Mark Hoffmann, small fruits Extension specialist at N.C. State University cautions strawberry growers about upcoming cooler temperatures that could impact fruit production.
Hoffmann issued the caution earlier today as potential frost events could occur Thursday and Friday.
“We are not out of the woods. Conditions are calling for one or two more potential frost nights in North Carolina,” Hoffmann said. “Additionally, rain last night and this morning might have made your row covers wet and heavy. However, tonight and tomorrow call for potential frost damage again and you might require frost protection! If you can, dry your row -covers before using them tonight.”
According to AWIS Weather Services, temperatures are expected to drop to as low as 36 degrees on Thursday and Friday mornings in Raleigh, North Carolina where N.C. State is located.
While all industries have been seriously affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, food and agriculture have been among the hardest hit segments of the U.S. economy. The primary reason lies in the composition of household food expenditures.
The impacts of the pandemic appear to vary by commodity based on two critical issues: perishability and labor use. Perishables like fruits, vegetables and milk are among the hardest hit. Many of these industries also depend on labor for growing and harvesting.
There is no immediate shortage of food in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). However, the current demand for items such as grocery-size products and on-demand delivery is greater than what is in abundant supply – bulk, large-sized products and processed shipments to restaurants that remain open.
This demand-supply mismatch appears to mimic anecdotal evidence of price spikes and empty store shelves on the consumer side and the collapse of demand and dumping of food on the farm side, with a range of linked effects in the middle.
Households spent $1.7 trillion on food in 2018, 54% of which was spent on food away from the home at restaurants, bars, sports venues and other establishments, according to the USDA Economic Research Service. A dramatic drop in foot traffic at all types of restaurants began in the second week of March.
Supermarkets and grocery outlets have also experienced a significant reduction in foot traffic. But delivery and on-demand services have been strained by the sudden surge in demand from people under stay-at-home orders and social distancing guidelines, which includes nearly 90% of the U.S. population.
With the drastic fall in food demand away from home, multiple forces were unleashed rapidly, causing ripples that stretched farther into every food and agricultural commodity.
First, the supply chain serving food service industries did not have many buyers. A case in point is cheese, where the major supplier, Wisconsin, found two-thirds of its demand fall to near zero within a week or two.
Second, social distancing guidelines and shuttered non-essential businesses affected supply chains serving both food services and retail grocers.
The results include a significant slowdown in the operations of processing and distribution, shortage of workers at farm, processing and distribution (trucking) facilities, and a shortage of cleaning and sanitizing supplies. Compounding these effects are the resources spent in contact tracing and quarantine if and when a worker tested positive for COVID-19.
Third, is the urgent need to transition products run through food services into those that consumers need at the grocery store. For example, restaurants usually buy diced vegetables, like onions, in 60-pound bags, but consumers at grocery stores usually buy 3- to 5-pound bags of unpeeled onions. Also, large cheese blocks sold to food services, which generally have sizable storage space, cannot be chopped overnight into packs of ounces and pounds to sell at grocery stores.
(The author is a professor of agricultural and applied economics in the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Chen Zhen, associate professor in the department of agricultural and applied economics, contributed to this story.)
A wet winter in South Carolina has presented challenges to the state’s strawberry producers. But South Carolina’s strawberry production is looking good this year despite the rainy winter, according to Bruce McLean, Jr., Clemson (S.C.) Extension area commercial horticulture agent for Dillon County, Horry County, Marion County and Malboro County.
He said production this season is starting to pick up despite some disease issues associated with excessive moisture.
“The quality looks really good,” McLean said. “Because of the wet weather that we’ve had; we’ve had some (disease) issues with botrytis (gray mold); angular leaf spot, we’ve seen in a couple of different areas; and also some anthracnose. For the most part, it seems like we were able to control it pretty well.”
McLean said in his four-county area located in the northeastern part of the state, strawberry acreage is limited to smaller scale operations. He said there are approximately 10 to 12 strawberry farmers who tailor their crop to the retail market. All have had to deal with weather-related issues with this year’s crop. McLean said the rainfall totals have been “above normal.”
“We’ve just had an excess of water and it’s really flared up the gray mold and anthracnose and angular leaf spot,” said McLean. He pointed out his area in South Carolina is not alone with production challenges.
“Seems like everybody’s had very similar problems. The only other problem that we’ve really seen to any degree has been spider mites. It’s always kind of a perennial issue with strawberry production. It’s something that we are scouting for. Every time it seems like we have a hot spot, we identify it and make some recommendations and it quells it down a little bit,” McLean said.
