Fruit
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While we don’t know the status of the orange crop in Florida yet, prior to the storm making landfall speculators were concerned about a significant hit to the citrus crop from the storm, according to this article in Bloomberg (may be paywalled). Growers are already under stress due to citrus greening, and some were not…
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If you are an extension agent or producer in the Southeast, you might find these guides on hurricane preparation and recovery from the USDA Southeast Climate Hub to be very useful. There is a guide for each state in the Southeast but also a separate guide for each commodity, not just the regular commercial commodities…
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The weather last winter gave peach growers frustrating conditions in Georgia and Alabama. A cold November 2021 brought plenty of chill hours to the Southeast. Then an early warm-up caused the early blooming varieties of fruit trees to flower earlier than usual. But temperatures down to the 20s on March 13 caused significant loss of…
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All the wet conditions in the Southeast have brought another hindrance to our farmers–the lack of sunshine associated with high humidity and cloud cover as we get round after round of rain. The lack of sunshine is causing problems for farmers that need the sun’s energy to finish off crops like corn and pecans. Here…
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You might remember last spring that we had accumulated enough chill hours early in the winter that fruit trees and bushes were ready to bloom as soon as a warm spell came. And then a couple of late frosts destroyed a significant number of the blooms and young fruit after they flowered. The effects of…
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The dry weather has had many impacts on our Southeast farmers this year. One of the consequences is that while disease pressure has been fairly low, the pests are out in full force. This is true for almost every crop. This story by Clint Thompson in Specialty Crop Industry discusses how the drought is affecting…
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Lenny Wells of the University of Georgia posted an interesting story in his Pecan Blog a couple of weeks ago on the impacts of heat on pecan trees when temperatures were so warm. It turns out that pecans can do well in very high temperatures as long as they have the right amount of water.…