UC Cooperative Extension is looking for grape growers statewide to help with a study looking at the powdery mildew population to help better understand how and where resistance is developing. The hope is to establish an annual rotation plan to help mitigate resistance. “What we want to do is to track the resistance that is developing in powdery mildew,” said Gabriel Torres, Viticulture Farm Advisor for Tulare and Kings counties. “We have at least five different groups, or mode of actions, and for four of them we have registered resistance. So, we want to map where the resistance is developing.”
Torres noted that participation in the study is simple and is encouraging any growers willing to cooperate to contact him directly. “We are working in collaboration with the USDA and we want the growers to help us to sample. We provide the kits, it’s a really easy way to sample,” Torres said. “We train them how to do it and they send all the samples and we are going to do some molecular studies.”
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