What's Happening to the Blueberries?
With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I’m Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.
A multidisciplinary team of University of Georgia agriculture experts are working to determine causes and solutions to postharvest quality problems that have hit Georgia’s blueberry growers hard in recent seasons.
According to the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences Newswire, blueberries are known to be susceptible to postharvest injuries, resulting in fruit softening or splitting during harvest, handling and storage. Because the fruit appears to be growing and ripening properly on the plant during the growing season and even at harvest, discovering reduced fruit quality after harvest is an unpleasant surprise for producers.
By approaching the problem from three perspectives — plant disease, postharvest handling, and growing practices — they say that having a multidisciplinary research team working on the issue increases the likelihood of finding a solution.
The team began the research by collecting samples from the 2022 crop and will expand from there.
In 2022, the total value of Georgia’s blueberry crop was $348.7 million, making blueberries one of Georgia’s top 10 agricultural commodities.
To get more details on the research, visit the CAES Newswire: https://bit.ly/3DfcsFr
