The globalization of Indian agriculture in recent years resulted in the need for the production of high quality products having comparative advantage. To meet this requirement, the trend of F1 hybrid seed usage in vegetables is increasing globally. The popularity of F1 hybrids is due to their vigor, uniformity, disease resistance, stress toleranceand good horticultural traits including, earliness & long shelf life and giving consistent stable yield. From the Breeders point of view, it is a fast and convenient way to combine desirable characters of vegetables together and also a way to control intellectual property rights through control and protection of Parental lines by Breeders. F1 hybrid vegetable seed production can be divided into Hand-pollinated and Gene-control pollinated. The gene-control system can be due to self-incompatibility or Male sterility. In the absence of gene-control system, a tedious hand-emasculation and pollination system has to be used to produce F1 seed. This method in principle is simple as it involves manual emasculation of the pollen producing organ, the anthers; followed by the hand pollination with the pollen of the male Parent and then preventing the other pollen from contaminating the pollinated flowers. This method is labor intensive and requires a team of skillful growers with lot of patience, commitment and able to follow instructions accurately.
The main task of the Seed producers is the cost effective production systems, selection & management of skilled growers and having good team of technicians. The distribution of hybrid vegetable seed production in the world is thus restricted to specific regions where cost effective labor, climate, weather and availability of good growers are the deciding factors. India is one of these countries that meets the requirements and producing huge volumes of hand pollinated F1 vegetable seed. Sagi Seeds Private Limited is incorporated in India, with its main objective to provide reliable & consistent Seed Multiplication and related services to Global Seed Industry. The promoters associated with this company have vast experience in Global Seed Production environment and have expertise to use modern technology in Seed Production to meet global quality standards.
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