Development of a decision support tool to reduce asparagus tip breakdown in the UK

Maintaining asparagus quality using cold storage alone is currently limited to one week. Thus, UK asparagus production is unable to provide year round supply necessitating the import of large quantities of spears from overseas. This practise has a significant environmental impact and burden as much of the product is transported by air freight. A previous Innovate UK and BBSRC funded project established the optimum dynamically controlled atmosphere (DCA) conditions to preserve the quality of UK-grown spears for 3 weeks plus one week of shelf-life. However, the major limiting factor to implementing DCA commercially was the development of the physiological disorder known as tip breakdown (up to 10% of asparagus production is affected). High levels of tip breakdown were observed in 2018 across the UK and this was attributed to the warm temperatures during the harvest season.

This project aims to identify the factors that cause tip breakdown; and thus the opportunity to reduce its incidence and understand when fresh harvested spears may be successfully stored in DCA and/or actions that may be taken. This will be achieved by developing a decision support tool using classification models in order to identify and predict tip breakdown at their early stages.