Acreage Living Newsletter
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Beat the Summer Heat; Protecting your Vegetable Crops in Excessive Heat |
Multiple days of excessive heat can be hard on vegetable crops, especially ones known to be cool-season. Brassicas, lettuce, carrots and spinach are particularly vulnerable to bitterness, wilting, bolting, deformities and coloring that affect the quality of the produce. |
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Fly Control |
With summer in full gear it is a good time to evaluate how your fly control program is working. When horn fly numbers are greater than 200 flies per animal we see significant production losses associated with blood loss and decreased feed consumption. Numbers of face flies and stable flies are harder to assess because they only spend a small amount of time feeding on cattle but are still significant pests. |
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Welcome to SmarterAppleSpraying! |
The Intelligent Sprayer is the creation of a team of USDA-ARS engineers at Wooster, Ohio, led by Dr. Heping Zhu. It has been tested on nursery trees, peaches, grapes, and other large-canopy crops, and is now available commercially for retrofitting standard airblast sprayers. Our study is the first to evaluate the Intelligent Sprayer for control of the full range of pests and diseases on apples during the whole growing season. |
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The Current Cucurbit |
The main focus of our three-state (Iowa, Kentucky, and New York), three-year (2020-2022) project is on finding better ways to manage diseases, insect pests, and weeds in organic systems, and getting that information to growers. Our funding comes from USDA’s Organic Research and Extension Initiative (OREI). |