The tomato world has been plagued by ToBRFV for several years at this point, but there is light at the end of the tunnel, Delphy's Joop Verhoeven assures us. The Senior Advisor Tomato and Pepper has good news: "Two seed houses are making large-scale introductions for the new season, 2023." These include 450 ha of resistant varieties from Enza Zaden and more than 100 ha of resistant varieties from Rijk Zwaan.
The two seed houses have developed ToBRFV-resistant varieties, which were sown last month. "The resulting plants will soon be planted with growers," he indicated in late December. "In the Benelux, this involves 450 hectares from Enza Zaden, a nice beef tomato and vine tomatoes that are ToBRFV-resistant. Rijk Zwaan has well over 100 ha in resistant cocktail varieties and cherry varieties."
Good news, then, and hopefully, the scenes that are now going on at many tomato growers will be a thing of the past. "When you get there now, it's like a hospital: you have to wash your hands beforehand, change clothes, footwear and gloves, keep disinfecting the hands in between, and so on."
Understory
What is unfortunate, according to Joop, is that there are no resistant rootstocks yet. "The virus also spreads via exudation from the roots, so growers will have to be watchful next year, even those with resistance at the top."
The danger, in that case, comes from the recirculation of water. "So you have to test, before and after the sanitizer, whether everything has been killed off. That should be a continuous process because even if your sanitizer is on, you still have to check whether it kills off, say, 80 percent or 100 percent virus particles. So you have to check that frequently: taking water samples and sending them to the laboratory. In short, resistant varieties are a nice development, but you have to keep your finger on the pulse."
For more information:
Delphy 
Joop Verhoeven
Senior Advisor Tomaat en Paprika
Regio: Nederland, Belgium
M +31 (0)6 53 42 72 30
[email protected]