Global cabbage breeder Manu Parmar shares his passion for developing varieties that deliver real value to growers. Working with a crop grown worldwide, he focuses on improving yield, quality, disease resistance, and resilience to changing climates.

What initially drew you to cabbage breeding, and what do you enjoy most about working with this crop?
What inspires me about cabbage breeding, is the fact that cabbage being a wide adaptable crop is grown around the world, having wide varieties, nutrition value and good profitability and yield.
I enjoy the most is selecting cabbages and see how tangible improvements that are more productive, resilient, and better suited to our growers.

What are some key goals or priorities you’re currently focusing on in the cabbage breeding program?
Our key priorities are developing sustainable cabbage varieties to improve yield, quality, disease resistance, resilience to climate change & delivering greater benefit and profit to our customers.

Have you observed any promising traits or results recently that you’re particularly excited about?
Varieties like Cabbice & Cali are flexible varieties for the early “green” fresh West coast, US market. It is exciting to see the uniformity, stability, good sanitation, & consistent performance under different conditions for more reliable production for our growers.

How do grower and market needs influence your breeding decisions?
Breeding decisions are strongly driven by grower as well as retailers and consumers feedback to ensure the final product performs well across the entire value chain. So at Hazera we focus on developing cabbage varieties that meet both needs with stable yields, uniform size, good storage life and quality.

Is there anything upcoming in the cabbage pipeline that you think will be especially meaningful for the market?
Yes, we have several promising hybrids progressing through the pipeline that could be very meaningful for the esp. for the US market.
The new varieties e.x Roadster is red cabbage variety with 75-85 growing days, round shape for fresh market.
In white cabbage, we are coming up with better varieties suited for west coast and are now in developmental stage.

Anything fun or personal you’d like the readers to know about you or your work?
I feel proud to be part of cabbage breeding team where we at Hazera have a heritage of developing varieties across the world. It can take many years to develop a new variety and the final success are rewarding to support our Gowers that benefit from them.