Articles
PROCESSING TOMATO: A BREEDING PROGRAM IN EMILIA-ROMAGNA
The research is aimed at developing cultivars for puree and paste production suitable to mechanical harvesting and adapted to the environmental conditions of the Emilia-Romagna and surrounding regions.
The main requirements are simultaneous ripening, resistance to overmaturity, to burning and to cracking, fruit firmness, high soluble solid yield and good colour.
Emphasis is furthermore placed on disease resistance as regards the bacterial spech, the TMV and nematodes.
With a view to prolonging the harvesting period, the development of early ripening varieties is also taken into account.
To achieve these aims, different plant structures are being considered.
These include such common ones as the well-known California varieties and the unconventional ones with reduced growth, as dwarf or monostem types.
These latter are developed following the pedigree or backcross methods.
Further, three synthetics are being advanced according to an S1 family recurrent selection for specific purposes: earliness and fruit size and quality.
The selected lines, starting from F5 or corresponding generations, are tested in successive steps or experimental levels /figure 1/ in different environments at the experiment stations of the Emilia-Romagna.
So as to reject unsuitable lines at limited cost, no harvesting is to be effected in the first level.
A panel of experts will determine rejects directely in the field.
Moreover an efficient and simple index of merit, based on ten traits as per the following formula, was constructed /Conti and Toni, 1987/: