Starmaya 4

Starmaya

High yield­ing plant adapt­ed to medi­um alti­tudes. Notably high acid­i­ty in the cup.

Stature
Dwarf/Compact
Leaf tip color
Green
Bean Size
Large
Yield Potential
High
Low
Very High
Quality potential at high altitude
Very Good
Very Low
Exceptional
Optimal Altitude
Medium
Coffee leaf rust
Resistant
Susceptible
Resistant
Nematode
Unknown
Susceptible
Resistant
Coffee Berry Disease
Unknown
Susceptible
Resistant

Agronomics

Year of first production
Year 2
Nutrition requirement
Medium
Ripening of fruit
Average
Cherry to green bean outturn
High
Planting density
4000-5000 plants/ha (using single-stem pruning)
Additional agronomic information
Variety not uniform. When planted, approximately 15% of plants will "segregate" (have different appearance/performance than the standard). An important note about F1 hybrids: Seeds taken from hybrid plants will not have the same characteristics as the parent plants. This is called “segregation.” It means that the child plant will not look or behave the same as the parent, with potential losses of yield, disease resistance, quality, or other agronomic performance traits. The variety should only be reproduced through clonal propagation and purchased from trusted nurseries.

Background

Genetic Description
F1 hybrid (introgressed)
Lineage
Marsallesa x wild Ethiopian/Sudanese natural mutant
Breeder
CIRAD-ECOM
History
A first-generation (F1) hybrid originating from a cross between Marsellesa and a male-sterile Ethiopian or Sudanese landrace variety. F1 hybrid varieties are still relatively new in coffee agriculture; only a handful have become commercially available to farmers in the last 15 years, and only in select countries. So far, Starmaya is the only F1 hybrid in the world that professional seed producers can propagate by seed, rather than through costly biotechnology. Before Starmaya, the only way to efficiently reproduce F1 hybrids for farmers has been through cloning (tissue culture cloning/somatic embryogenesis) or manual pollination of the mother and father plants, both of which methods are costly and have limited capacity. As early as 1998, coffee breeders recognized that it would be theoretically possible to propagate F1 hybrids via seed if one of the parent plants were sterile. If you place two different fertile coffee varieties—your desired hybrid Mother and Father varieties—together in a typical field of coffee, some offspring would be the result of Mother to Mother crossing (resulting in offspring that look like the Mother), some Father to Father (offspring like the Father), and only some would be Mother to Father (offspring hybrids of the two). This is obviously an inefficient way to produce hybrid seed. However, if one of the varieties in the field is sterile (meaning it does not produce pollen), then any offspring (e.g., coffee cherries, the product of sexual reproduction of the Mother and Father) that appear on male sterile plants must be hybrids between Mother x Father. Wind or pollinators would carry the pollen from the pollen-producing variety onto the sterile variety, and the resulting cherries would necessarily be hybrids. The challenge was to find a naturally male sterile plant that could be a suitable breeding parent. In 2001, researchers from Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD) collaborating in a public-private coffee breeding project with ECOM, noticed a male-sterile Arabica plant growing in a population of wild Ethiopian and Sudanese coffees on the La Cumplida farm in Nicaragua. Breeders crossed it with Marsellesa, a newer-generation rust-resistant variety (Timor Hybrid 832/2 x Villa Sarchi CIFC 971/10). After observing good performance in field trials in Nicaragua, ECOM released the variety, naming it Starmaya.

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