- Author: Bradley Hanson
Several of us are part of a multi-state project on electrical weed control in organic blueberry and orchard crops. Tong Zhen is the lead grad student researcher on the UC Davis part of the project and we are working closely with our counterparts at Oregon State University (Marcelo Moretti and team) and Cornell University (Lynn Sosnoskie and team).
Tong wrote about our "first impressions" of the Zasso electrical weed control unit in 2022 and we included a demo of the equipment last year at the 2023 UC Weed Day. Tong's projects are just getting rolling for 2024 in...
- Author: Nicholas E Clark
- Contributor: Mark E Lundy
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- Author: Bradley Hanson
A colleague and a graduate student at Cornell University are conducting a survey to assess grower attitudes towards establishing wildflower strips as part of conservation programs and asked me to share the survey link to broaden the response to include California growers.
From the Cornell team: We are conducting a survey on grower attitudes towards establishing wildflower strips. This survey is part of a project we are doing on using seed pellets to establish wildflower strips. The basic idea of the project is to put multiple small wildflower seeds into a seed pellet the size and shape of a field crop seed. These pellets could then be planted using standard grain drills/planters, significantly...
- Author: Bradley Hanson
The USDA Agricultural Research Service's Invasive Species and Pollinator Health research unit recently shared their annual activities report. There are several interesting updates on biological control of weeds and management of aquatic invasive weeds that are highly relevant to California weed managers and land management folks.
The full report is attached at the bottom of this post, but here are a few of the topics that grabbed my attention and might be of interest to the readers of this blog:
- Invasiveness of yellow flag iris (Iris pseudacorus L.) with climate change
- Biological control of yellow...
- Author: Bradley Hanson
Last week, I had a chance to visit research cooperators in Chile and tour some of their processing tomato fields with serious infestations of the parasitic weed, branched broomrape and it was really eye opening for me.
We've had collaborative projects with researchers at the UC Davis Chile Life Sciences Innovation Center for the past several years. It's been really helpful to have a northern-southern hemisphere research rotation so they can do a field trial in our off season and vice-versa. Also, branched broomrape is a quarantine pest and is not...