Harvest 2024 was a tale of two seasons. The one before the market crash in mid-to late April and the one after the “wall of fruit” burst almost overnight from a massive Georgia highbush crop. You’ll get a balanced sense of how the Florida season went from the article on page 10 of this edition of Blueberry News.
Although it is not my intent here to delve into the details of the Florida season, Florida had a very large crop. If you were further south and grew early Evergreen varieties, you likely did quite well. I hope this helped heal some wounds left by Hurricane Ian. If, on the other hand, you were further north with varieties whose harvest overlapped the Georgia crop, you saw a great year in the making disappear overnight when the grocer buyers did a rug pull, dropping prices so low millions of pounds barely covered harvest costs and some millions were just left to rot on the bush. I’m sure there will be many interesting conversations among growers at the July regional meetings and roundtables about how this happened and what to do about it in the future. My two cents: Better forecasting by Florida and Georgia growers wouldn’t hurt.
Announcing a New Initiative for the Florida Blueberry Industry
The main intention for my letter is to let our blueberry growers know about a new initiative sponsored by your FBGA Board and key members of our UF/IFAS Blueberry Team. At the Spring FBGA Field Day in March, we formed a committee from members of our FBGA board and IFAS Extension staff to develop a formal method to prioritize research needs for the Florida blueberry industry. We looked at some excellent research programs such as Michigan Blueberry Commission, and The Northwest Center for Small Fruits Research to help conceptualize what we might want the product of this endeavor to look like.
This Florida Blueberry Research Priorities Committee is chaired by Phil Harmon with the following members serving: Ryan Atwood, Kyle Straughn, Doug Phillips, Gerardo Nunez, and Leonard Park. We are just getting started and recently held our first session to generate and categorize a preliminary list of research needs. To make this effort successful, we need your input about what you, the grower, believe are the most challenging issues we need to research to help make your blueberry farm successful. To start the process of getting firsthand input from our grower members, we will be including a presentation and idea-gathering session at each regional Summer Grower Meeting in July. I hope you will attend a meeting and offer us your ideas about what problems academic research might best help your farm.
Chairman Phil Harmon set forth the formative scope for the committee thusly: “I see this as a multi-step process with the first step being to establish and publish clear and specific priorities. The second step may be to evaluate if these priorities are being addressed and met.” During this stage of development, growers and our IFAS Extension faculty will participate in refining the research priority document. I hope we can present a significant progress report on this first phase of work at the Fall Conference this October and obtain additional input from our Florida growers.
Once we have a documented and prioritized wish list for research, the committee will hand this off to our FBGA Board to create an effective implementation framework. As Florida growers, we have benefited greatly from the involvement and support of IFAS administration, the leadership of UF Blueberry Team faculty in the Horticultural Sciences Departments, and our UF Blueberry Breeding program. I hope these efforts to formalize the research needs of the blueberry industry will provide an opportunity to strengthen our relationship with our University of Florida colleagues as we work together to make the Florida blueberry industry the best it can be.
Leonard Park
President of the FBGA
