– SPONSORED CONTENT – Strawberries can fall victim to various fungal and bacterial diseases, with crown rot and red stele root rot being 2 of the most common. As soilborne pathogens, these diseases can destroy your strawberries from the ground up and are often difficult to identify until it’s too late to properly manage the disease. These diseases thrive in …

The California Strawberry Commission (CSC) is announcing two key hires to advance the industry through research and communications. Dr. William “Bill” Turechek joins the CSC as the new Vice President of Research. Bill joins the CSC after serving since 2006 as a Research Plant Pathologist at the USDA-ARS Horticultural Research Laboratory in Fort Pierce, Florida, where he worked on epidemiology …

The UC Davis Strawberry Breeding Program is having two field days coming up.  The first, on May 24, will be held in Lompoc and the second will be held on June 14 at Meridien Road in Prunedale.  Both field days will feature the program’s day-neutral varieties. More details about each meeting are on the pdf fliers attached below. Attached Files UCD Day …

As attention focuses on heart disease this February for American Heart Month, the latest research on strawberries, including their potential heart health benefits, was presented at the 9th biennial Berry Health Benefits Symposium (BHBS) in Tampa, FL. This research adds to the growing body of scientific evidence supporting the role of strawberry consumption in promoting heart health. According to Britt …

Strawberry growers, researchers, and other industry members from around the globe are invited to attend the 10th North American Strawberry Symposium (NASS), a meeting of  to be held in conjunction with the annual North American Strawberry Growers Association (NASGA) conference, March 7-10, 2023 at the Embassy Suites in San Luis Obispo, California, USA. California, where nearly 90% of U.S. strawberries are grown, features a unique coastal environment …

Washington State University is leading a new project that aims to advance soil-biodegradable mulches and develop innovative methods for recycling the plastic. The projects is funded by a $8 million, four-year Specialty Crop Research Initiative grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Growers of crops like strawberries, raspberries, pumpkins, tomatoes, and melons depend on plastic mulch to …

Two newly developed, low-cost tests that use nanoparticles to detect chemicals can accurately measure tiny amounts of two potentially harmful herbicides in fruits, vegetables and their products. Reporting in the journal Food Chemistry, a Washington State University research team used two testing methods to measure the levels of two herbicides, namely atrazine and acetochlor, in samples of apples, strawberries, cabbage, corn and …

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. …

While not exactly the stuff of sci-fi movies, scientists have developed a “ray gun” that emits a light hazardous to a pestilence that devastates many types of crops. Fumiomi Takeda, a research horticulturalist, and Wojciech Janisiewicz, retired research plant pathologist, from the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Innovative Fruit Production, Improvement, and Protection unit in Kearneysville, WV, led a team that used shortwave ultraviolent …

For a few years, University of Florida (UF) plant pathologist Natalia Peres has used an ultraviolet light system to thwart strawberry pathogens. Peres even published a study this year that showed the system helps control powdery mildew. Two fellow researchers with the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) have now used the same robotic UVC applicator to show that …