Syngenta is the leader on the European sunflower market. Our hybrids are cultivated all over Europe, including Ukraine, Russia and Turkey.
Our constant objective is to supply, for various and changing climatic and agronomic conditions and for different uses (edible oil, bio fuel, lipochemistry), the best potential of sunflower plants to our customers: farmers, cooperatives and industries.
The result of this activity is a constant flow of new hybrids proposed each year to our customers. During the past 10 years, more than 100 hybrids have been launched in Europe.
We constantly integrate new germplasm from worldwide public collections as well as wild germplasm in our breeding scheme to answer specific requirements of each market.
The main breeding station is located in Saint Sauveur (near Toulouse, France). In Europe, we have several other stations for specific traits and diseases, depending on the different market needs.
The breeding team represents 12 full time employees. They are mainly located in Saint Sauveur (France) but also in Spain and Ukraine.
We are always attentive to market needs, and that is why we recently proposed several new products like Imidazolinone resistant varieties, high oleic products or new downy mildew resistant sunflower seeds.
The three main breeding goals are common to all the different markets:
Other breeding objectives are driven by market specificities.
We create more than 2000 new hybrids each year which are evaluated in 45 000 plots for yield or diseases.
The process to obtain a competitive hybrid takes around 10 years and we are using several biotechnology tools to speed up the time to market and improve our breeding efficiency.
Detection of the best resistant plant:
