Agriculture News

Unseasonable Winter Weather Takes A Bite Out Of Georgia's Peach Crop

For a lot of people up and down the East Coast, Georgia is synonymous with peaches. Think about it; when have you ever heard someone wax poetic about a California peach?

Turns out, though, Georgia peaches, and Southern peaches in general, are having a really tough year.

Mark Sanchez is the CEO of Lane Packing in Fort Valley, Ga. It's one of the big growers in the four county area smack in the middle of Georgia where peaches come from. His office by the loading dock is in fact in Peach County. He says climate is the secret to Georgia's peach dominance. He says California can't touch Georgia's weather. "In Georgia we have the cool nights, lot of rainfall, very hot summers," Sanchez said.

That makes a juicy peach. Hot in the summer here? You bet. It's those cool nights that were missing last winter and that's a problem. Sanchez said before peaches bloom in the spring, they need long, uninterrupted stretches of cold in the winter.

New Manure Sidedress Method Lowers Fertilizer Costs, Increases Yields

With corn needing nitrogen, and pigs and cattle producing a lot of it, anything that offers a better way to use their waste to fortify crops should intrigue farmers. Two agriculture experts at The Ohio State University have redesigned a metal tractor attachment so that it allows farmers to put manure on a field while crops are emerging.Applying manure to growing crops, which is not widely done in Ohio or nationwide, can boost yields, reduce nutrient losses, and give livestock producers and commercial manure applicators another window of time to unload their waste and enrich their crops.While draglining manure, a process that involves applying manure through a hose that pumps it directly from the livestock facility, is not new to many Ohio farmers, it is rarely used to apply manure on a growing crop.

This Cornell scientist saved an $11-million industry — and ignited the GMO wars

It started with rotting flesh. Slicing into the green skin of a Hawaiian papaya ordinarily yields juicy, salmon-colored fruit that's almost custard-like in its consistency and sweetness. But in the early 1990s, one Hawaiian farmer instead found bits of whitish, dried-out flesh in his recently harvested fruit. On the skin were discolored spots resembling tiny rings. It was a sign of trouble for hundreds of Hawaiian papaya farmers who, for the next several years, would lose field after field of their crop — altogether an $11-million dollar industry. The culprit was an incurable virus called Papaya Ring Spot Virus.  In 1992, Dennis Gonsalves, a plant pathologist at Cornell University who grew up in the region most acutely affected by the virus, came up with a wild idea to stop it. He wanted to vaccinate the papaya crop from the virus using genetic engineering. To do it, Gonsalves and two other scientists (his wife Carol Gonsalves and David R. Lee) opened up the papaya genome and carefully inserted a gene from the ring spot virus into its genetic code.  After nearly a decade of work, Gonsalves and his team created a papaya plant that was genetically resistant to ring spot. The Gonsalves' crops blossomed across farms that had been decimated by the virus. Today, their fruit, which they named the Rainbow papaya, dominates Hawaii's papaya exports.  Yet instead of ending a storm, as the crop's name might suggest, the Rainbow papaya unleashed its own tempest.

After Oranges

We know that the orange is in fact green. The fruit changes to its namesake color when exposed to cool air. Yet, when the temperature drops below 28 degrees for longer than four hours, ice will form within an orange. The peel will show no injury, but the frozen flesh will turn mushy and the orange will fall from the tree, inedible. When the force that makes us can also ruin us, when a lethal irony is at play, we call the story a comedy or a tragedy, depending on the ending. Even if it is just an orange. 

By the time the brown fungus of Alternaria alternata is spotted on the leaves of a Minneola tangelo tree growing in a low, wet grove, it is probably too late. The tree will be helpless to do anything but drop the fruit. The eggs of the Mediterranean fruit fly are laid below the skin of a host orange. After seven days, the larvae will hatch and feed on the sweet flesh. The symptoms of citrus tristeza virus include small leaves and twig dieback. Beneath the bark, the tree’s trunk will resemble a honeycomb. A tree like that can’t support itself. That’s one way the story can end. Tristeza is the Spanish word for sadness.