Jeff Cook, University of Georgia Cooperative Extension Agriculture and Natural Resources agent for Peach and Taylor counties, says the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has forced peach producers and farming operations to take extra precautions when protecting their crews from becoming sick.
“They have separate crews so they’re trying to keep the crews a little more separated this year. But the biggest thing that they’ve all said to me is they’re trying to keep the crews away from the outside world,” Cook said.
Farmers limit the workers to the amount of time they’re exposed to other people that are not part of their specific crew.
“They’re trying to help reduce the amount of time they’re having to spend at the store or at the bank. Once a week they carry them to the bank and once a week they carry them to the grocery store,” Cook said. “To the farmer, if their crews get sick and they can’t pick peaches, then we’re in big trouble.”
Cook said some peach workers have been in place since February when farms started the peach pruning peach process. The second crews are now in place to help thin the peaches since a lot more people and hands are required. These peach crews also include those who’ll work in the packing sheds and help harvest once trees are ready.
Cook estimates that there are 10 to 12 workers in one crew, though, multiple crews may ride the same bus to a particular orchard. The workers are not close together out in the fields. Each one has a specific tree they work on, and trees are normally spaced 16 feet apart.
“When they are thinning, the ride there is as close as they are going to get to each other. When they’re out in the field, they’re not really near each other,” Cook said.
United States Congressman Austin Scott (GA-08) believes if there is a fourth coronavirus relief bill to help people like farmers and aid agribusinesses, it will not happen fast.
Scott, along with fellow Congressman Sanford Bishop (GA-02), spoke about the recently passed Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act and its different provisions. Due to circumstances regarding the health and well-being of members of Congress, passing another piece of legislation may have to wait.
“There are 535 members of Congress. There are at least five that have tested positive for the coronavirus. There are several others that have been on quarantine because they’ve been exposed to it,” said Scott on April 3. “One of the questions is, at what point are you able to bring 535 people back in to work in close proximity and actually get something done? I think this last bill was unique in the way that it was passed. I don’t think it is possible to pass another bill with simply the Senate effectively drafting the bill and the House, including myself, voting yes by voice on the bill.”
The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was an integral part of the $2 trillion CARES Act. It was designed to aid small businesses recover amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. However, it may not have enough funds to support the $350 billion allocated for the program. Congressman Buddy Carter (GA-01) believes additional funding will be ready if needed through a Phase 4 relief package. Scott reiterates his position that another stimulus package will still take some time to pass.
“I would tell you, if there is a fourth relief bill, I think a couple of the areas that are going to have to be looked at. (No.) 1, from a timing standpoint, I think it would be more than 30 days from now before another bill passed. (No.) 2, at that stage, we will have a better indication of what the revenue impact is on state and local governments and on our healthcare providers,” Scott said.
This file picture shows whiteflies on a squash leaf.
By Clint Thompson
Between the coronavirus pandemic and decreased demand for their product, Florida’s vegetable farmers have had their share of challenges this past month. Add whiteflies to the list.
According to the South Florida Vegetable Pest and Disease Hotline, the Immokalee, Florida area in South Florida has seen hundreds of acres abandoned. This is due to irregular ripening and high incidences of tomato yellow leaf curl virus disease (TLCVD).
There’s been some reports of 50% to 80% of the disease being seen in several vegetable fields. According to Gene McAvoy, University of Florida/IFAS Regional Vegetable Extension Agent IV Emeritus and President of the National Association of County Agricultural Agents, whiteflies have been problematic in tomatoes, watermelons and other cucurbits.
“We’ve had a number of growers destroy substantial amount of acreage, even before this whole COVID-19 thing blew up. We’ve had a lot of irregular ripening because of high levels of whiteflies. Most of our growers are using a resistant (tomato) variety so that’s not an issue in the round tomatoes. But especially with the Romas that have no resistance, they’re getting tore up,” McAvoy said.
The whiteflies’ impact on tomatoes is felt across Central Florida and on the East Coast where pressure is higher in older tomatoes. Whiteflies are also problematic in cucumber and pepper and are increasing in melons.
High incidences of whiteflies may be attributed to the mild winter. While colder temperatures don’t eliminate whiteflies, they do kill many of their wild hosts and slow population development in cultivated hosts. Warmer temperatures allow for larger whitefly populations to overwinter and become mobile earlier.
