Hort Meeting

Hort Meeting. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

It’s time once again to make plans to attend the 105^th Annual Northwest Hort Expo December 7, 8, & 9 in Wenatchee. Mike Willett with the NW Hort Council will be one of the presenters and will be discussing pear exports.

WILLETT: The key issues for the Chinese appear to be concerns regarding the movement of fire blight and codling moth in the fruit. They don’t have fire blight in China and they don’t have codling moth in the eastern parts of China where most of the population is.

Willetts’ talk will be one of many to take a look at the fruit industry.

WILLETT: We think that we can deliver fruit to them free of codling moth. We just tend not to have codling moth problems in pears because they’re so much less susceptible to codling moth than apples are particularly the winter pear varieties.

He will talk about these issues with exporting pears to China and he says there is good research to help the export process.

WILLETT: We have research that was done by Ken Johnson who is also on the Hort program at OSU which shows that the fire blight bacteria does not survive on the surface of mature symptom-less fruit and that fruit really isn’t a vehicle to move the organism from one country to another.

Tomorrow Mike Willett will share some more of his insights into

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