I'm asking you as my readers to participate in a survey concerning soilborne pathogens in strawberries and caneberries. There's a few questions about what your expectations are in managing these, as well as a number of questions concerning how and where you normally obtain information on these matters.
I've taken it already, and find it to be a well thought out survey which takes about 5 minutes to do. I'd really appreciate your participation if not only for the two reasons given below.
A few years someone was trumpeting a survey he was party to that determined that UC Cooperative Extension wasn't even in the top five sources of information for growers. That always struck me as pretty strange, because my colleagues and I spend a good part of every day answering agriculture questions, and our meetings usually have a lot of people attend. Our websites don't lack for traffic (I think the UC IPM website alone gets like one million views a month) and we do a brisk business out of our offices distributing pamphlets and selling publications. Something doesn't match up with what that survey from a few years ago said, and so hopefully the survey here will help clarify what is going on and give us an idea of where we can improve our services.
Second, because I'm welcomed on to most ranches (not all though), I think I have a pretty good feel for what is going on with berries on the Central Coast. Quite frankly from what I have seen with my colleagues (especially Steven Koike from the Monterey CE office) over the past two years on the advance of soil pathogens is concerning, and we aren't even completely post methyl bromide yet. And that's the other big part of the survey which explores what you think matters most in soilborne pest management and what you think the scientific community should be doing about it.
But if you don't do the survey, we aren't going to know very much more about either of these.
Here's the link:
http://ucanr.edu/sites/Strawberry_soil-borne_diseases/