In the past two years, West Coast vegetables growers have been asked to absorb stratospheric aggregate inflationary input costs while at the same time trying to find a way to pass on 20%-30% inflationary costs, presenting them with an unsustainable dilemma. Without a long-term solution to this dilemma, we could all see fewer vegetables finding their way to grocers’ shelves. …
Growers were happy to see potato prices rise overall in the Pacific Northwest last year. The final value of Idaho’s 2021 potato crop sold was $1.04 billion, up 14 percent from 2020. The marketing year average price for potatoes in Idaho was $8.46 per cwt, up $1.18 from last year. In Oregon, the 2021 potato crop sold was valued at $218 million, up …
Despite the greatly increasing consumer interest for organic spinach in the U.S. and worldwide, production is not keeping pace with demand. To help overcome some of the challenges facing organic spinach production, Vijay Joshi, Ph.D., a Texas A&M AgriLife Research plant systems physiologist at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center in Uvalde, was recently awarded a grant from the U.S. Department of …
Strawberry farmers worldwide may get help from new University of Florida research that shows a way to battle one of the fruit’s fiercest foes. The key: combine genomic data with phenomics. The genome amounts to all the DNA in an organism. Phenomics is the study of plant growth, performance and composition. Through phenomics, scientists use DNA to measure plant traits. …
A team of researchers has assembled a reference genome for Solanum lycopersicoides, a wild relative of the cultivated tomato, and developed web-based tools to help plant researchers and breeders improve the crop. Solanum lycopersicoides (S. lycopersicoides) harbors a gene making the plant resistant to a particular strain of bacterial speck disease. The gene could be introduced into cultivated tomatoes to protect …
If you savor a juicy watermelon in the scorching summer heat, farmers toil to meet your tastes. But, like all farmers, those who produce watermelons seek ways to control diseases, so they don’t lose all or part of their crops. The needs of growers drive Yiannis Ampatzidis to use artificial intelligence to detect pathogens early and accurately. One such disease, …
Researchers at UC Davis have found a new, safe way to treat dairy manure for use as a high quality, organic liquid fertilizer on fresh produce crops. Watch this interview with Ruihong Zhang from UC Davis as she shares the results of their studies and read more in California Dairy Magazine. Please thank this video’s sponsor Clean Energy for their industry support.
While they can’t make it rain, California water districts and farmers are finding creative ways to be a part of the solution to severe drought conditions and subsiding groundwater levels by sinking water back into the earth during the “wet season”. Watch this brief interview with Chase Hurley from Triangle T Water District as he shares some success stories and …
Cowpea is an important crop in many parts of the world, especially sub-Saharan Africa. It is resilient and can grow in areas with little rainfall and low-quality soils. But as hardy as it is, cowpea yields can decrease by drought and low levels of soil phosphorus. In a recent study, researchers determined cowpea root characteristics that could help the plants grow …
Photosynthesis has evolved in plants for millions of years to turn water, carbon dioxide, and the energy from sunlight into plant biomass and the foods we eat. This process, however, is very inefficient, with only about 1% of the energy found in sunlight ending up in the plant. Scientists at UC Riverside and the University of Delaware have found a …
