TOMI at the Variety Showcase 2024

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."