“Down here our strategy is to try to have clean fallow in the summer and not have anything for them. We usually start off pretty low but if we have a warm, mild winter like we’ve had the past couple of years where they start building in the fall, they just continue going this time of year. They basically become unmanageable,” McAvoy said.
Budbreak in pecan trees is under way in orchards across the Southeast, and farmers need to be wary of one particular pest – budmoths.
Budmoths were a nuisance last year on pecan trees and have already showed signs of infesting young trees during the first week in April.
A bag of shelled pecans in this file photo.
University of Georgia Cooperative Extension pecan entomologist Angelita Acebes offered tips on her blog on how to identify a budmoth and what management options are available at this point in the growing season.
Pecan growers can recognize budmoth damage by the webbing around newly-developed leaves and small dark spots on the tips of those leaves.
During the spring, adult moths start laying eggs and can lay eggs in about six days. Unfortunately, the young larvae will feed on the leaves. Then they spin a web to roll the leaves where they’ll bore into the shoot. Once in the shoot, an insecticide will be ineffective because it can’t reach them.
Whether to spray your trees at budbreak is a question that can go either way. Spraying at budbreak is an option since there’s a small window to effectively apply an insecticide. If farmers have time to scout, treating when the infestation is first noticed is also an option.
When considering what insecticide to apply, worm materials are more ideal if you can catch budmoth outbreaks early. If budmoth damage is severe and the initial outbreak was missed, Lorsban is the only option for quick control.
Count Daren Hanshaw in as one of the numerous Florida fruit and vegetable growers impacted by the coronavirus pandemic and the continued imports of produce from other countries.
Hanshaw Farms: Pictured are cucumbers left in the field.
Hanshaw who owns Hanshaw Farms in Immokalee, Florida, grows cucumbers, tomatoes, watermelons and cantaloupes on about 500 acres. He’s experienced the negative impact of the past month with all his crops.
“We’ve had a variety of ways that this thing has hit us. Obviously, we’re still waiting on about a $1.5 million of receivables of tomato money from the fall that these food service companies are not paying their bills,” Hanshaw said. “That hiccup started at the beginning of this before we really knew what it was going to do to our current crop. Our first problem was cash flow. The first problem was noticing that people were slowing down on paying their bills. That money is trickling in but obviously that money is what keeps this watermelon crop and this cantaloupe crop going and pays the labor every week for that.”
Hanshaw had about a 10-day period where he was harvesting cucumbers at $35 or $40 per box. That price dropped to $10 in the span of three days.
“It went from, everybody needing whatever you can harvest to well we better not harvest because we’re not even getting our labor and box back. The decision we had to make was to pull the plug rather than delivering them to the packing house basically just to trade money or to lose,” Hanshaw said.
“You had off-shore stuff still coming in to Pompano. You had Mexican stuff that was surging. It just seemed like the volume picked up just exactly at the least perfect time for us. On top of the fact, our customers were telling us they couldn’t take the product,” Hanshaw said.
Hanshaw said he has a fresh cut contract with two major companies, but just Monday did he receive the first three POs (purchase orders), where normally he should have had 15 loads per week. The demand for watermelons has dropped significantly and it shows in the market price. Hanshaw said the prices are 45% off of what they have been the past three years.
“I can’t disagree that there are more important things to get on somebody’s shopping list than watermelons. Obviously for us, in our world, they’re the most important thing going right now,” Hanshaw said. “I don’t believe that there is a surplus of fruit. It’s not like everybody down there has got a stellar crop. It’s demand and it’s competition with foreign product that’s beating us up.”
Last weekend’s cold temperatures may have impacted North Carolina’s grape production this season. According to Mark Hoffmann, North Carolina State small fruits Extension specialist, he should know more in the upcoming days about the severity of any frost damage that may have occurred throughout the state.
“The WineGrowers Association, they have a survey out to assess how much damage people are seeing. It’s going to take a couple of days before we know that,” Hoffmann said. “I know in the mountains they didn’t get a lot of frost. They didn’t get a lot of damage because they didn’t have a lot of shoot growth. In the lower areas, like the Yadkin Valley, they had shoot growth already two weeks ago. Pretty sure they got a lot of damage.”
He said on Friday, April 10, temperatures dropped into the 30s in the Yadkin Valley, outside of the mountains in the Piedmont area. To know how to manage frost damage in grapes, see Hoffmann tips on frost management in grapes.
“There’s so many other things in North Carolina that could impact yield production. If you get a lot of damage and you have to remove the shoot, then yes it will (impact yields). If you only have mild damage, then you might be okay,” Hoffmann said.
