- Author: Mark Bolda
This question was floated at our recent Plant Nutrient lunch. In view of the fact that Miracle Gro is such a great fertilizer in home gardens and similar settings, would it be worth the while to use it in strawberries? Excellent solubility, fast plant response, good concentrations of the macronutrients and a complete diet of micronutrients to boot.
Going to the 2011 Cost and Return study for strawberries, we see that total nitrogen use for strawberries is 140 lbs, consisting of 500 lbs of 18-8-13 slow release and another 350 lbs of CAN17 (by the way this is NOT a recommendation for fertilizer use in strawberries, these two materials are simply to be used as a general guide to obtain cost information). In order to obtain the same level of nitrogen out of Miracle Gro (24-8-16), we would need to use 625 lbs which, since it is a soluble fertilizer, would be injected through the drip tape and spread over the life of the crop.
Total cost of 18-6-13 pre-plant and CAN17 works out to be $488, or 1% of the total operating cost per acre to produce strawberries. Miracle Gro, on the other hand, retails for $20 per 10 lb carton on Amazon (checked Alibaba, more expensive at $11.55 - 13.55 per 5 lb carton, minimum 40 carton pallet out of Malaysia from what seemed to be sort of a sketchy operation), meaning our total cost would be $1166 (0.24 x 583 lbs = 140 lbs; 583 lbs x $2 per lb = $1,166) or 4% of the total operating cost for an acre of berries.
It is hard to believe that the plant response to Miracle Gro, even if markedly improved over current practices, will make it anything worth the near 3x rise in cost, so it is probably not worth the while to pursue this idea any further.
- Author: Mark Bolda
This article is one of many putting empirical evidence to what most of you already know: wage growth is accelerating. The "Chart of the Week" in the middle of the page is a must see for any employer trying to map out what wages are going to look like going forward. They are going to rise and not insignificantly.
http://guggenheiminvestments.com/perspectives/macro-view/against-this-rosy-backdrop
The "rosy economic backdrop" for this uptick in employment opportunity and wage growth? Greater household formation (meaning more demand for houses), lower energy prices, a stable dollar, a strengthening European economy and yes even more exports.
- Author: Mark Bolda
Nice gallery of lygus (plant bug) management in cotton in the American Southeast.
Run through it if you have a few minutes, again this is in cotton, but the points about lygus management are not unrelated to our situation in the berry business.
Key points:
1. Lygus (plant bugs as they call them over there) move from their preferred hosts (see below) to cotton when it gets dry.
2. No need to over-react and spray all of your crop when you see the problem in one area. Use a sweep net and understand the lygus population over the entire field, field edges might have more.
3. Recommended to open lygus control campaign with highest rate of a neonicotinoid insecticide; not sure personally about that one, don't forget that neonicotinoids are just as heavy, if not heavier, on many of our beneficial insects (Geocoris, Orius and Nabis) since they are in the same insect family as lygus.
3. Destruction of cotton terminals takes place in a short period of time (20 minutes); would this point to even less time to negatively affect the achenes of strawberry and developing drupelets of blackberry?
4. High numbers of lygus are reported in corn and wheat surrounding cotton, but yet the authors do not claim to know why the lygus is coming into cotton. Interesting that high numbers in a surrounding crop do not necessarily mean lygus migrates to another crop. We do not know from where our lygus is coming.
5. Monitor the situation after the spray. Did you achieve good knockdown?
Nice little article.
- Author: Mark Bolda
For those of you interested in farming organically and curious about the business of it, this seminar, to be held June 22 at the UC Cooperative Extension office in Salinas and attached below, should be of interest.
Organic Certification Meeting June 22
- Author: Shimat Joseph
- Author: Surendra Dara
- Author: Mark Bolda
A brief FYI for those of you who have seen this bug in your strawberries. It's not uncommon this year.
This is a Say stink bug, Chlorochroa sayi and can cause deformation depending on the stage of the fruit. Note the orange stripe around the outer edge of the body. The triangular area in the back has four yellow spots. This species is a pest in tomatoes, but this year there are high numbers of them in vegetable fields.
Rather than re-writing what is already written on this pest in the UC IPM guidelines, we provide this link from tomatoes:
http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/r783300211.html
