09/16/08 Helping to Save the Crop

Helping to Save the Crop. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. Rain is good. Rain is bad. During the growing season, rain is welcomed as the young plants and trees are developing and crops begin to grow but as harvest time nears any substantial precipitation can quickly become a crop destroyer as fruit swells and splits. The result is fruit left on the trees and money down the producers drain. In England where it tends to rain a bit they have been working on this problem with cherries and as we talked yesterday, Plant Health Care researcher Jason Holohan says they have made some giant strides saving the fruit with a product called Pretect. HOLOHAN: We've got acceptance of about 80% of the market. We've had big pressure last year and a lot of people trialed it last year and this year a lot of people have harvest crop because of the fact that they've been using Pretect and without it they wouldn't have a harvest this year. The last 2 years have been plagued with heavy rains on almost a daily basis and by spraying their trees with Pretect before the rains the plants are better prepared for the stress of the additional moisture. Holohan says that they are looking beyond cherries as well. HOLOHAN: We're doing it with apples as well. We're working with apples and using the exact same product and it's increasing the maturity of apples and we're bringing it forward by about a week, the harvest date. We've got a lot of data on this. We've got a lot of Spanish trial data on the maturity of tomatoes; on olives. We're increasing olives by 3.3% yield and then increasing olive oil content as well. So we've got a lot of data coming in the next 12 months purely on tree crops. Pretect by Plant Health Care is currently undergoing trials in the U.S. and is not currently registered for use but if you have questions you can contact them through their website. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.