Mid-Atlantic Orchard Monitoring Guide (NRAES 75)

This 361 page publication (NRAES-75) was originally published by the Northeast Regional Agricultural Engineering Service (NRAES, later known as the Natural Resource, Agriculture, and Engineering Service), a multi-university program in the Northeast US disbanded in 2011. Plant and Life Sciences Publishing (PALS) was subsequently formed to manage the NRAES catalog. Ceasing operations in 2018, PALS was a program of the Department of Horticulture in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) at Cornell University. PALS assisted university faculty in publishing, marketing and distributing books for small farmers, gardeners, land owners, workshops, college courses, and consumers.The tree fruit industry represents a complex agroecosystem that requires numerous management decisions in diverse areas in order to maintain profitability in an increasingly competitive global market. Wise decisions begin with a thorough knowledge of the various production components and an awareness of their status in the orchard. Monitoring is the tool for acquiring periodic information about the orchard situation so that timely decisions can be made and action can be taken. It seemed appropriate to assemble the collective expertise of numerous individuals into a regional guide for orchard monitoring because there are more similarities than differences in the production of tree fruits in the mid-Atlantic region. Our goal was to develop a user-friendly, multi-disciplinary guide for use by fruit growers, consultants, chemical field representatives, and research and extension personnel. This Mid-Atlantic Orchard Monitoring Guide is authored by 37 fruit researchers and extension specialists from land grant universities in Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia, as well as researchers from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Authors for the various sections of the guide were selected by discipline chairs in entomology, plant pathology/ nematology and horticulture. Discipline chairs were responsible for collecting and assembling written material and photos from the authors for submission to the editor

The Impacts of Lightning Beyond the Troposphere

We propose that the upcoming Decadal Survey on Solar and Space Physics describe prominent contributions of lightning and its impacts beyond the troposphere, particularly within the NASA Heliophysics portfolio. We present a brief review of several topics highly relevant to NSF and NASA. We opt to unify these topics into one white paper, with longer reviews/references included

The Battle for a Sustainable Food Supply

Since the time that Homo sapiens took up farming, a battle has been waged against pests and diseases which can cause significant losses in crop yield and threaten a sustainable food supply. Initially, early control techniques included religious practices or folk magic, hand removal of weeds and insects, and “chemical” techniques such as smokes, easily available minerals, oils and plant extracts known to have pesticidal activity. But it was not until the early twentieth century that real progress was made when a large number of compounds became available for testing as pesticides due to the upsurge in organic chemistry. The period after the 1940s saw the introduction of important families of chemicals, such as the phenoxy acid herbicides, the organochlorine insecticides and the dithiocarbamate fungicides. The introduction of new pesticides led to significant yield increases, but concern arose over their possible negative effects on human health and the environment. In time, resistance started to occur, making these pesticides less effective. This led agrochemical companies putting in place research looking for new modes of action and giving less toxic and more environmentally friendly products. These research programmes gave rise to new pesticide families, such as the sulfonylurea herbicides, the strobilurin fungicides and the neonicotinoid insecticide classes