Production Practices and Quality Assessment of Food Crops. Vol. 1

MODELLING FRUIT QUALITY: ECOPHYSIOLOGICAL,
AGRONOMICAL AND ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
MICHEL GÉNARD AND FRANÇOISE LESCOURRET
Plantes et Systèmes de culture Horticoles, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, Domaine
St. Paul, site Agroparc, 84914 Avignon Cedex 9, France; E-mail: Michel.Genard@avignon.inra.fr,
Francoise.Lescourret@avignon.inra.fr
1. INTRODUCTION
Orchard management is facing new challenges, instigating new research and fruit
production strategies. The new market organisation requires to improve the quality
of processes, produces and the environment, especially in Europe under current
EU regulations. To be more competitive in this new market organisation, growers
have to take into account more constraints than earlier. Indeed, they have to adapt
their technical choices to the present concerns about environment and fruit quality.
On what basis can this adaptation be made? The knowledge reported in the scientific
literature is poorly used by orchard managers. In fact the extension services
offering advices to growers are often conducting their own experiments to advance
empirical knowledge useful to growers (e.g. Giauque et al., 1997). This empirical
knowledge is very efficient but takes time to be established. In this new context,
growers will have to rapidly adapt their technical management to ensure sustainable
horticulture. Scientists must bear responsibility concerning the development
of decision support systems, the role of which is thought to increase in the coming
years (Knight, 1997). They may improve ‘the decision processes that generate
cropping systems to incorporate more information, to take into account a wider range
of criteria, and to allow for faster adaptation’ (Boiffin et al., 2001).
Decision support systems are usually constituted of biological, technical and
economic models. They all have to be well adapted to the new objectives and
constraints of fruit production. For instance, the economic model has to take into
account environmental costs (Doyle, 1997), the technical model has to consider how
to create and manage orchards, and the biological model has to consider the effects
of orchard management on crop quality. In terms of biological models applied to
fruit production, there is a lot to be done as almost none of the current models
deal with important aspects such as the response of the plant to orchard management
practices, pest attacks and diseases, and consequences on fruit production
and quality. Such biological models are now needed to innovate in an integrated
view through evaluation, exploration and learning (Boiffin et al., 2001).
To be able to help growers to face unusual situations, the biological model must
be, in our sense, process-based. Indeed, process-based models now lead to better
predictions in unusual situations than empirical models which can only be used under
the range of environmental and agronomical conditions used to develop them.
Moreover, only process-based models will be able in the future to easily integrate
R. Dris and S. M. Jain (eds.), Production Practices and Quality Assessment of Food Crops,
Vol. 1, “Preharvest Practice”, pp. 47–82.
© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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