Upright Fruiting Offshoots
We continued our collaborative developement of planar fruiting wall architecture for high efficiency sweet cherry orchards-The UFO system. We are currently working with an illustrator to finalize a one-page (two sided) handout for industry, illustrating the key training steps. Third-leaf yeilds in a collaborating orchard ranged from 1.5 tons/ac ('Early Robin'/'Gisela 6' and 'Kiona'/'Gisela 5') to about 5 tons/ac for 'Coweche/'Gisela 5'.Yeild of third-leaf 'Selah'/Gisela 6' was estimated at 4.5 tons/ac.
What's New
WSU research teams have been awarded more than $15 million in U.S. Department of Agriculture grants aimed at specialty crops such as tree fruit, wine grapes and potatoes
Specifically, the grants will fund the following WSU projects:
• $3.8 million to a team led by plant physiologist Matthew Whiting for “A Total Systems Approach to Developing a Sustainable, Stem-free Sweet Cherry Production, Processing and Marketing System.” Collaborators include cherry breeder Nnadozie Oraguzie; biological systems engineer Qin Zhang; Fran Pierce, director of WSU’s Center for Precision Agricultural Systems; plant physiologist and genomicist Amit Dhingra; and food scientist Carolyn Ross.