Stimulating the Grape Interest in the State

I'm Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

The Washington State Grape Society's annual meeting and tradeshow, being held this year November 13 and 14 in Grandview, is a great place for growers to find out the latest on industry advancements and issues. Deb Heintz says one of the things that growers like to see at the meeting are panel discussions.

HEINTZ: And we've got two of them this year. One is on early watering of wine grapes where they'll sit down and talk about the pros and cons. There's been discussions over the years as to whether or not that's a good, bad or indifferent thing. So we've got some people on the panel that will help us understand that a little bit better. The second panel is Vintage in Review, the Big Concord Crop: Working Management Options. From that we're going to be able to perhaps have a little bit of understanding of this huge crop that's coming in this harvest and perhaps how growers prepared for it. Along with that is State of the Grapes; Trent Ball is always great in giving us an overview of the harvest year and perhaps what we can expect in the future years.

In addition there will be a compost session covering what is compost, how you can use it, the nutrient release of compost and why testing of compost is important, as well as the offering of pesticide credits. Event keynote speakers include Dr. Karkee and Dr. Lav Khot, both with WSU, who will be talking about the state of drones in agriculture.

HEINTZ: We're going to be talking about what they are, how they work - and then some additional technical information provided as far as how are drones working in the field by monitoring crop health, collecting data - that type of thing.

For more information be sure to visit www.grapesociety.org.

That's Washington Ag Today.

I'm Lacy Gray on the Ag Information Network.