Coffee berry disease coffee berry disease resistance results coffee beans

Coffee berry disease

I believe everyone is familiar with the coffee leaf scourge (la roya) that ravaged Central America a few years ago, but coffee berry disease (Coffee berry disease), which began to spread in Ethiopia in the 1970s, is also a pain in the hearts of coffee people.

The pathogen of CBD is Colletotrichum coffeanum, a filamentous fungus that only attacks coffee berries. At first, the berries infected by this strain will have small holes that look like brown patches, changing the color of the berries to gray, but as the infection spreads, the berries will gradually change from gray to black, leading to necrosis.

When coffee berry disease is rampant, it will cause losses of more than 70% to 80%. Therefore, although the initial use of fungicides has achieved good results, farmers and agronomists understand the diversity of coffee varieties in Ethiopia. It is definitely not a problem to use this advantage to screen out varieties with high resistance to disease.

The Gima Agricultural Research Center (Jimma Agricultural Research Center, JARC) set up by the Ethiopian government in Gima collected 639 coffee trees in various producing areas of Ethiopia from 1973 to 1975, and 13 varieties were selected in repeated tests to show the results of resistance to coffee berry disease.

If the variety name starts with "74" and "75", it means that it is the result of this batch of research. 74 and 75 represent 1974 and 1975, depending on when the variety was first selected, and the following number is the number given to the variety by the researcher.