Plant Breeding for Pest Tolerance

Pacific Ag Group maintains an active plant genetics evaluation program that tests thousands of seedlings every year for tolerance to crop pests, adaptability to new environmental conditions and overall productivity and crop quality.

Organic and alternative farms everywhere seek plant varieties that are resistant to pests. These are difficult to find and even harder to develop in a breeding program. Seed companies, grower groups, and individual breeders in trust our technicians to grow out their cultivars selections at our secure field facilities.

Pacific Ag also has an active strawberry breeding program that seeks to develop cultivars that are resistant to soil borne diseases and thus avoid the requirement for soil fumigation. In addition, our breeding creates a vigorous strand of plant material that is also resistant to many foliar pests such as spider mites and powdery mildew. Both day-neutral and short-day strawberry cultivars are selected from thousands of seedling crosses every year. This commitment is an effort to create new plant varieties for alternative and organic growers seeking to produce quality fruit in low input systems worldwide.