Fruit Times
Focusing on online reviews, this article provides data not only about who is reading online reviews, but also how they are responding to other's reviews. This is important because people are likely talking about your business and products on Yelp.com or on social media sites.
Penn State Extension and the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture (PDA) are hosting three Mock Farm Food Safety Audits. These events, to be held on working farms, are designed to help small scale produce farmers gain a better understanding of what to expect from a third party Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) audit.
Focusing on traditional advertising, this article provides results regarding our respondents' views of print advertisements or broadcast ads, including television and radio, as being a good fit for direct marketers.
Continuing our discussion about online and social media tools, this article presents responses pertaining to social media and web-based tools that might be good fits for direct marketers.
If you are a food retailer, have you ever wondered if Facebook is a good fit for your business? In this installment, we will provide responses to survey questions designed to explore this question for several different types of food retailers.
As in 2011, the insecticide active ingredient dinotefuran received a special Section 18 Emergency Exemption Registration from the US Environmental Protection Agency to help control brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB) in Pennsylvania on both pome and stone fruit.
Many orchard soils are getting dry. Keep your irrigation on this week. It is essential with trickle irrigation not to lose your subsoil moisture and replace what the trees are using on a weekly basis. Beginning this weekend the forecast is for extreme temperatures for 5+ days in the 90s. Make sure to get your cover sprays (for BMSB) and Ethephon for return bloom on before then.
With weak growing cultivars such as Honeycrisp, the lack of sufficient leader growth to reach the top of the trellis (10 ft) by the end of the 3rd year is a serious problem that limits yield in future years. Honeycrisp can be a difficult tree to achieve sufficient leader growth when grown on M.9 or B.9 rootstocks. With more vigorous cultivars such as Gala, Fuji or McIntosh, reaching the top of the trellis by the end of the 3rd season is usually not a problem. However, with weak growing cultivars, growers need to intensively manage the trees in the first 3 years to achieve the desired growth.
In an effort to provide stakeholders with information they can use to develop or enhance their social media presence, today we are sharing results pertaining to how our Internet survey participants connect with fruit or vegetable businesses.
June 25, 2012. Brown rot is a major disease of stone fruits and warm, humid weather favors brown rot infection. Two species of fungi are responsible for brown rots: Monilinia fructicola and Monilinia laxa which can infect blossoms and cause brown rot on fruit. M. fructicola is the specie that is known and widespread in Pennsylvania orchards. M. laxa is suspected of causing blossom blight early in the season but has not yet been identified in PA orchards.
You may be getting tired of hearing about Spotted Wing Drosophila (SWD), but adults are being found in traps in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania and eastern Maryland, and its larvae have been found in summer raspberry fruit in Maryland (along with lots of other kinds of larvae in all sorts of berries).
Insect pests to be monitoring at this time include second generation leafrollers, green/spirea aphids, leafhoppers, leafminers, Japanese beetles, wooly apple aphids, mites, apple maggots and brown marmorated stink bugs.
A business has many Internet-based tools to choose from when connecting with customers. These include websites, email, and social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. In today's article you will learn what online or Internet tools survey respondents expect businesses to use.
2012 Apple Scab Infection Periods April 16 to June 10 and forecast/infection prediction through June 17* from Penn State Fruit and Research Extension Center in Biglerville, PA.
Continuing with disseminating results from Internet survey, in today's article we provide a better understanding of how people are finding food retailers' social networks.
In today’s installment, we provide a more detailed view of the types of information that consumers expect to obtain from a food business. We also look at a few differences in expectations across demographic groups.
Chemical thinning alone may not be sufficient to promote annual bearing for apple varieties which possess a genetic tendency to alternate bearing. Examples of these include York Imperial, Golden Delicious, Mutsu, Fuji, Macoun, Honeycrisp, and spur-type strains of Delicious.
Based on the egg hatch models (SkyBit, Inc) for TABM we should observe 10 percent egg hatch around May 29, while for OBLR around June 3. In the majority of Pennsylvania orchards where leafrollers are present, TABM is the dominant leafroller species responsible for most fruit injury. A critical time to control the second generation of pear psylla is during the first week of hatch of the young nymphs and then a repeat application should be made 12 to 14 days later. An action threshold of 1 nymph per leaf is recommended.
The brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB), Halyomorpha halys (Stål) (Heteroptera-Pentatomidae) continues to dominate the list of potentially most damaging insect pests in Pennsylvania fruit orchards. Since the pest explosion during the 2010 season, this invasive exotic pest dictates most insect pest management activities in Pennsylvania orchards.
From May 1 through May 24 we had spotty rain that accumulated 5.18 inches. These wet conditions favor apple scab, rust, bacterial spot and cherry leaf spot development. And when rain stops, powdery mildew takes off, which is difficult to manage once it gets established in the orchard.
