FEATURE | c i t r u s
The Greening Challenge Executive Director of CRDF Tweaks Approach to Research by HEATHER MACHOVINA
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RICK DANTZLER, executive director of the Citrus Research and Development Foundation, recently spoke to a group of citrus growers from Highlands County about the future course of Florida citrus. Since 2009, CRDF has funded 462 projects and spent $165 million in an effort to keep the Florida citrus industry thriving and competitive through innovation.
RICK DANTZLER
12 | CFAN
“While we now know more about HLB than ever and several good things are in the works, we can’t act as though the research has been more successful than it has,” says Dantzler. “The truth is that the most important metrics – production, the number of citrus acres, and the number of growers – are still going the wrong way, so we must do things differently, and we are.” Some of the changes happening around CRDF may not seem grand, but they are big changes in the world of research funding. Other revisions underway are more substantive than procedural, like CRDF taking on the responsibility of conducting all last-stage field trials of the plant breeding programs they help fund. “The point is we are going to get there even
if that means breaking the mold,” Dantzler emphasizes. Some promising work is being done with peptides to help control citrus greening and other plant pathogens. Every peptide does something different and provides different modes of action within the plants. So far, two peptides have shown hope in fighting citrus greening and increasing yields in HLB-infected trees. The peptide by Elemental Enzymes, called Vismax peptide, is a foliar spray that causes the tree to attack the bacterial infection (HLB) as well as induces the tree to actually grow out of the disease. Vismax peptide only needs to be applied once every year in the spring as the trees flush, and it lasts through harvest. It has been proven FloridaAgNews.com