Grape production in North Carolina
Hoffmann said producers started harvesting two weeks ago in the eastern part of North Carolina. But the whole state should be picking at this point. Depending on how weather cooperates over the next month will impact how big the harvest window will be this year for grape producers.
“If we have a good year, we can go ’til the end of June. In a bad year, it can be over in like mid-May already,” Hoffmann said. “If it gets humid pretty soon and if we get a large, heavy rain event, which happened two years ago in May; it was in 2018 I believe, in the second week in May, we had a large rain event and then the third week we had another large rain event that basically shut it down.
“I would say April and the first two weeks of May, for sure, and then after that, I hope we have two to three more weeks.”
Hoffmann estimates that more than 1 million bottles of wine are produced every year in the state and there are 1,500 acres of grape production in state.
“Ten years ago, it was much smaller than that. We’re growing a lot. We have about 180 wineries which produces wine. The last 10 years it grew about 50%. It’s a pretty large industry,” Hoffmann said.
1) A bumblebee and sweat bee forage on the same flower, Cosmos sulphureus. 2)Sweat bees (Lasioglossum spp.) are so small they often go unnoticed. Sixteen species of these bees were collected visiting watermelon. 3) The Southern plains bumblebee (Bombus fraternus) is a frequent watermelon and wildflower pollinator on farms in South Carolina.
By Mimi Jenkins
A resilient and stable pollinator community includes a diverse suite of pollinators with a range of nesting habits, foraging behaviors and activity periods. These different behaviors and traits complement each other and can buffer against any year-to-year fluctuations or environmental changes that affect species differently.
BEYOND HONEY BEES
In many pollinator-dependent crop systems, honey bee colonies are brought onto the farm to provide the pollination services necessary to produce the crop. In the case of watermelon, a monoecious plant with separate male and female flowers that make it entirely dependent on pollinators to set fruit, using honey bee hives to pollinate the crop is widely recommended for growers to achieve high yields. While honey bees are an important agricultural pollinator, especially for industrial scale farms, considering alternative pollination sources that already exist in the natural environment helps buffer against ongoing honey bee losses and the rising cost of renting honey bee hives.
Wild native bee communities rely much more on the natural habitat of an area than honey bees because of their different nesting habits and because they are not actively managed by humans. Wild bees require habitat that provides food (flowers) and shelter (nesting materials and proper soil/environmental conditions). Other pollinating insects, such as flies and butterflies, share the need for floral resources with bees but many do not have a nest, and others require certain plant hosts or prey in their larval stage.
The flowering period of the wildflowers in this South Carolina strip began in May before watermelon bloom and lasted long after watermelon was done flowering, into August.
Implementing on-farm enhancements such as wildflower strips is one way to increase the availability and diversity of food resources for pollinators beyond the crop bloom period. Traits that should be considered for wildflowers in farm fields include: drought-tolerance, native to eco-region, fast germination rates, hardiness, difference in flowering period, length of flowering period and attractiveness to a variety of pollinating insects.
RESEARCH RESULTS
In a study I conducted from 2016 to 2018, the number of visits to watermelon was significantly higher for one group of pollinators (sweat bees in the genus Lasioglossum) when wildflowers were in a watermelon field compared to fields without wildflowers. These small, metallic grey-green bees nest underground and do not forage more than a few hundred meters from their nest.
In addition, the overall biodiversity of the pollinator community was higher in watermelon fields with wildflowers strips, with nearly twice the number of pollinator species collected on watermelon fields with wildflowers compared to control fields. The mean number of watermelon pollinating species per field was 15 species, and the mean number of total pollinators (including wildflower pollinators) per field was 24 species.
More than half (64 percent) of the watermelon pollinator species collected were also collected visiting one or more of five wildflower species in the study. This demonstrates that social colonies of bees, solitary bees and other insects like syrphid flies and butterflies utilize the multiple floral species as resources on the watermelon field in addition to the crop flowers when they are available. In fields with wildflowers, we also observed and collected a wide range of pollinators and insects that do not visit watermelon flowers but visited the wildflower species, such as several swallowtail butterfly species, cleptoparasitic bees and sunflower bees.
In conclusion, when wildflowers and weedy flowers are available on the farm landscape, a more diverse community of beneficial insects is supported. This community included declining species like Monarch butterflies, the American bumblebee and the Southern plains bumblebee as well as parasitic and predatory flies and wasps that can control crop pests.
