FLAQ® your guarantee for
healthy starting material Florensis are aiming for starting material which is free from pests and diseases, quick to start growing and with complete purity in breeding. To guarantee this to the greatest degree possible, FLAQ (meaning Florensis Approved Quality) was founded a few years ago.
What does FLAQ mean? All varieties which are used for breeding are tested for damaging viruses and bacterias. If or when any of these are found, the material will go through a rigorous and sometimes long lasting process of cleaning in the laboratory. The principal of making the material virus-free is based on the fact that the virus is growing just a bit slower than the young plant itself. Therefore, by taking over and over again the youngest part of the tissue, the virus can be eliminated step by step. But, the possibilities to do this vary per crop and virus!
Besides testing to see if the material is virus-free, flowering trials are also conducted. The flower colour and the plant habit are checked to ensure the variety is true to type.
Of course the controls do not end with a disease-free start. Mother stock for cuttings are placed in a secure, insect-free greenhouse where netting, disinfected shoes, gloves, protocols and so on make sure that the possibility of new infections is kept to a minimum. By constant testing and scouting, checks are made to ensure the crop still meets the set demands.
A good system only stays good through tight control so in addition to internal control the “Naktuinbouw” also looks over our shoulder, mainly checking the Elite-part which is set in FLAQ. At Florensis the responsibility for FLAQ is assigned to a small committee who regularly take care of updating of the system and organisation of audits by specially trained people.
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