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The Variety Showcase, organized by the Culinary Breeding Network, is an annual event dedicated to illuminating the significance of organic seed. Chefs collaborate with plant breeders to craft unique dishes featuring specific cultivars or breeding lines, showcasing the diversity and potential of organic seed. The seed work showcased at these events addresses a wide range of critical issues and values, including climate resilience, culinary excellence, nutritional richness, biodiversity preservation, cultural heritage, spiritual significance, seed sovereignty, and more.

TOMI collaborators Emma Landgraver, Joel Davis, Jim Myers and Nicolas Enjalbert conducted a tomato tasting at the Variety Showcase in Portland Oregon on September 8, 2024, and the project was featured in the booklet written that all attendees received:

"The TOMI Project, now funded for another four years, has been active for a decade, focusing on overcoming production challenges through breeding and improving biocontrol methods. With organic tomato demand rising, farmers face issues from foliar diseases that can devastate crops. While new hybrid varieties offer disease resistance, they often lack the flavor and traits desired by organic consumers. Beneficial microbes and natural compounds can help, but their effectiveness is inconsistent, leading farmers to rely on copper fungicides that can harm soil and water quality and reduce profits.

TOMI aims to enhance disease management through regional breeding programs and on-farm trials, using new models and decision-support tools to help farmers select optimal breeding populations and biocontrol practices. Oregon State University's regional trials have identified productive, flavorful tomato varieties and are working on breeding for resistance to late blight and powdery mildew, as well as testing microbial strategies to boost systemic disease resistance."

To accompany the new Tomato Seed Production Guide, TOMI partners hosted a virtual training on producing high-quality organic tomato seed for your own farm or to sell. TOMI partners Laurie McKenzie and Jared Zystro from OSA, and Plant Pathologist Dan Egel from Purdue University, led this 60-minute virtual training on the how-to’s of organic tomato seed production, including tomato biology, climatic requirements, genetic maintenance, disease management, and how to harvest clean and store tomato seed.

Purdue University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, North Carolina State University, North Carolina A&T University, Oregon State University, and Organic Seed Alliance (OSA) are pleased to be among the recipients of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) awards announced last month. The grant was awarded through NIFA’s Organic Research and Extension Initiative (OREI).

The project, titled Tomato Organic Management and Improvement Project (TOMI): Part II, allows researchers to build on a previous OREI grant awarded in 2014. Through the first award, researchers were successful in advancing germplasm of new disease-resistant tomatoes and identifying microbial inoculants (i.e., biopesticides) that can reduce foliar diseases on organic farms.

“TOMI has also helped our research team discover that tomato plants have lost their ability to host beneficial microbes that help fight diseases over the course of domestication, and our current breeding practices could be making this worse,” says Lori Hoagland, a soil microbial ecologist at Purdue University and lead researcher on the project. “We also determined that biological control products vary in their potential to control diseases among regions and farms, which currently prevents organic farmers from being able to rely on these products.”

This new grant through OREI will help researchers continue to address these challenges while further supporting the development of a holistic, systems-based approach to managing diseases on organic farms. This will include furthering new disease-resistant tomato varieties that have been adapted to organic farming systems and exhibit eating qualities that consumers desire.

“Tomatoes are a popular organic crop, especially in local fresh markets,” says Micaela Colley, program director for OSA. “This project will result in varieties that provide superior flavor and nutritional qualities with the production traits farmers need, especially resistance to diseases that can cripple tomato production in areas with intense disease pressure.”

“Tomato growers will be involved in all aspects of the project and gain practical hands-on experience with soil health, disease management, and participatory breeding,” Colley adds.

Participatory plant breeding combines the practical experience of farmers with the technical expertise of formal plant breeders, resulting in more high-quality organic seed and more farmers with skills to improve their own varieties.

“By combining traditional plant breeding techniques with research aimed at identifying factors that control the composition and activity of soil and plant microbiomes, the research team hopes to develop new varieties that are better able to support beneficial microbes that help tomato plants fight diseases,” Hoagland explains. “We will do this by determining how local environments and soil management practices on organic farms alter populations of soil microbes with biocontrol activity. Then, we will determine how breeding varieties in these distinct environments affects the potential for tomato plants to support these microbes and control diseases.”

Researchers will also collaborate with farmers to improve the health and disease suppressive activity of soils on their farms, and determine why inoculants work in one place and not another. This data will help inform organic farming decisions and make disease management strategies more dependable.

The overarching goals of TOMI II include:

• Helping organic farmers control diseases while promoting soil and environmental health, and delivering tomatoes with great flavor to local consumers;
• Identifying existing, and breeding new, varieties that perform well under organic conditions and ensuring farmers have access to both the performance data as well as improved varieties;
• Collaborating with organic farmers to improve the health and disease suppressive activity of their soil, and identifying biopesticides that further support disease control in areas with intense disease pressure;
• Advancing an interdisciplinary research and outreach approach (soil microbiology, pathology, and breeding) to tackle the challenge of managing diseases on organic vegetable farms by researching plant-soil-microbial interactions; and
• Furthering the science and practice of on-farm research and participatory plant breeding methods to manage diseases, which require a close collaboration between farmers, plant breeders, pathologists, and soil scientists to ensure project outcomes are relevant and useful.

TOMI II is an example of collaborative research in the public sector that is responding to the needs of organic farmers both regionally and nationally. Multiple partners leverage each other’s expertise in addition to the environmental conditions and climates in their respective regions.

For example, some of TOMI’s breeding trials are conducted in North Carolina where disease pressure is generally high. Farmers in other regions then benefit from these selections after other breeders involved in the project take that improved germplasm and further adapt it to very different climates, such as those in the Pacific Northwest.

In this way TOMI is working toward releasing varieties that are better adapted to changing climates, resource availability, and environmental conditions to help mitigate these risks for farmers and the food supplies they serve. Adaptation is key to achieving resilience in our food and agricultural system. This resiliency is longer lasting when more organic farmers have the skills to further adapt and improve plant genetics through seed saving and on-farm breeding, and improve the disease suppressive activity of their soils. This is why TOMI also emphasizes farmer education as a project goal.

“We can’t overstate the importance of this second round of funding for the TOMI project,” says Colley. “Programs like OREI are essential to the success of organic research and delivering improved varieties to organic growers since public cultivar development takes time and generally lacks long-term funding.”

Consecutive funding for plant breeding is critical to getting finished varieties into the hands of farmers, since it takes several years to breed new varieties. It is also critical for the development of holistic, systems-based approaches to tackling important challenges like disease management on organic farms.

Thanks to USDA-NIFA for making this project possible through grant award 2019-51300-30245.

Effectively managing diseases is one of the biggest challenges facing organic vegetable growers. A wide range of biologically based products are now available on the market that claim to boost crop growth and help plants withstand many plant diseases. However, there are few independent, scientifically-based studies to validate the efficacy of some of these products, and instructions detailing how and when to apply these products to achieve the best results are unclear. In this webinar, participants describe the different types of products available in the marketplace today, provide an overview of recent studies evaluating their efficacy, and discuss strategies for identifying the most effective products and application practices. This webinar was organized by the NIFA OREI funded Tomato Organic Management and Improvement project.

This webinar was recorded on March 30, 2017. Presenters are Giuseppe Colla of Tuscia University in Viterbo Italy, Mariateresa Cardarelli at the Italian Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in Rome, Italy, and Dan Egel and Lori Hoagland of Purdue University.