Inside the secretive and lucrative world of orchid breeding

Bringing a new orchid to market can take a decade of hard work.

While the rewards are significant – the global orchid market is worth hundreds of millions of dollars – competition to produce the next great flower is intense.

Therefore, in the race to develop new orchid species, the laboratory is at least as important as the greenhouse.

According to leading Dutch orchid breeding company Floricultura, centuries of human intervention (selective breeding and propagation) have turned the genetic background of many commercial orchids into a “disaster”.

This means that it is extremely difficult to predict what characteristics a new plant species might have.

But Floricultura and its competitors may try to speed up the process of selective breeding by developing genetic markers for specific traits such as color, shape, disease resistance, flowering longevity, etc.

Rather than waiting for a newly bred plant to bloom within three years, growers can apply genetic screening techniques to very young plants and discard those that do not suit their requirements early in the process.

“If there are several thousand mixed races [come] “From the laboratory we can screen them by marker and select the ones that have the marker you are looking for,” says Wart van Zonneveld, research and development manager at Floricultura.

“It’s indicative of a particular feature you want or don’t want based on what’s easier to find.”

So-called “new breeding techniques” are a closely guarded secret. Each company develops its own genetic markers and processes because this allows them to develop unique varieties.

“We keep it to ourselves because there is so much investment,” Van Zonneveld says.

“It’s still breeding, you have to do a crossbreeding, and we can’t just pick out a piece of DNA and put it back,” says Paul Arens, an ornamental breeding researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

He and his colleagues conducted research for a Dutch government-backed initiative that shares information with participating companies.

“The basics are the same as we’ve been doing for 100 years. You take two plants, look at their characteristics and cross them. But [the breeders] they have white lab coats, [and] “They do all kinds of research with markers and genomics related to plant health.”

Genetics are also used to protect new cultivar intellectual property rights through breeders’ rights in Europe and patents in the United States.

“If a company makes a new orchid, then [it] “I want to have the sole right to commercialize this orchid,” says Arens.

“Otherwise, someone else can buy it from the store, reproduce it and sell it themselves.

“But the breeder’s rights investigator has to make sure that a new variety is different from those already on the market…it has to be different, it has to be stable and it has to be uniform.”

Breeding rights and patents are granted based on physical descriptions, not DNA analysis; however, it is important to compare new plants with similar crops to determine whether they are suitable for conservation.

DNA analysis is a powerful tool in determining which plants the new variety should be compared to.

“It’s just like what we do in forensics. You run markers in different locations in the DNA that give you a pattern, and then you get a chance to match it or not,” Arens says.

Floricultura is not sold to the public, even to garden centres. Their business is to breed and develop new varieties, which they sell to breeders who grow the plants on a large scale.

They have more than 180 varieties in their catalogue, but several hundred more are in development because the demand for innovation and development never ends.

“You can’t stop because it takes too long to develop new varieties,” says Stefan Kuiper, the company’s breeding manager.

“You must go on, [or] “You will be behind the rest.”

After genetic screening and initial selection, it takes about three years for the plants (first attempts at a new variety, siblings from parent orchids) to grow, first in laboratory conditions and then in greenhouses, but there are still years left for the development phase to be completed.

Paul Arens of Wageningen University and Research says breeding is the “art of discarding”, discarding plants that do not suit your passions, but it is also the art of propagating what is left.

Because the next group of plants will not be siblings; instead they will be exact copies of those who survived the selection round – clones.

“Initially everyone had seedlings, so crossing and then seed pods yield plants, but at Floricultura we introduced meristems,” Stefan Kuiper told me.

Meristems are the cells that enable a plant to continue growing throughout its life, and they are what are used to clone surviving plants.

Stefan cannot provide further information about the technique they used; Like genetic research, it’s a trade secret.

However, the cloned seedlings are again grown and grown to another selection point over the years.

Growing orchids is resource-intensive. Plants need reliable heat, light, water and nutrients for months.

The application of genetics and other techniques can only accelerate this so far. Ultimately you need to let the plant grow, flower shape and size, color, number of stems, disease resistance, etc. You need to verify its properties such as and then make another selection.

This process takes the young plants by air to India and by truck to Poland, before returning to the Floricultura facility in Heemskerk in Northern Holland, where more than seven hectares of greenhouse space are available for both development and production.

Rainwater is collected from greenhouse roofs, and in response to changing weather conditions, the company is now beginning to recycle this water and the nutrients it contains for secondary use.

Wart van Zonneveld proudly showed me his geothermal wells, which pump water from 3 km below the surface to the top at 102°C.

It provides so much energy that they are exploring sharing it with the local council for district heating projects.

It’s not just monitoring that’s automated. In large greenhouses, trays of plants move on rollers, sequentially delivering them to the next growing stage.

At least in Floricultura there remains a task reserved for people.

Although the tools used to develop new varieties, clone new plants and evaluate the results have all been transformed by technological innovations, after nine years of work the decision on which varieties to include in the catalog is still made by Stefan Kuiper and his colleagues personally.

A plant may tick all the genetic boxes and produce all the right traits, but to sell it has to be beautiful, and that’s a judgment made by humans.

“Breeding is a bit [like] It’s a “gamble,” Kuiper says, and for now the human element remains.

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