India wants to join the strawberry superpowers

India wants to join the strawberry superpowers es on strawberry varieties from the US and Europe In the west of India, the mountainous region of Mahabaleshwar is home to most of India's strawberry farms. Around 85% of India's strawberry cultivation happens there.An altitude of more than 1,000m (3,280ft) gifts the region a long cool growing season between November and March.In addition, light, well-drained soil is well-suited to strawberry cultivation.But that doesn't mean farmers have an easy life - it's a labour intensive and risky way to make a living."If you have a field full of strawberries and sudden heavy rains hit, the entire crop is ruined and we have to bear massive losses," says Sheetal Danavle who, with her husband, grows strawberries on half of their three-acre farm.Strawberry plants have to be replaced every season and are not grown from seed. Instead, farmers buy young plants from suppliers.

For Danavle, on her small farm, that's an outlay of $2,500 (£1,900) every year."If the season goes well, you can earn double your investment. But the climate makes it a huge gamble," she says. rawberries can be a "huge gamble" says Sheetal DanavleThousands of farmers grow strawberries across the Mahabaleshwar region, making the fruit one of the most profitable horticultural crops in western India. Despite that success the industry still relies on varieties that are imported from California, Florida, Italy and Spain, as no one in India has developed a domestic plant.It can take 10 to 15 years for breeders in the US and Europe to develop a top quality fruit and they patent their varieties.

"We import the certified mother plant from the breeder abroad," says Nelson Sequeira, the founder and director of Tara Farms Fresh, a licensed strawberry propagator.Once imported the plants have to go through a government quarantine, before they are planted in a nursery. There the mother plant produces daughter plants and those are then sold to farmers."One single imported mother plant becomes an engine. That single mother plant will shoot out runners to yield an average of 20 daughter plants - with some advanced growers pushing that up to 30 or 40," says Sequeira.It's a high-tech and precision operation."The plants do not touch the ground.

We use large industrial pipes split completely in half to form long, rounded gutter containers," Sequeira explains."Instead of soil, we pack these containers with a specialized coco-peat substrate derived entirely from coconut husk. We then integrate a highly precise drip-irrigation and fogging system to control micro-climates." berry plants are cultivated every yearSequeira and other propagators rely on mother plants from abroad - for now.But work at Mahatma Phule Krishi Vidyapeeth (MPKV), an agricultural university in Maharashtra, might change that.MPKV has partnered with the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) on a breeding experiment.Researchers are using controlled, low-dose gamma irradiation on plant tissues to induce stable genetic mutations."The goal is to fast-track the development of India's first indigenous, climate-resilient strawberry cultivar that matches the large fruit size and firm texture of foreign varieties while natively tolerating Indian heatwaves," says Dr Darshan Shashank Kadam, assistant professor of Horticulture at MPKV.He admits it could be a long process, with results perhaps in 10 or 15 years. But in the near term they are helping farmers in other ways."We are developing scientific packages of practices for farmers.

We have already standardised planting schedules, fertiliser recommendations and growth regulator applications specifically for Mahabaleshwar conditions," he says. Fresh Agrotech grows strawberries year-roundLarge farms with more resources are investing in new technology.Ketan Yashwant Sodha, is the founder and CEO of Berry Fresh Agrotech. He started with traditional open-field farming, but was frustrated by losses caused by the weather."For the past 10 years, it has consistently rained in India during our peak season - November, December, and the first week of January.

When you are in an open field and your plantation is at its absolute peak, a single rain will ruin your entire crop," he says.So in 2022, he started to experiment with hydroponics, a type of covered cultivation that does not use soil and tightly controls water, nutrients, light, and temperature.His early results were not encouraging."I suffered immense losses and failed multiple times," Sodha says."The soil is forgiving; hydroponics does not forgive. If you make a mistake today, you will wake up tomorrow morning to a disaster - and the recovery time in hydroponics takes twice as long as soil."But the lessons learned from those mistakes are paying off."We have trailed 19 different varieties, including rare Japanese ones, and we are the only ones in India trailing a specific Netherlands variety this season."Sodha says that limiting each plant to 75ml of water a day produces "rich, highly concentrated sugars and aromas instead of water-logged, bland fruits".His team also runs what he calls regular "blood work" on the crops, which involves laboratory testing of the leaves and petioles (the stalks attaching leaves to the stems) to measure exact nutrient uptake. That way he knows exactly which nutrients and chemicals need to go into the water supply.And by using a semi-open polyhouse, strawberries can grow the whole year round.