Calag Archive

The following is the first of two articles based on a study of prices and retail margins for oranges, lemons, and grapefruit, reported in detail in Reports No. 168 and No. 170, published by the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics, University of California, Berkeley.

The naval orangeworm has been increasing as a pest of walnuts and almonds.

Bartlett pears—in a Placer County foothill orchard and in a Sacramento Valley orchard—were equally russeted in 1954, whether they developed on trees dusted with copper, sprayed with streptomycin, or given no blight control treatment during the blossoming period.

Effects of prescribed burning on soil fertility were studied on two California forest soils—Salminas at Hobergs in Lake County and Holland at the Teaford Forest in Madera County.

The State of California, by Quarantine Regulation 21, effective January 12, 1955, prohibits the removal from property infested with the Khapra beetle—Trogoderma granarium, Everts—of all materials that might help the spread of this insect which is so destructive to stored grain and grain products.

Several hundred acres of rice in Fresno County were abandoned in the spring of 1954 because the stands had either died out completely or had become so sparse that it was uneconomical to continue farming them.

Alfalfa—Medicago sativa—stand loss due to crown and root rot in some areas of California may be nearly as great as that caused by bacterial wilt. The common term crown rot includes more than one specific disease, and not all of the causal components of this disease complex are known.

Areas of bare ground—in fenced test plots of about 500 acres each in Fresno, Kings, and Kern counties—almost disappeared during two years of favorable weather.

The need for delivering to the market citrus fruits of the highest possible internal quality promoted interest in the possibility of the association of marketable quality with some measurable entity other than the commonly used ratio of total soluble solids to titratable acidity. In the course of investigations of the changes in nitrogenous constituents during the maturation of orange fruits, it was possible to gather data which demonstrate the changes in the concentration of certain constituents of the juice which occur during the development and ripening of these fruits.

Foliage injury in certain fruit tree varieties has been reported as being quite serious when the leaves were subject to hydrogen fluoride or fluorine deposits. Leaf tip-burn resulted in gladiolus plants when exposure was made to various concentrations of fluorine gas. Leaves of citrus trees located in close proximity to gaseous sources of fluorine are reported as containing an increased content of fluorine. Fluorides are known to occur in certain crude phosphate materials, the very sources from which fertilizers are prepared.