From 8-10 May 2023, VIRTIGATION partners gathered in Tel Aviv, Israel, for the second annual meeting. They took stock of progress made and planned the next research & innovation actions for the project. Read our recap of VIRTIGATION’s visit to one of the Middle East’s leading horticultural pioneers.
Israel - the heart of horticultural innovation
This small Middle Eastern country assembles an estimated 3,000 hectares of greenhouses. Greenhouse cultivation is key in ensuring Israel’s food security, as this type of cultivation enables growers to overcome constraints imposed by soil quality, arid climate and limited groundwater supply. Israel is world-renowned for technological innovations in horticulture. Israeli scientists have developed e.g. countless seed varieties that are resistant to (viral) disease, provide higher and better-quality yields with less water even in hot climates, and also produce food with a longer shelf life. While Israel’s northern regions are home to the country’s richest agricultural area, greenhouse cultivation of tomatoes and cucurbits is also taking place in the southern desert and semidesert region of Negev.
Field visit to tomato greenhouses in the Negev
Against this backdrop, the vibrant Israeli city of Tel Aviv was the optimal location to host the second annual meeting of the project. The three-day meeting took place at the Institute of Plant Sciences of our Israeli partner Volcani Center near Tel Aviv, which is also home to the Israel Plant Gene Bank. VIRTIGATION partners kicked off the annual meeting with a half-day field visit to horticultural installations in the country’s Negev region.
Located in close proximity to the Gaza strip, the first stop of the project’s field visit was the Southern R&D Negev Center. There, local plant health experts showcased to VIRTIGATION partners the different experiments being conducted by this research center, which is 1 out of 8 agricultural research centers located throughout Israel. At the Southern R&D Negev Center, project partners could see innovative greenhouse experiments aimed at testing the cultivation of new crops such as banana, pineapple and pitaya on the Negev’s sandy soil. In addition to this, the project also visited cherry tomato and cucumber greenhouse experiments. The experiments conducted by the Southern R&D Negev Center play a key role in providing value chain stakeholders such as growers with information on how to further innovate the cultivation of (new) crops in the country’s desert and semidesert region.
After the Southern R&D Negev Center, the VIRTIGATION consortium then visited several tomato growers in the area, which have been heavily hit by ToBRFV infections. Project partners could see the devastating damage caused by ToBRFV first-hand, which has already forced growers to change their cultivation habits. Nowadays, local tomato growers in the area need to have two instead of one harvest seasons to manage the impact of ToBRFV. Furthermore, ToBRFV infections have caused tomato yield to drop significantly since the virus was discovered in 2014 by Volcani Center scientists. Subsequently, the growers visited by VIRTIGATION partners stressed the importance of obtaining new tools and methods to better manage ToBRFV in their greenhouses, especially from projects like VIRTIGATION.
VIRTIGATION annual meeting
On 9-10 May, VIRTIGATION partners gathered again at Volcani Center’s Institute of Plant Science to take stock of the project progress made so far, and plan the next research & innovation actions to come. Many partners could already present first results from their research & innovation efforts, with some already having been published in various peer-reviewed scientific publications. Moreover, project partners discussed in detail the upcoming semi-field and field trials, which will focus on testing various potentially promising biopesticide formulations to control the whitefly vector of ToLCNDV. By the end of 2023, first significant results are expected to be produced by the project from these field trials.
First meeting with the VIRTIGATION Advisory Board
On 10 May, the second annual meeting of the project concluded with the first session of the VIRTIGATION External Expert Advisory Board (EEAB). The VIRTIGATION EEAB is a newly established consortium body, which consists of renowned plant health experts from policy, industry and research. Advisory Board members are tasked with providing strategic feedback on scientific, technical and economic aspects of the project, as well as assess the emerging results coming out of VIRTIGATION. Additionally, EEAB members act as multipliers of VIRTIGATION news and results.
At the first project meeting with the EEAB, two out of three VIRTIGATION EEAB members joined in person to provide first valuable inputs to guide the direction of the project’s research & innovation efforts. Valérie Grimault, Assistant Director of the crucial plant health organisation EPPO and expert in ToBRFV, provided recommendations to VIRTIGATION partners on how their scientific data and results could contribute to EPPO’s plant health policies, protocols and standards. She was joined by Darren Martin, Associate Professor in Computational Biology at the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine of the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Martin, expert in virus genome analysis and bioinformatics, recommended partners to go deeper in their research on plant virus diversity, to better understand the evolutionary patterns of the plant viruses addressed by VIRTIGATION. Project partners appreciated the strategic feedback provided by EEAB members, which they will now use in the remainder of the project, as VIRTIGATION enters the second half of its lifetime.
The second annual meeting of VIRTIGATION then concluded with a visit to the Israel museum near Jerusalem, as well as a walk through the historic Israeli capital itself. The next VIRTIGATION annual meeting will take place in spring 2024 in Catania, Italy, and will be hosted by our Italian partner University of Catania.
© all pictures: RTDS
