New fruit and vegetable varieties of 2020

Thanks to technological innovations and the extensive research and testing performed by scientists around the world, it’s possible to obtain new varieties of fruits and vegetables every year.

These new varieties are created to meet not only the food needs of the population, but also the demand for a food market that nowadays requires increasingly organic products and better-quality standards.

Below, we mention only some of the new fruit and vegetable varieties that were obtained in 2020, which are available to producers in the new growing season. The list is published every year by the magazine Fruit and Veggie.

What are these new varieties of fruits and vegetables?

• Everglades sweet corn. Widely adapted with a higher level of emergence and uniformity. It has a nice dark green package, and the kernel has a higher quality. It can last up to 76 days once harvested.
• Valentine F1 tomato. A variety of high performance and with an early ripening. These are smaller, grape-shaped tomatoes, that have meaty flesh and an intense red colour. They are highly productive, have an exceptional taste and a long shelf life after harvest, approximately 55 days.
• Everleaf Emerald Tower basil. Variety with a deep dark green colour, glossy leaves and a good columnar habit. Edible or ornamental, it has a traditional Genovese flavour. You can expect huge harvests of leaves throughout the summer. It flowers up to 10 to 12 weeks later than standard basil.
• Botran cabbage. Fancy, dense cabbage with a serrate edge to the leaves. It has better resistance to black rot and the size can be controlled leaving enough space in the farmland to avoid saturation. Will continue to gain size after it matures, rather than splitting.
• Carvora F1 Carrot. A good alternative for Nantes tray production. It has a very smooth texture and a uniform length and shape. Will keep its uniformity even at lower density. It has an expiration of 50 days.
• Oneida onion. It has a dark skin, a very nice round shape and large size. Also, the necks are small and cure down well, which makes the storage season easier. It has an expiration of 98 days.
• Sugar Rush Melon/Cantaloupe. It achieves an approximate weight of 4 to 5 pounds of fruit, thanks to its orange flesh and sweet flavour similar to the Sugar Cube variety. It has a higher resistance to pathogenic organisms and can last between 73 and 75 days.
• Huckleberry Gold Potato. It has a purple skin with intense yellow flesh, round to oval tubers with high levels of antioxidants, and low glycaemic index. It achieves greater resistance to tuber malformations and is less likely to present a hollow heart like other varieties. Excellent for the market thanks to its good storage quality.

For more information on other varieties go to the Fruit and Veggie website.

 

 

Success story in Chile

Just as new varieties of fruits and vegetables have been created in North American countries such as the United States and Canada, where fruit cultivation is fairly widespread, Chile has become a global reference for South America.

In Chile, new varieties of fruits have been obtained, which include nectarines, raspberries and grapes that manage to withstand long transportation journeys, while maintaining their quality levels, without having to resort to transgenic processes.

According to the agricultural website Red Agrícola, these new fruit varieties didn’t exist in the world before and, Chile used to export other varieties such as peaches that were developed in other countries, with different conditions and needs than what the South American nation has.

Rodrigo Infante, scholar of the Faculty of Agronomic Sciences of the University of Chile (UCH), indicated that “this reality made the Chilean Production Development Corporation create Strategic Technological Programs and Consortiums 15 years ago to create ties between companies, universities and research institutes of the country to develop genetic improvements to nectarines, grapes and raspberries.”

The initiative analysed the varieties of fruits that existed in the country, which were subjected to diverse tests and crossbreeding, to create a whole new family with higher levels of resistance for the transportation to distant countries, in addition to improving their performance after harvest.

To learn more about other success stories in the country of Chile, we recommend reading our article Cherry Production: How to Increase Your Productivity and Success Story in Chile.