Tomato Brown Rugose Fruit Virus (ToBRFV)

The Tomato Brown Rugose Fruit Virus abbreviated ToBRFV has a major financial impact on the entire tomato industry. That is why Axia Vegetable Seeds and the entire breeding team are working hard day and night to develop resistant (HR) varieties.

Crossing this resistance into existing commercial varieties takes a lot of time. Axia assumes that it will be able to trial in The Netherlands and Belgium the first resistant (HR) varieties in December 2022. For the NAFTA region we expect to have the trial seeds ready in March 2023. There are a number of varieties currently on the market, but they are (IR) or asymptomatic. This means that the plants do get sick, but the symptoms are not visible. Axia currently has several asymptomatic varieties on the market that outperform the competing varieties. We are of course very happy with this.

Production
At Axia Vegetable Seeds, we take seed health very seriously. We know that a successful harvest starts with good varieties and clean seeds. We produce all our tomato seeds at GSPP accredited production locations. Before the seeds reach our headquarters, they are already tested for various diseases, such as Pepino, Cmm, ToBRFV and many other diseases.

When the seeds arrive at our logistics center, they are stored in a separate quarantine room and samples are taken for disease testing. We then send these samples to 3 different laboratories. Only when the test results come back negative (i.e. disease-free) are the seeds released for processing, packaging and sale.