DailyDirt: Growing Better Strawberries

Green Tech

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

We’ve talked about how strawberries are actually not berries and about a few cool tidbits about growing them. If you like strawberries, here are just a few more links for your perusal.

• American strawberry farmers enjoy access to the strawberry breeding program at UC Davis which accounts for more than half of the ancestry of strawberries in our supermarkets. The proprietary strawberry breeds created in this program are generally sold to any grower that wants to use them, but potential changes to the university’s program could make desirable strawberries harder to obtain. [url]
• The Marshall strawberry almost went extinct — even though it had been called “the tastiest strawberry in America” — in 2007. A single clone at the USDA’s Germplasm Repository was re-grown among some strawberry enthusiasts (circa 2009), and a Kickstarter campaign is helping to create an organic strawberry farm dedicated to this variety. [url]
• The use of methyl bromide as a fumigant has been around for decades in strawberry fields, but it’s an ozone-depleting chemical (and a possible carcinogen). Alternatives are being tested as methyl bromide is (slowly) phased out, and some disinfestation techniques appear to be promising replacements. (It should be noted that even some organic strawberry farmers get plants from nurseries that use methyl bromide, and new techniques to control disease organisms can use more water.) [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: disinfestation, farming, food, gmo, marshall strawberry, methyl bromide, organic, pesticides, strawberries
Companies: kickstarter