Coregeo® Australia is pleased to announce that it has been licensed the right to commercialise the apple-scab—resistant variety, Kalei (variety ‘RS103-130’), by the Department of Agriculture Fisheries and Forestry, Queensland (formerly DEEDI).
As part of this process Coregeo is advising growers and supply chains of the opportunity to commercially exploit the variety.
Two streams of production
The variety Kalei will be produced in two streams—a conventional stream where it will be sold as Kalei, and a commercial organic stream where premium fruit may be sold under licensing arrangements using the Azana™ brand name (Figure 1 depicts how the system will work).
Strategy
The strategy is to create a new ‘evo’ (environmental) category in the apple market for Azana brand and other commercially produced organic apples.
Commercial organic apples will have the attributes of existing apples (high quality, long seasons of availability due to appropriate use of modern post harvest practise) but will comply with one of the certified organic codes (no particular organic code will be specified).
At the same time, for those producers not interested in organic production, Kalei variety apples will provide excellent appearance and eating quality with reduced input costs due to scab resistance.
To find out more, see the August 2012 issue of Tree Fruit
