Grafting vegetables can protect crops against a range of soil-borne diseases and can improve crop tolerance to flooding during the hot-wet season. The Center has developed effective grafting techniques for tomato, eggplant, chili, sweet pepper and several cucurbits. Vegetable grafting is used by farmers in Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Vietnam and there are good business opportunities to expand this method to other countries.
Tomato
Grafting technology has been adopted on a large scale in Vietnam to control bacterial wilt in tomatoes that could otherwise completely destroy crops. Grafting susceptible varieties onto resistant rootstock provides good control. Tomatoes are difficult to grow during the hot-wet season, and grafting tomatoes onto eggplant or tolerant tomato rootstocks can minimize problems caused by flooding and soil-borne diseases. More than 10 years of work in the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan have confirmed the practical value of this technology.
Chili and Sweet Pepper
Grafting can provide crop tolerance to bacterial wilt, Phytophthora blight and root knot nematodes. Grafting of scions is done onto open-pollinated capsicum rootstocks. Only a small proportion of farmers currently use grafted planting materials, even in developed markets such as Japan or Korea. Although they can be costly, grafting onto resistant rootstocks can provide an effective solution to some soil-borne diseases where breeding has not yet produced varieties with effective levels of disease resistance.
Cucurbits
Grafting can be used with a variety of cucurbits to provide control of Fusarium wilt and flooding tolerance. Watermelon can be grafted onto bottle gourd to manage Fusarium wilt and provide flooding tolerance when planted in heavy or loam soils. Cucurbits can be grafted onto pumpkin, which will provide some drought tolerance if planted in sandy soil. Disease-susceptible lines of bottle gourd can be grafted onto Luffa (sponge gourd) or pumpkin to improve crop performance.
Suggested reading
- [wpfilebase tag=fileurl id=431 linktext=’Grafting Tomatoes for Production in the Hot-Wet Season’ /]
- [wpfilebase tag=fileurl id=400 linktext=’Grafting Sweet Peppers for Production in the Hot-Wet Season’ /]
After they learned grafting technology at AVRDC, scientists from the Institute of Agricultural Science for Southern Vietnam then introduced it to farmers in Lam Dong Province during 2002-2004. Farmers took it up enthusiastically and by 2007, around 4000 hectares of tomatoes in Lam Dong were being grown with grafted seedlings, providing local farmers with an additional US$ 6 million profit each year. Large-scale private grafting operations have sprung up near the city of Da Lat. This remarkable success shows that this technology can be implemented in other less-developed countries to increase farmers’ income and job opportunities.