Why use 30 ft towers? That means pickers have to be on ladders or something, and it means adding fall protection and similar equipment. Why not multiple floors and 6 ft towers? Weird.
Ok, but let’s see how many times more irritated water they’re using. Conventional farmers get most of their water for free from the sky, and it’s clean, has no salts or calcium, and a balanced pH, unlike the municipal or county water these guys are having to buy.
Also, I’d like to see their AC bill for August and January, to say nothing of their light bill.
Near Richmond? Since when was Richmond running out of land? Build these things in LA or Singapore, not Richmond.
The genes discovered are to help reduce psyllids. Once the plant is infected with HLB, these genes offer no benefit.
And the genes don’t prevent psyllids, they just reduce them, and only if the plant is healthy enough to produce those volatiles. At best, it’ll make the infection take longer.
The only real long term protection is protection against the bacteria itself.
Sorry, don’t mean to be super negative, I just want to provide some perspective, as I don’t think the journalists writing these articles have (they’re journalists, they want clicks after all, the truth be damned).
Which is the opposite of what the current strategy for most growers is. Most groves are being planted with trees that are resistant to the most negative effects of HLB, and still grow and produce fruit. It still reduces their lifespan significantly, but if you get 5-7 years out of the tree with good fruit the whole time, it works out.
Can’t find a solution, adapt and live with it.
Yeah, that’s one thing that surprised me and the article. Why were the researchers putting all this effort into reducing phyllid pressure rather than finding the genes for HLB resistance?
I’m not going to satiate the worldwide supply for citrus, but if I get a geothermal greenhouse going I hope to trial some citrus. Adapting by growing in new areas with clean stock is a valid strategy that should be examined.
It seems like many diseases exist that are game enders for various species.
HLB> citrus, Fireblight> pomes, Witches Broom> jujubes, SDS> kaki persimmons, Not spraying> stone fruit (dependent on area, only half joking). FMV> figs seem up in the air, I remember some kind of soil pathogen mentioned for strawberries… I’m sure there are more I’m forgetting.
I’m betting solutions could exist for many challenges, but some stuff you just give up and pivot to other options.
There is something strange about this. Every news article and press release has the same 2 pictures, and none of the grand opening articles showed the inside at all. No one in their right mind constructs buildings like this. It would be an OSHA nightmare.
It looks more like what a researcher who’s never set foot in a factory before thinks high-tech factories look like.
Yeah, it’s kind of a wonder we can grow anything to be honest. Chestnut blight > chestnuts, eastern filbert blight > hazelnuts, Pierce’s disease > grapes, black fig fly > figs, anthracnose > strawberries, Panama disease > bananas, a list of pest and disease a mile long > the entire freaking rose family aka almost all traditional European fruits, fusarium wilt + root knot nematode + xylella + phytophthera > basically all plants RIP.
Granted, many of these pathogens require hot, humid conditions, which totally doesn’t describe where I live
But, on the bright side, there’s an extent to which these diseases can be controlled. And even for the ones that are basically a death sentence like Pierce’s disease, HLB, and chestnut blight, all of the affected species have close relatives that are resistant, so it’s really just a question of extensive breeding work.
Given how much money state universities dump into pretty useless stuff like sports, and even good but generally unconcerned with practical matters stuff like much of STEM and the humanities, you’d think they’d be less averse to dumping a few million into some good breeding programs. Sure, they do some breeding work, but it’s not nearly as much as you’d expect. So, so many state university systems, and yet we’ve got one pawpaw program, two citrus programs, one fig program, two blackberry programs, etc. Can two programs really cover all the different climates and needs for blackberries in the US? No way. Nor do they try, both programs are pretty hyper-focused on a few goals and have surprisingly narrow breeding stock they pull from.
Rather than inject antibiotics into the tree, or modify the tree DNA to produce something, this product is a modified virus that’s common in citrus already. The virus RNA is modified to express an antimicrobial peptide from spinach.
They have been replanting orange groves in large quantites recently, which either means: A.They have a greening prevention (or at least stalling/living with) plan
Or
B. The citrus (and orange in particular) market has gotten so profittable its worth the risk.
Hopefully this new essentially a vaccine research really helps out. If you buy a tree from a UF/Ifas program, they give you a little booklet about how to keep the bug off your plant too.
The article talks about “an 80 percent drop from its pre-disease peak”, but I wonder if thats 80% from before the canker outbreak or after. Citrus canker was the big disease in the late 90s- early 2000s and I felt like that was a much more aggressive drop. They chopped down whole groves (and pontentially neighboring groves) if one tree had citrus canker.
