🍅 A tomato that is more resistant and more productive… but less tasty. Do we really have to choose between yield and flavour? That was one of the questions of day three at IHC2026 Kyoto.
Another intense day. Of the 27 symposia, 24 ran in parallel today. We carefully leafed through the 38 pages of paper titles and chose with care what was worth hearing — because at a congress of this scale, choosing is an art in itself. 😊
The day was dominated by fruit growing 🍎, but a few vegetable-growing topics slipped in too. 🍅🌶️🥬
The most valuable for us were the papers with a practical slant — those are the ones we want to share with farmers. Genomics, pangenomics, combining ability and heterosis for yield traits in interspecific crosses, or the fact that a chilli pepper from Nepal is a tetraploid with a unique genetic background — all of this we are keeping for our internal working sessions. 🔬🧬
🍅 Grafting tomatoes: do we gain resistance but lose flavour?
A paper from Italy tested different rootstocks on tomatoes. The conclusion highlights a trade-off many farmers know well: grafted plants can be more vigorous, more productive and more resistant to certain stress factors, including nematodes — but with some scion–rootstock combinations, flavour can suffer. The rootstock influences fruit metabolism, and the result can be a lower content of sugars and acids, meaning more “bland” fruit.
Interestingly, researchers from Croatia observed a similar phenomenon in melon 🍈: more resistant and more productive, but with fewer sugars, and therefore less sweet. An important lesson for breeding: productivity, resistance and quality must be pursued together. 🎯
🌿 Seaweed-based fertilisers — an ally for photosynthesis.
We took away a simple, practical idea: the growing medium, together with supplementation with seaweed-based products, can improve the photosynthetic performance of plants. 🌱☀️ An approach with practical potential for producing more vigorous plants.
🥬 Orache, a forgotten vegetable worth rediscovering.
Lars Mogren presented the potential of garden orache (Atriplex hortensis), with scientific data on its nutritional value — an old, hardy plant that deserves renewed attention. 🌱
🐛 How to keep nematodes at bay without chemicals.
A paper from Benin on participatory agroecological management of root-knot nematodes (root-knot nematodes) in pepper crops 🌶️ showed us the potential of two plants: African basil (Ocimum gratissimum), an aromatic plant with nematicidal properties, and sunn hemp (Crotalaria juncea), a legume also used as green manure.
Together, they helped keep nematodes under control during the first crop cycle. A simple solution with potential for low-input production systems. ♻️🌿
🍓 The poster session — this time as visitors.
As it was not our presentation day, we had time to stop by the stands. We saw a wide Japanese drip hose, cleverly designed for uniform irrigation. 💧
We learnt that in Japan some strawberry varieties are grown from seed rather than from runners — a method that yields healthy planting material and opens up new possibilities for breeding. 🍓🌱
💻🧬 And we discovered companies that use bioinformatics and data analysis to predict which hybrid combinations have the best chance of success — in effect, a way to “test on the computer” before sowing in the field, which can shorten the timeline and reduce the costs of a breeding programme.
🧭 Workshops — there were too many topics that interested us, so each of us went to a different one:
🤖 AI in horticulture — opportunities, challenges, solutions and adoption. Artificial intelligence is knocking ever more insistently on the door of agricultural research.
🌳 Agroecological approaches for a more resilient future — a rich workshop with case studies from Greece, Argentina and Japan. There was talk of shelterbelts made up of fruit trees and shrubs, the conservation of traditional varieties and the use of native and local plants.
The main message stayed with us: the future of sustainable horticulture does not depend on a single technology, but on combining several solutions — old and new, local and innovative. 🌍🌱
🎓 How to strengthen public horticultural research and education — a discussion that touched us directly: the falling number of students and young people interested in horticulture is not just a problem at home, but one felt internationally.
🧬 Induced mutation breeding in horticultural plants — where we learnt, in concrete terms, how to calculate the dose for inducing mutations. 🔬
That is about it for day three. We leave with plenty of ideas on the agenda and one more day of the congress ahead. 😊
Warm regards from Kyoto! 🇷🇴🤝🇯🇵
