This summer Rijk Zwaan did the first improvement test in an organic cucumber cultivation. By looking deeper into the wishes of the organic growers the improvement company want to improve the production and quality of organic vegetables further. Especially in the cucumber cultivation the production difference between popular and organic remains large, despite the fact that growers obtain the maximum from the plants. "Even without exceptional losses we harvest about 40% less per m2 average than from popular cultivation" Fons Verbeek of BioVerbeek says. "We need strong varieties and a dark plant colour. In addition the quality has to be good. 10 years ago 
Robust
BioVerbeek now choose the most robust varietes out of the existing assortment of the improvement companies, but the plants remain more or less sensitive to problems such as abortion, mycosphaerella or burning of the leaves. Therefore BioVerbeek have cooperated during the last few months with a first organic improvement test with eight varieties of Rijk Zwaan from a very early selection period. In addition to the production per m2 the plants and the harvested fruit were assessed a number of times by the selectors and cultivation advisers of Rijk Zwaan.
Direction
"The cultivation advisers of Rijk Zwaan together with the selectors already look at the potential of varieties for organic cultivation, but we do not especially improve for the market" the account manager Organics Heleen Bos says. "With this experiment Rijk Zwaan can already in an early stage test new selection material under organic cultivation conditions. In this way we know much better whether a variety has a future in organic or not." In addition there is still a second important advantage: on the basis of the test growers can point out even more clearly what they are looking for. "This gives our selectors the direction to look into for the future" says Bos. Verbeek agrees that these tests can have important value. "We are happy that Rijk Zwaan want to think with the organic grower about the challenges in this way. Now the choice of varieties is still limited, but it would be great if we could think about more possibilities shortly."
