Cooperative Extension Part 1

Friends, family, and colleagues,

Last week, we had the opportunity to do some collecting and that involved going out in the field. In academia, a lot of time is spent in an office answering phone calls, responding to email, and other boring office tasks. However, there are times when they do let us out to play. This is an extension specialist’s favorite activity (or at it’s least my favorite activity anyway). Field visits are an opportunity to take what we have seen in a book or in a presentation and apply it to a grower’s situation. 

"A pathologist is the only person who is excited to see a disease in the field"-Mathews L. Paret

What is Cooperative Extension?

Cooperative extension is a unique wing of academic research. It is an integral component of any college of agriculture in the US. The overall purpose of extension is to take the information gained at academic institutions and to disseminate said information to the public. For my field, that means taking the knowledge I gain from my research and applying it to watermelon growers’ operations. Cooperative extension was established over 100 years ago with the Smith-Lever act of 1914. 

Office Visit

This day, we were out in Dongtai, Jiangsu province. We started out talking to some staff at the ministry of agriculture. From what I could gather, they appeared to be a provincial level governmental office. (think Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services-FDACS or the Delaware Department of Agriculture-DDA). Their job was mostly policy and grower support from what I gathered. None of them spoke English, so we got most of our information through a translator. 

Ministry of Agriculture building. There were three more buildings surrounding it.

Field Visit

The grower was harvesting one of the institute's varieties "Sumi #8", it's a sweet melon weighing about 4 kilograms with yellow flesh.

After a lengthy meeting at the ministry of agriculture, we drove out to the first operation. They were spraying fungicide, insecticide, miticide, and what appeared to be a foliar fertilizer in a 55-gallon cocktail mix. Their philosophy was to spray for everything just in case. This is not only wasteful and environmentally harmful, but fungicide resistance can develop if products aren’t rotated properly.

Here's the tank-mix of all the chemicals.
Not quite as advanced as the sprayers we use at the university.

This is a copper compound used for control of bacteria and fungi.
Many bacteria are tolerant/resistant to copper

What is Fungicide Resistance?

One phenomena of the diseases I work on is that repeated exposure to the same fungicide time and time again can select for resistance. This means that the sensitive isolates are controlled, but the resistant isolates keep growing without any inhibition. If you’re a fungus that is resistant, this means that you will continue to grow and reproduce. This is problematic for the grower since 1) it’s expensive to use something that doesn’t control the disease and 2) it can cause problems for other growers or the same grower in other years. The collective term is fungicide resistance or fungicide insensitivity. This is a serious problem in hospitals with “superbugs” and insect pests, which is caused by the same phenomena. 

This is Imidacloprid, an insecticide, mixed with another insecticide.
It is the compound often blamed for honeybee decline in the US.
Some species of insects are also reported to be resistant.

Extension in action: Delivering Recommendations and Sampling the Goods

We talked to the grower for a bit about what he was using and we discussed the importance of rotating fungicides and to use only fungicides for control of gummy stem blight. He was also using some antibiotics, which we explained won’t control gummy at all and could cause problems down the production line. He was very grateful for the advice and we ate lots of watermelon in his make-shift home.

Dr. Paret with the grower and some ministry of agriculture officials. Notice the table, that's the remains of two watermelons and one cantaloupe after we ate. They were sweet as candy!

I’m making this a 2 part series, since this day was really neat with a lot of extension opportunities. I’ll post the second part soon.

Mason