#bacterialcanker

From the podcast interview with Mike Omeg: John: Mike, you’ve been talking about the returns in very abstract terminology of return on investment, etc. Tell us about results. What has changed with your trees? We started this conversation by mentioning a desire to develop the root systems. What has changed with your root systems? What has changed with tree health? What have you actually observed in the field? Mike: I have some anecdotes and then I have some actual data to share. Let’s start with the anecdotes. In November of 2014, we had one of those once-in-a-lifetime historic freezes. The lowest the temperature had been was 43 degrees. Our trees generally go into dormancy in November, but it had been a very warm fall and the trees were still actively growing. We hadn’t had any acclimation to the cold. Then we had an arctic front come down, and we went from lows in the 40s to below zero in one day, and it stayed below zero. Here at my house, we had -4 degrees Fahrenheit. The leaves on the trees just turned black. Just like a dahlia plant looks after the first frost, the leaves turned black, and they just hung on the trees. Several hundred acres of trees in our area just died. We had blocks where all the buds were frozen on the trees. At that time, I was doing some comparison and analysis between mulch and intensive bionutrient applications and conventional applications for management of the orchard. Read the full article

Bacterial canker is considered an untreatable infection in stone fruit and cherries.  When the infections become severe enough, the block of trees may be pushed out and replanted for a fresh start. Our experience indicates it is possible to reverse bacterial canker infections. We can't point to a specific nutritional profile or disease suppressive soil microbial populations as having produced the resistance. We used soil mineral analysis and plant sap analysis and fine-tuned soil amendments, fertilizers, and foliar applications based on the results. Bacterial canker disappeared from trees that had previously been infected to the point of being destined to be pushed out the following year. Today, these trees are a productive block five years after the initial applications were made. Lynn Long and I discussed this specific cherry block in our conversation on the podcast here. John: We’ve worked together on some orchards where we’ve seen some interesting things concerning bacterial canker. At one farm that we at Advancing Eco Agriculture have worked on, the incidence of bacterial canker has been greatly reduced―I think to the point where now, after several years, we can say that it seems to have been eliminated on a couple of blocks. Many growers have asked what we did and what products we used. And the answer, as Lynn has pointed out so well, is that we don’t know. We worked with nutrition products, we worked with biological products, and we tried to manage that ecosystem. Read the full article