September 17, 2025
Guillaume Menet
Breeding Team Lead - Global Breeding Cucurbits
email guillaume.menet@syngenta.com
In a competitive squash market, buyers and consumers demand tasty, healthy, firm fruits with vibrant color and consistent size and shape. Achieving this means navigating a wide range of challenges across the entire supply chain – from field resilience against diseases, pests, and climate shifts, to efficient harvesting and robust post-harvest handling for optimal storage and extended shelf life.
Syngenta Approach to Top Tier Quality Squash
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Quality Starts with the Seed
Excellent squash begins with the right seed choice. Syngenta’s global innovation ensures our varieties offer broad disease resistance, safeguarding crops against common threats that can lead to discolored and deformed fruit.
We also prioritize weather resilience, ensuring our signature squash varieties deliver high yields and are firm and unblemished at harvest. For summer squash (especially green cylindrical types), our varieties maintain a desirable shine without dulling and offer diverse shades of green to meet specific market preferences.
Our extensive global research capabilities also enable us to quickly develop solutions to emerging threats, such as new or more virulent strains of potyviruses or rising levels of Tomato Leaf Curl New Delhi Virus (ToLCDNV). Many of our varieties come with built-in resistance to common viruses and fungi.
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Ease of Harvesting
Efficient harvesting is critical for maintaining fruit quality, regardless of whether you’re growing in open fields or protected cultivation. Syngenta varieties are specifically bred to produce strong, upright plants which minimizes bruising and other damage, as well as reducing labor costs.
Traditional squash harvesting is labor-intensive, requiring frequent picking and the manual roping of plants to keep them erect. To address this, Syngenta develops varieties like Zefiros / Bladerunner that offer easier care and harvesting. These varieties feature more open, upright, and accessible plant structures, which provides fruits with greater natural protection, increases their visibility for pickers, and reduce the labor required.
Consistent fruit size also plays a vital role in enabling faster harvesting and packing. Robust disease protection extends your harvest window, allowing planting and harvesting even during periods of increased disease pressure.
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Passing the Transportability Test
In post-harvest, squash fruits must withstand storage and transportation, whether destined for local markets or longer-distance hauling. At Syngenta, this is a core consideration when we select varieties.
A critical quality indicator is how fruits perform when transitioning from refrigerated to room temperature conditions. This transition often leads to significant quality degradation, such as dark marks or changes in shape.
We rigorously test and evaluate fruit shape, coloration, and how quality evolves during storage. Through our comprehensive testing, simulating both cold chain (refrigeration) and ambient (room temperature) transit, we select varieties that respond the best to these conditions and adapt to the reality of the distribution chain. This is prevalent when breeding for protected crops in the autumn and winter months, where varieties are cultivated in Spain and Italy for the rest of Europe.
For example, Herakles ND and Lambda NDh- resistant to ToLCDV - were selected based on their strengths in protected environments in autum and winder and their performance post-harvest.
Performance at Every Step
At Syngenta, we take a holistic view of the entire squash chain. Our commitment is to continuously improve our varieties’ characteristics, ensuring they perform exceptionally well at every single step of your production and supply chain.
Signature Variety Highlight: Fortress Zucchini
Fortress green zucchini stands out as one of Syngenta’s leading varieties in the North America market, offering exceptional benefits for growers:
Signature Variety Highlight: Olympos
OLYMPOS is one of our newest additions to our assortment in Europe, for its adaptation to hot conditions and adverse pressure of potyviruses.
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