India wants to join the strawberry superpowers
BBC
India's booming strawberry business runs on plant varieties borrowed from California, Italy and Japan. Now scientists are blasting cells with gamma rays to build a homegrown strain—might take 15 years.
Strawberries shouldn't really work in India. But drive up into the hills of Mahabaleshwar, at over 1,000 metres, and you find a five-month window of cool air and light, well-drained soil that somehow produces 85% of the country's crop. Thousands of farmers depend on it, and for someone like Sheetal Danavle, who farms three acres with her husband, it's a $2,500-a-year bet against the weather. One badly timed downpour during the November-to-March season and the whole field is gone.
What's odd is that none of the strawberries growing there are actually Indian. Every plant traces back to a patented mother plant bred in California, Florida, Italy or Spain, because developing a new commercial variety takes breeders abroad 10 to 15 years. Propagators like Nelson Sequeira import that mother plant, run it through quarantine, then coax it into producing dozens of genetic clones in coco-peat-filled irrigation pipes that never touch soil. It's an elaborate, high-tech workaround for a fairly basic problem: India has never had a strawberry of its own.
That may be starting to change. Researchers at Mahatma Phule Krishi Vidyapeeth, working with the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, are hitting plant tissue with low-dose gamma radiation to force mutations, hoping to fast-track a fruit that's as big and firm as the imported stuff but actually tolerates Indian heat. Dr Darshan Shashank Kadam is honest that results could still be a decade or more away. In the meantime, his team is doing the unglamorous work of standardising fertiliser schedules and planting calendars for the region's specific conditions.
Further down the food chain, bigger operators are betting on precision rather than genetics. Ketan Sodha of Berry Fresh Agrotech switched to hydroponics after years of watching open fields get wiped out by rain, and admits the early results nearly broke him — soil forgives mistakes, hydroponics doesn't. Now he's trialling 19 varieties, rationing plants to 75ml of water a day, and running lab tests on leaves to fine-tune nutrients like a coach managing an athlete's diet. Krishan Bhilare's farmer collective has gone even further, building AI-linked weather towers that tell growers exactly when rain will hit, and stacking plants five layers high on vertical towers to squeeze 125,000 plants onto land that used to hold 25,000.
None of this fixes the risk for a small grower like Danavle, though. After a cyclone flattened her own hydroponic experiment in 2017, she didn't rebuild it — she went back to the old way, then added something the imported plants never came with: an Instagram following. Tourists now show up to pick strawberries straight from her field, no middleman required. Turns out the most reliable strawberry technology in Mahabaleshwar might just be a smartphone camera.
My take
Nobody should be surprised that a country growing this much fruit still has to license every plant it puts in the ground — that's what happens when IP law lets a handful of Californian and Italian breeders sit on decade-long genetic head starts. The gamma-ray project is the right instinct, but fifteen years is a brutal timeline when a single bad monsoon can wipe out a small farmer in one afternoon. Watch the gap widen between well-capitalised hydroponic outfits chasing 200,000-plant facilities and farmers like Danavle, for whom a strong Instagram following is currently a more dependable asset than any patented cultivar.
Read more about this at: BBC
