The results of the 5-year work of BRESOV were presented to the scientific community at the Final Conference entitled “The Improvement of the Broccoli, Snap Bean and Tomato organic farming by Exploiting their Biodiversity: the results of the H2020 BRESOV project” that took place in Agrigento, Sicily, from 29th to 31st March and was organised by project coordinator University of Catania. More than 70 people, incl. project stakeholders, representatives of the EU institutions, breeders, farmers & students, followed the invitation to this international event.

The first day of the conference featured several presentations by high-level invited speakers from the University of Catania, the Italian Society for Horticultural Science (SOI), the Institute of BioEconomy (IBE-CNR), Agriculture and Forest Council of the Sicilian Region, DG AGRI’s Unit for Organics and FAO. Further on, 3 crop group sessions took place - brassica, snap bean and tomato, each one of them having an invited keynote speaker from University of Warwick (UK), Oregon State University (USA) and INRAe respectively.

The second day of the conference started with the Organic Farming session where Euroseeds’ Amelie Detterbeck spoke about improving seed production for organic farming. The next session focused on organoleptic, nutritive and nutraceutical traits of brassica, snap bean and tomato.

In the afternoon, 3 Key Exploitable Results (KERs) of the project were presented by KER leaders, and it was followed by a round table entitled “Vegetable Organic production in Europe and its perspectives”, chaired by Amelie Detterbeck. For this round table, experts of the whole value chain were invited to discuss about their experiences in the organic vegetable sector, the bottlenecks they encounter in increasing the organic vegetable production in Europe and how the BRESOV project results can help in solving these challenges.

On the third day, the conference participants paid a visit to a field of the Terre del Barone organic farm in the Valley of Temples, Agrigento, where BRESOV field trials took place and where the work is focused on participatory organic breeding and farming of vegetable crops populations, as well as the Garden of Kolymbethra to explore the Greek agroecological approach.

This international event provided a platform to present the results and allowed for fruitful discussion and networking.

Tweet this article   Share on Facebook