://brickbornfarming.de/ocs_filesi/dokumente2019/Tagungsband_53_2019.pdf.

Next year, DGG will pause and be substituted by the Symposium on Horticulture in Europea (SHE) in June in Stuttgart, followed by another DGG congress in March 2021, presumably in Erfurt.

The satellite meeting of the Fruit Logistica on 5 February 2019 in Berlin attracted nearly 50 participants. Prof. Manuela Zude of ATB Potsdam organized and hosted the meeting with an exchange of progress and approaches on mechanisation and automation in both countries. The US visitors were from the Pacific Northwest of the USA in Washington DC, the world’s largest fruit growing region with ca.  44,000 ha and 2.5 million tons of apples annually.