Michael Loik, Colleen Josephson, Greg Gilbert, and Matt Sparke, Innovations in Monitoring and Control of Powdery Mildew in Forests, Fields and Facilities
Climate change is creating challenges for agriculture and forest management such as droughts, extended wildfire seasons, warmer heat waves, and stormier winters. This variable weather will drive direct impacts on forest health, farm productivity and worker safety, and will make tree pathogens more difficult to model and manage. One pathogen that causes considerable loss of forest and farm products is powdery mildew, a fungal pathogen commonly found in forests, farms, greenhouses, and other growth facilities. Powdery mildews require tremendous time and expense for management, which in the case of agriculture usually takes the form of chemical fungicidal control. The goals of this research team are to (1) generate new innovations for monitoring and controlling powdery mildew in forests, fields, and growth facilities and (2) develop a training program to help regional farm workers adapt their careers in relation to agroecological and technological risk management and intervention. To date, the research team has monitored for presence of powdery mildew and a fungal hyperparasite and potential biological control agent of the mildew, in wildlands, parks, urban gardens, and residential neighborhoods across Santa Cruz County and has also monitored powdery mildew infections on 6400 tree seedlings in areas affected by the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fire in Henry Cowell State Park. They have also advanced technological innovations for monitoring and controlling powdery mildew outbreaks. The team has developed both a sensor data-logging platform to assess leaf wetness (a key factor for mildew infection) as well as a novel indoor drone system that is able to detect various aspects of crop health (e.g., leaf greenness, stress within the photosynthetic system, water stress, or the presence of infections), treat infected plants with UV light to kill disease organisms on the leaves, and measure thermal patterns of leaves to detect plants requiring irrigation. These new methods for detecting and controlling powdery mildew will eventually need a high-skilled ag tech workforce. The team is thus also focused on workforce development. To study where and how this workforce can be trained, and with what community co-benefits in terms of increasing income security, a first step has been to conduct an interdisciplinary scoping review of the literatures addressing agricultural workforce development opportunities in California.
Jarmila Pitterman, Hannah Waterhouse, Darryl Wong – Developing Climate-Resilient Crop Systems: a multi-trait analysis of crops and soils under dry-farmed and irrigated treatment
Climate change models predict increasingly hot and dry weather conditions, raising concerns about impacts on agricultural production and food security in the decades to come. Answering this challenge is organic dry farming, a sustainable farming practice that allows growers to produce crops under hot and dry conditions with next to zero irrigation and grower input. Dry farming has many benefits for the grower and for the environment, including improving aspects of soil health. The research goal of this collaborative project is to investigate the traits that allow dry-farmed crops to succeed while measuring the impact this practice has on key soil attributes, and to communicate our findings to growers. The specific research objectives are to (1) To provide new insight into the drought physiology of dry-farmed Dirty Girl tomatoes and Hopi beans relative to standard Slicer tomatoes and French green beans under dry-farm and irrigation regimes, (2) To investigate essential soil attributes such as texture, moisture and mineral content in forms of nitrogen and phosphorus under dry-farmed and irrigated regimes, in association with both crops, and (3) To capture the relationships between plant physiology and soil nutrients using regression analyses, or other appropriate models. The research team planted the crops in early June at the UCSC Farm, established our two watering treatments, and monitored the plants with bi-weekly physiological, morphological, and anatomical measurements. Once the plants were ready for harvest, we collected fruit measures such as marketable yields and brix sugar content. Additionally, we sampled soil attributes at the beginning, middle, and end of the experiment to investigate plant-soil processes. Our team aims to use the information gathered from this experiment to identify the suite of traits that allow dry-farmed crops to thrive under drought conditions. Their initial results are finding that beans and tomatoes repond quite differently under dry farmed conditions with impacts on plant growth, plant water stress, stomatal density, and overall yields. Their next steps are to focus on using regression analyses to make connections between all the traits we measured, with the aim to capture relationships between plant physiology, anatomy, and morphology.
