As a plant breeder, you have developed a new variety, a product usually resulting from years of breeding and selecting. Or you might have discovered a spontaneous mutation within an existing variety. Or perhaps you discovered a spontaneous seedling with unique characteristics. In any of these cases, it could be lucrative to protect this new variety under plant breeders’ rights. It would be advisable to conduct sufficient trials with the new variety first to ascertain both its external qualities and its production characteristics for yourself but also to determine to what degree the variety is sufficiently unique, uniform and stable if you decide to actually apply for plant breeders’ rights. It is important, however, to submit the application for plant breeders’ rights in good time, preferably before you start marketing the plants.

Strategy

Once an application for plant breeders’ rights for your new variety has been submitted, it would be advisable to take the next step: map out a propagation strategy. There are a number of options:

Limit propagation and production to what you do yourself
You can, of course, decide not to let anyone else propagate and/or produce your new variety and do it all yourself. You will then be sure of having control over the supply and also, to a certain extent, over the price.

Licensing contracts with other growers
It would also be possible when working together with New Variety to find one or more propagating companies that would like to sign a licensing contract with you for propagating the new variety. Such a licensing contract could be one of three kinds: propagating solely for the licensee’s own use/production, propagating solely for supplying third parties, or propagating for both the licensee’s own use/production and supplying third parties.

Becoming a supplier of cuttings
As the owner, you could also control propagation yourself by supplying other growers with cuttings that they will then grow on.

Information

When you have a new trademark, you can contact New Variety BV at absolutely no obligation. We are very interested in new plant varieties and we will be pleased to assist you in protecting and marketing your trademark.