Organic Fruit Production in Europe

PART I: SHORT HISTORY OF ORGANIC FARMING The organic fruit production in Europe is not only a matter of statistics, regulations and tables but also has a meaningful historical background. So as an introduction, we can take a brief excursion back to the roots and the evolution of organic farming. (The following text is closely—but not entirely—based on an overview article of Gunter Vogt, 2000a). Organic farming’s origins in the first decades of the 20th century need to be understood in the context of five main aspects

Consumer Reaction to the «Flavour Group Concept» to introduce Scab Resistant Apple Varieties into the Market. «Variety-Teams» as a Further Development of the Concept

A tool to ease the market introduction of scab resistant apple varieties in supermarkets, is the so-called «Flavour Group Concept (FGC; Weibel and Grab, 2000) that has been developed by FiBL and «Coop» (second biggest supermarket retailer of Switzerland) already in 1995. The FGC is providing to the buyers additional information on the specific flavour direction of that "unknown" apple cultivar in front of them (mild to sweet; spicy-tart; predominantly tart). In 2002 a consumer behaviour study was undertaken by «IHA/GfK-Switzerland» Institute to evaluate the consumer response to the FGC. The results reveal that 36 % of the persons interviewed at the point of sale considered additional information on the flavour direction of the apple cultivars as «important» and 40 % as «very important». Information on flavour direction was considered as the second important information at the shelf (59 % score), compared to the general presentation of the apples with 78 % score. On basis of these positive results, Coop introduced the FGC also for conventional apples. One year later, also the biggest supermarket retailer of Switzerland «Migros»introduced a FGC for organic and conventional apples. To develop further the FGC, in the year 2002, a consortium of the supermarket chain Coop Switzerland, organic apple growers, retailers and FiBL experts joined together in a so called «Variety Team». There, in contrast to Variety Clubs, the focus is not a particular variety but the active creation and promotion of an attractive assortment of scab resistant apple varieties in a well co-ordinated and thus for growers and retailers most efficient way. Investments and risks are evenly shared between the Team Partners. The first cultivar promoted is «Ecolette»

Homotopy Ends and Thomason Model Categories

In the last year of his life, Bob Thomason reworked the notion of a model category, used to adapt homotopy theory to algebra, and used homotopy ends to affirmatively solve a problem raised by Grothendieck: find a notion of model structure which is inherited by functor categories. In this paper we explain and prove Thomason's results, based on his private notebooks. The first half presents Thomason's ideas about homotopy ends and its generalizations. This material may be of independent interest. Then we define Thomason model categories and give some examples. The usual proof shows that the homotopy category exists. In the last two sections we prove the main theorem: functor categories inherit a Thomason model structure, at least when the original category is enriched over simplicial sets and fibrations are preserved by limits.Comment: 39 pages, AMS-TeX file using picte

Vergleichende Qualitätsforschung - Neue Ansätze und Impulse täten gut

Eine am FiBL durchgeführte Auswertung neuer Studien im Bereich der vergleichenden Qualitätsforschung brachte die Bestätigung bekannter Befunde und Tendenzen, zeigte aber keine grundsätzlich neuen Ansätze. Für den biologischen Landbau bleibt die Qualitätsforschung von zentraler Bedeutung