Developing a new berry variety is a process that requires significant time, foresight, and respect for natural cycles. According to Swanny Chouteau, EMEA Portfolio Lead at Bayer Crop Science, breeders must take the necessary time to ensure the safety and reliability of what they offer to growers.
Producers are investing considerable resources and are not willing to take risks on untested solutions. Even with modern technology, nature still sets the pace in agriculture.
Baya Solara: a strategic launch for Bayer
The release of Baya Solara marks an important milestone for Bayer in the strawberry sector. The variety is the result of a breeding process aimed at offering strong agronomic and commercial benefits.
Among its key strengths are a long shelf life and natural resistance to Phytophthora cactorum, a soil-borne disease that causes severe root and crown rot in strawberries.
The launch follows Bayer’s 2023 acquisition of strawberry breeding assets from the UK’s National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB), signaling the company’s ambition to establish a leading position in the strawberry market.
A targeted solution for Northern Europe
Baya Solara is a unifera variety, meaning it delivers a single, abundant harvest each season. It was specifically developed with Northern European countries in mind, where disease pressure is increasing and farmers have fewer chemical tools at their disposal due to stricter regulations.
Its strong resistance to Phytophthora makes it especially valuable in this context. In addition to agronomic advantages, the variety is also easy to harvest—an increasingly important trait as the cost and availability of manual labor continue to pose challenges for growers.
Long-term planning and rigorous testing
The creation of a new variety is not a short-term endeavor. It typically takes between five and ten years from concept to market, depending on the crop and the desired traits.
Breeders must anticipate what the market and producers will need years in advance, including economic factors such as labor availability and costs.
Bayer’s development process includes testing thousands of plants under diverse cultivation conditions to assess how they perform across different environments and over multiple seasons.
The goal is to identify stable, flexible varieties that can adapt to a range of climate scenarios and production systems.
Biological limits and validation cycles
Although there is growing interest in accelerating breeding timelines, especially through technology and data-driven selection, some processes remain fundamentally biological and cannot be rushed.
Chouteau emphasizes the importance of validating desired traits—like flavor, yield, and disease resistance—over multiple growing seasons.
Only by doing so can breeders be confident that a variety will deliver consistent quality and performance in the field.
For strawberries in particular, speeding up development too much could compromise the reliability that growers depend on.
Future outlook: flexibility, greenhouses, and global reach
Climate change is placing new pressures on fruit and vegetable production. Flexibility has become a critical requirement for any new variety, which must perform well both in open fields and in greenhouse conditions.
Bayer sees strawberries as one of the fastest-growing fruit segments, with strong consumer demand and increasing interest in controlled environment agriculture.
In addition to unifera varieties, the company is also investing in remontant (everbearing) types that produce multiple harvests throughout the season.
While the current focus is on Northern Europe, Bayer plans to expand into new regions, including the Americas and Australia, as part of its global strategy in berries.
Image and text source: agfundernews.com
