Be Vigilant!!!

Late blight was devastating in the northern part of the USA last year. For the professional tomato and potato growers, many times it caused complete loss of crop and income. That’s sad.

This photograph of late blight on tomato plant was taken by Dr. Meg McGrath, Department of Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology, Cornell University.

For more information about late blight, check out the following link from the New York State Cooperative Extension at Cornell University: http://vegetablemdonline.ppath.cornell.edu/factsheets/Potato_LateBlt.htm

For the home gardener, it came in on diseased plants shipped from the South and wiped out most tomato production in gardens in the Northeast. For most hobby gardeners, they would find it difficult to be able to assess this nasty disease. The most effective means of controlling late bight is to pull and destroy infected plants before the disease spreads, and it will quickly. There are also biological controls available, and we recommend that home gardeners go online and search for the topic for more preventative information.

There were a bunch of new gardeners last season that came into the marketplace, and unfortunately, their conclusion for the loss of tomato plants may have been the lack of a green thumb, and this was not the case. It is a sad event when families anticipate their very first, home grown tomatoes, only to realize that their plants have died in only a day or so.

Be vigilant!!! Go online and learn all you can about late blight.

Proactive… not reactive… makes sense!

Diane Eggert, president of the Farmers' Market Federation of New York, is the point person for a recently submitted grant on food safety and food handling. The Harris Seeds Company will be supporting the process and will have an employee from our company joining the committee that will guide the direction of this program. In addition to Cornell University that has been at the educational forefront of this project, committee members will include direct market farmers, food safety inspectors, health department officials, and other industry associates.

Food borne illnesses associated with vegetable production can be devastating to agriculture. If such illnesses were to occur to the local direct vegetable marketers in New York, or any other state for that matter, the financial losses would be staggering. Consumer confidence in the grow local…sell fresh phenomenon that is sweeping the nation could come to a sudden halt, driving customers back to the chain stores in peak selling seasons. Being proactive and not reactive at this point makes perfectly good sense.

If this grant gets awarded this summer, The Food Safety Prevention for Farm Direct Marketing Project will study the project in depth and eventually bring these issues to direct marketers across the state with the assistance of Cooperative Extension. This process will ensure that direct market growers will deliver quality food that is safe for the consumer. As the project progresses this fall, we will provide you with timely updates.

If you would like to read more, please go to the following link:

http://www.harrisseeds.com/storefront/download/FoodSafetyProjectBrief.pdf