WSU Research Grants.

WSU Research Grants. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Jay Brunner, Director of WSU’s Tree Fruit Research and Extension Center is excited about grant money that WSU was recently awarded that will help continue important research being done.

BRUNNER: There’s some longevity and that’s good because a lot of these projects that we’re looking at are not short term solutions to complex problems and these specialty crop grants include not just etymologists working on an etymology problem but they’re trans-disciplinary so we have an economist and a social scientist working with us on the enhancing biological control project.

Brunner says by incorporating other areas into the research there is a better final result.

BRUNNER: And the idea is to do the research and to capture the best ways to transfer that research knowledge to the clientele then actually do the transfer, do the education or do the extension and so it’s a multi-year project but it’s designed to deliver new knowledge and technology to the end user.

Owing to the fact it takes a number of years to do the research in specific areas it can also take some time in bringing results out to the public.

BRUNNER: If you take an example of pheromones, pheromones were discovered in the early 1970’s for codling moth and there wasn’t a commercially developed product until the 1990’s and it took another decade for our industry to really come up to significant adoption.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.