On October 12, Lindcove REC provided a post-conference tour for the attendees of the California Citrus Conference.  Rock Christiano, Staff Research Associate for the Citrus Clonal Protection Program explained how the program provides pathogen-free budwood to the citrus industry.  The participants toured the screenhouses that generate the budwood and the new greenhouse that will provide a protected environment for important citrus germplasm.  Dr. Tracy Kahn (UC Riverside) gave a walking tour of her demonstration orchard at LREC and provided information on early mandarin varieties.  Therese Kapaun (SRA), Don Cleek (Principal Ag Technician) and Jose Hernandez (Senior Ag Technician) gave a demonstration of the new fruit grading system and high level of detail that it can provide the researchers. 

The Fruit Quality Laboratory at the Lindcove Research and Extension Center is in full swing for the 2012-2013 harvest season.  Jamie Nemecek demonstrates use of the hydraulically powered Boswell Press, which squeezes citrus fruit at 1000 psi to produce juice for testing.  The juice is used to measure total soluble solids (TSS or commonly referred to as °Brix) and to calculate % acid (titratable acid or TA).  These values are needed to calculate the California Standard, a fruit maturity value that was recently passed into law for California navel oranges.  The law requires the fruit juice to have a minimum value of 90 to ensure that only pleasant tasting oranges are sent to market.  Different levels of pressure could cause variation in juice chemistry, such as contamination with excessive amounts of rind oil. The Boswell Press keeps the juice extraction consistent, providing excellent data for Lindcove research.

Mid-autumn in the San Joaquin Valley indicates the beginning of the olive harvest.  Lindcove is primarily known for it's citrus blocks, but has a small planting of Manzanillo and Sevillano olive trees.  Olives are generally alternate bearing, and Dr. Carol Lovatt (UC Riverside) and Dr. Elizabeth Fichtner (Tulare County Farm Advisor) have been experimenting with plant growth regulators to improve flowering for the off years, in efforts to improve crop yields.  At harvest, fruit from each tree is picked into individual bins and weighed.

This week the packline grader is getting a test run and color check to ensure "what you see is what you get" on the packline output.  Five projects are scheduled to use the packline grader between now and the end of the year, with an estimated 458 packline runs.  For research purposes, a packline run is all the fruit from one tree run together as one lot.  Data from the each tree lot can be analyzed separately.  In this photo Senior Agricultural Technician Jose Hernandez places Fukumoto navel oranges by hand onto the grader line, the fruit then passes through the grader, and each piece of fruit is retrieved at the other end to be scrutinized for how well the grader recorded the actual colors on each piece.  The grader takes 30 pictures of each piece of fruit as it rotates along the belt, and the data output reports each of ten colors as a percentage of the total.