Raspberry Economics in Production

The UK raspberry industry is seriously impacted by the cost of production. The price of raspberries over the last 20 years has grown by 232% (Defra Horticultural Statistics 2021). This increase in the price per kilo mainly reflects the changes in production systems (eg. programmed plant propagation, polytunnels, irrigation and fertigation, substrate use, cold chain marketing) that have been used to improve quality and yield. These highlight the technical difficulty and costs of producing high-quality raspberries which are significantly higher than for similar volumes of other fruit crops. In the last two years grower costs have risen by 25%, however retailer returns showed a 0% increase. The economics of production is therefore the most pressing concern for raspberry growers who need to reduce costs and compete with cheap imports to produce home grown high quality nutritious fruit. Low, or no profitability for UK growers would lead to either further reliance on low quality imports (already at ~ 70% of raspberries consumed) or a total failure of supply, both of which disrupt UK horticulture and the rural economy, with a downstream negative impact on consumers from lack of sustainable, tasty, nutritious fruit and those associated health benefits. The recent market pull for economical production has focused attention on breeding and genetic resources as the best option for the development of low-cost production. Identifying and then utilising appropriate traits which allow plants to grow with less input, including infrastructure, labour, irrigation, and fertigation would allow economic viability and sustainability towards net zero to benefit growers, society, the rural economy, and the environment.

In this work the consortium will utilise developments in genetics/genomics, molecular breeding, transcriptomics and phenomics and with the additional goal of developing genomic prediction models, to access the required traits more rapidly and move these into elite germplasm towards variety production. Ideally, the output would be a large suite of genetic SNP markers that would link to desirable plant, fruit and other traits of importance that would allow targeted selection and breeding over significantly shorter time scales (3-5 years). This speeding up of breeding has happened to a lesser extent for individual resistance traits and more complex fruit quality traits but now needs to be carried out on a much bigger scale to meet the project goal of economic production. This would also allow more flexibility in breeding as the industry faces ever-changing circumstances.