There is a high possibility that pollen imported from New Zealand was a source of infection for the nation’s first case of kiwifruit bacterial canker disease Psa3 confirmed in Ehime Prefecture in May, the prefecture said in its report released on Thursday, July 24. The prefecture said the same type of imported pollen was used by all of the 17 farms where the primary infection presumably took place. Fruit Tree Research Center in Ehime, the nation’s largest kiwifruit production area, said high concentration of live Psa3 bacteria was detected from three samples of imported pollen provided by the farms. To prevent the disease from spreading, local governments and agricultural … Continue reading →

  Mie, Kagawa, Chiba prefectures and National Agriculture and Food Research Organization’s Kyushu Okinawa Agricultural Research Center announced Wednesday, July 23, that they have jointly developed a new strawberry variety which is propagated by seed. Yotsuboshi, whose application for registration was made open on July 14, has the potential to grow vast numbers of good-quality plants with higher efficiency compared with the common propagation method of growing plants by runners, as plant offspring hardly inherits viral diseases from parent plants. Moreover, since it is a F1 hybrid, the first filial generation of offspring of distinctly different parental types, growers do not have to worry about the plants proliferated without permission.The … Continue reading →