The series of our interviews continues! This time we get to know more about Mercier and its role in Biobesticide.
PNO Consultants had an interesting talk with Olivier ZEKRI and got interesting details, read them all here!
I’m Olivier ZEKRI, in charge of R&D in my company. Mercier group it’s a family group, since 1890 we are involved in viticulture business, providing grafted plants for all the wine growers in the world. We are leader in plant production in France, and the 2nd one in the world, we provide more or less 20 million of plant per year. We are also winegrowers with 70 ha vineyard and more or less 400.000 bottles produced per year – AOP Fiefs Vendéens. We have our own lab – Mercier Novatech – dedicated to research, analysis and selection.
We start Biobesticide adventure some years ago before the project with some preliminary studies with Jonathan Gerbore – Greencell former R&D manager – about Pythium effect on GTD on grapevine. It was natural to continue the studies through this BBI project.
We are involved at the late stage as end-user of formulated products, to evaluate the efficiency and the application of the product on grapevine, in nursery conditions.
Vineyard panorama will change a lot the next 10 coming years, we will stop our phytosanitary products dependency and for that we’ll have to innovate a lot with biocontrol protection and new genetics resources uses. Vegetal will become determinant!
To be in good health to continue to manage all our wonderful project that we have to handle. Regarding Biobesticide, it will be for an important year where we’ll start to test directly on field the BBI solutions. So we can just hope to have nice results.