20235118141322

Blueberries are a native American fruit and quality is critical for domestic and export markets. Blueberries must withstand harvesting, storage, packaging, and shipping.

In the U.S., reduced availability of hand labor and rising labor costs for harvesting fresh fruit are creating a competitive advantage for foreign producers. U.S. growers are challenged with adopting new technologies including mechanical harvesters and improved grading and sorting lines to remain competitive. However, adoption of these new technologies also results in increased crop loss due to reductions in berry quality.

Alterations to the current production systems are necessary to better adapt to these changes. This project is aimed at increasing competitiveness and sustainability of the U.S. blueberry industry by developing methods to improve fruit quality and reduce crop loss.

The Blue-Dynamo team will continue its ongoing research efforts to address challenges to fruit quality through this project. Research objectives such as measuring pathogen diversity, collecting crop production data to correlate with fruit rot, and studying regional production effects on microbial communities are a few main foci.

This will initiate a significant connection with our grower stakeholders throughout the project and facilitate the enterprise budgets to be modified to reflect current, regional grower practices. The overall output from this proposal is the Blue-Dynamo website which includes management practices, economics, safety to pollinators, and efficacy.

Michigan State University

10.309 - Specialty Crop Research Initiative

Institute of Food Production and Sustainability (IFPS) [USDA - NIFA]

East Lansing, Michigan 48824 United States

Single Zip Code

USDA-NIFA-SCRI-009765