Raphael Maier’s Post

2 years ago I finished a "bestseller"! I wrote my thesis on "breeding cold hardy passionfruit" which took me: - 13 years of growing passionflowers 🌱 - 3,5 years of university study 👨🎓 - 200+ books, articles and papers read 📚 - 4 months of writing ✍️ - 108 pages written 📝 - 1 "opus magnum" 😉 What I didn't realize at the time was that anybody else would be interested in the subject. Now more than 2 years later this work has been transformed into a book and translated into 4 languages. Of course, it's not on any serious bestseller list, but without any big publishing company or marketing it's still being sold and read all over the world. Which is just mindblowing for me. 😁 But I am so happy that people found my work helpful and are crazy (or curious?) enough to read it. And what's best: It became the foundation for my present breeding program. So let's continue to put it into action and breed full-scale cold hardy passionfruit! 💪 #writing #plantbreeding #passionfruit

Ich bekomme regelmäßig Fragen zum Anbau und zur Kultur der winterharten Passionsfrüchte. Ich hoffe dass diese Kulturanleitung (für die Produktion von verkaufsfertigen Pflanzen) hier etwas hilft. Den ganzen ausführlichen Artikel zum Thema gibt es hier: https://lnkd.in/eEcqwWyi

Wow! What progress! 3,5 years ago I was excited to see the first real progress of my then very small private plant breeding program. (see pictures) I started breeding cold hardy passionfruit on my own without any money or support, just because (nearly) nobody else was doing it at the time. The beginning was difficult with lots of setbacks. What you see in the picture was one of my first big successes: Big fruits between 60g and 100g. Very vigorous plants, beautiful flowers, and confirmed cold hardy. (-20 °C) However, it was surely not perfect. The main problem was late fruit ripening. Today and 1-2 generations later I am once again excited about the progress. And there is hopefully still a lot more to come in the future! #plantbreeding #passionfruit #coldhardy

It's always great to do pollinations to create new varieties. Check this out if you want to know how to breed new apple varieties.

7 Lessons I learned from Domesticating a New Crop: The Hardy Passion Fruit I've been dedicating the past few years to breeding Passiflora incarnata (frost-hardy passion fruit), a key part of our plant breeding programs at Lubera Here are some valuable insights I've gained from domesticating this and other new crops: 📈1. Rapid Improvements: Unlike the modest yield increases of 1-2% per generation seen in established crops, new species can show staggering 50% to 300% improvements in their initial generations! It’s just mind-blowing to see! 🌱2. The Challenge of Finding Good Germplasm: While hundreds of corn or tomato varieties are readily available, finding even 3-4 distinct genotypes of a wild plant for domestication can be a triumph. 🧐3. Starting From Scratch: There's no textbook for the best germination protocols, fertilization amounts, or planting distances. Understanding these essentials is crucial, especially if you plan to commercialize the plants later. 🤝4. The Power of Collaboration: In a field where many breeders prefer secrecy, openness is vital. A strong network is essential for accessing quality germplasm, information, and support. 🌿5. There are 100 traits to improve: Wild plants are wild. They don’t behave like you want. So you need to work on many different fronts. Germination, fruit number, aril color, sugar content, emerging date, etc. 🎨6. Untapped Potential & Directions to take: Despite the challenges, the potential directions for innovation are endless. Whether it's maximizing fruit size, extending shelf life, or enhancing floral beauty, the possibilities mirror the transformation of wild cabbage into cauliflower, kohlrabi, and Brussels sprouts. 😁7. It’s a lot of fun! Even if it’s sometimes a headache, I absolutely love it and dream about fields covered with hardy passionfruit vines. It's immensely rewarding to shape the future of agriculture with each new crop domestication. #AgricultureInnovation, #CropDomestication, #PassionFruit #Breeding Have you ever worked on domesticating a new crop? What did you learn in the process?

Would you have thrown away this plant? It did bloom like crazy with big showy flowers. It grew vigorously, and was very healthy. But it didn't set any fruit. It produced nearly no pollen and it wasn't cold hardy. When you breed plants you have to make decisions. Lots of them. Some plants go to the next stage, while others have to go. If you are serious about plant breeding, then 90 % of what you create has to die. Just because it's not perfect. You just want to keep the best. My goal is to breed cold hardy passionfruit. So a plant that seems to be sterile and not winter hardy is of no use. Fortunately I didn't have to kill the plant, as it died on its own during the winter. That's sad, but necessary to move on and create even better plants. So if you want to breed plants: "Learn to make a choice and kill plants, even if it's hard." #passiflora #plantbreeding #coldhardypassionfruit

What are you doing on a 1h drive with 2 interns at Lubera ? Preparing apple pollen! Right now we are in the apple bloom season. This means for us as plant breeders the clock is ticking. We have around 2 weeks and then we have to wait till next year. So if it’s nice weather we go out and get as much as possible done. We pollinate flowers 🌸 for breeding new apple 🍎 varieties. So Thursday we collected all the necessry flowers but we needed the pollen the next day. We used the 1h drive back home in the evening to cut the pollen from the flowers so that we could dry it over night for pollinations the next day. And mission accomplished! We got our pollen, we did our pollinations the next day and are hoping for a few more days of good weather for the fruits to form. Thanks a lot to our interns Renske Bouwheer and Jon Zalbidea Olabarri. And thanks also to Simone Bühlmann-Schütz and Agroscope for the pollen exchange. P.S: you want to work in plant breeding? Lubera is still looking for interns for summer-autumn this year. Just send me a DM.

It’s important to point it out the differences between a molecular biologist and a plant breeder! You can find and map as many genes as you want: if you don’t have a good marketable variety at the end, then you have nothing as a plant breeder. It’s also worth considering that plants are still more then just a list of genes on a screen. They are very complex organisms in interaction with their environment. Something which can seem to work in theory doesn’t always in the field. At the end a farmer doesn’t care about great new genes. The farmer wants to know how well the variety performs. That said we all, as plant breeders, benefit from new insights in molecular biology. So let’s continue the work together, but don’t confuse molecular biology and plant breeding.

❤️ I love talking about the potential of hardy passion fruit cultivation! I had a great time exchanging with fruit growers in Austria and discussing the future of hardy Passiflora.