Hazera Launches New Virus-Resistant Tomato Varieties

Hazera TomatoesHazera has launched a series of new tomato brown rugose fruit virus (ToBRFV)-intermediate resistant varieties that are designed to offer an optimal balance between protection and performance while providing growers an effective tool to face the highly infectious virus affecting growers worldwide. ToBRFV poses a constant threat to growers worldwide, significantly reducing yields, affecting the quality of fruit, and systematically infecting other plants, as it is a very transmittable virus that can infect through soil, tools, water, and human contact.

Since ToBRFV hit, Hazera’s R&D team has been working tirelessly to find varieties capable of giving an effective level of ToBRFV resistance without compromising yield and fruit quality. Over the course of several years, Hazera researchers and agronomists invested endless resources to find solutions to address growers’ needs worldwide.

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“These efforts included in-depth trials in many locations, under different conditions in a global scale, to confirm that we are able to provide the optimal solutions, with the right balance between performance and ToBRFV protection,” says Alejandro Szechtman, Hazera’s Portfolio Marketing Director.

Hazera also announced a wide ToBRFV-resistant variety pipeline worldwide, which will provide optimal solutions per market requirement, beginning with Italy, Greece, Spain, Mexico, Turkey, and Israel.

Hazera, through Limagrain’s upstream research, has contributed to a network of internal and external collaborative discovery projects on ToBRFV using different approaches. This resulted in Limagrain being the first company to file a patent on ToBRFV resistance in tomato in 2017. While the first generation of tomato hybrids resistant to ToBRFV is being commercialized, Limagrain discovery programs continue to work intensively to find resistances against potential emergent more aggressive forms of this devastating virus.

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“Our R&D efforts haven’t ended, and we’re still investing to achieve higher resistance, and expand our portfolio to the benefit of growers worldwide,”Szechtman says.

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