03/03/08 Fruit Spraying Conference

Fruit Spraying Conference. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. As technology continues its march forward, many industries are jumping into the queue. The tree fruit industry has been looking at embracing technology for spraying applications and Dr. Andrew Landers, Application Technology Specialist at Cornell University wants to get the principals together. LANDERS: What we'd like to do is bring up the subject of precision fruit spraying. As you and your listeners will know, in field crops we've had precision farming or precision agriculture using GPS and GIS and satellite navigation for spraying for nearly 2 decades and so it is time we did this with fruit crops. Particularly apples and grape vines. Dr. Landers is putting together the first ever North American Conference on Precision Fruit Spraying to be held in April. LANDERS: It's specifically aimed at researchers and policy makers. As you know we have the Washington Tree Fruit Commission who are great proponents of the tree fruit roadmap on a national level and in grapes we have the National Wine Grape Initiative to help bring a cohesiveness to grape research and extension throughout the nation. So it's quite timely that we put this together. According to Dr. Landers it's important as the industry grows to embrace these technologies. He says that the European growers are considerable ahead of the U.S. in that regard. LANDERS: We're specifically wanting to draw peoples attention to the European work so I'm bringing in some international speakers to discuss their work and also to show people what our specific research topics at Cornell have been. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.