Michael Geissinger 0:16
Welcome to feel notes. We’re joined today by Allison Jonjak, if I seen your name right, Allison. We’re joined today by Allison Jonjak, who is a cranberry outreach specialist with UW Extension in the state of Wisconsin. And we’re going to be talking about cranberry production in Wisconsin. So Allison welcome. Maybe if you just want to start by sharing, introducing yourself and sharing a little bit of an overview about what your experience working with cranberry growers has done in Wisconsin?

Allison Jonjak 0:51
Yeah, absolutely. I so I had originally grown up on a cranberry marsh in northern Wisconsin, went to school for Ag Engineering, and my master’s also in, you know, Ag Engineering, specifically kind of soils. So physics, soil chemistry, worked with real crop growers for about seven years. And then the University of Wisconsin invented this cranberry outreach specialist position. And I was like, I want to go back and work with my favorite crop in my favorite state, then came back in 2020. So in those three years, it’s been really fantastic to kind of re anchor myself in. Cranberries are such a unique crop, agronomically, they grow in really acidic soils, and the the nutrient expectations are pretty backwards of what people expect if they’re used to row crops, and getting reinvolved in the cranberry community and helping growers, you know, connect with Madison, figure out what is the best research for researchers to focus on that’s going to be directly applicable to growers. It’s been really thoroughly fantastic.

Michael Geissinger 2:04
Yeah, are there any specific things that you enjoy working about with cranberry growers, maybe more than if you’ve worked with other kinds of producers or farms before or just kind of the heritage of it for you.

Allison Jonjak 2:16
Um, I’ll say specifically, actually, so one of the things that’s really cool about cranberries, again, because it’s such a niche crop, and it’s such an interesting, you know, different than everything else space, we kind of talked about this a little bit, but the growers, no one is out there inventing tools for cranberry growers. So if a cranberry grower is, you know, working on such and such a mechanical issue, they’ll solve it themselves, and then like, talk to their neighbors and be like, Oh, check out how I solved this problem. And wind up, you know, developing a machine company on the side that’s going to make these new, these new berry pumps, or these new like boom attachments. And I really love. I mean, pretty much all farmers have the kind of tinker in your garage until you figured something out spirit, but cranberry growers really exemplify that, you know, I see how this could be better. I’m going to I’m going to spend a couple of spare, spare weekends figuring out and actually making it better. And so the the drive to always, always make make things more efficient is really fun to be around.

Will Fulwider 3:28
So we just finished, unless I’m mistaken, we just kind of finished up cranberry harvest. Am I correct?

Allison Jonjak 3:33
Yes, there’s been a few people still doing some kind of post harvest cleanup. But by and large, the crop is in and people are remembering which way is up and, and drying themselves out.

Will Fulwider 3:46
All right, and just in time for Thanksgiving, hence why we’re talking about cranberries. And so you know, we’re dealing with the perennial crop here, which is not typically unless you’re doing alfalfa, what we see much of in Wisconsin, it’s not our corn, soybean and wheat rotation. So what does that cranberry management look like through the rest of the season? And, you know, kind of talk about a little bit about some of the differences that we see with that with this crop and others, you know, people may think that it grows in cranberry bogs that are always flooded, but I know that not to be the case. And I don’t even know that much about cranberry. So you should talk on it.

Allison Jonjak 4:25
Yeah, so cranberries tend to grow naturally. And we tend to grow cranberries in Wisconsin in the places where they were naturally growing before before agriculture started to happen right so people the first cranberry marshes were just cranberry marshes and all you would do to have a cranberry marsh was hire guys to come help pick them in the in the fall with you and then go back to Chicago afterwards. Eventually they realized hey, we can do better if someone’s here all year and protecting from frost. So there is so much going on. So even though Harvest is over, we’re still watching temperatures closely. This year, it’s been unseasonably warm after harvest. But usually, as temperatures start to drop, we watch the vines kind of progress into dormancy so that if we get a sharp drop or a really deep cold snap, that would be more than the vines were ready for were able to frost protect. And that can be either sprinkler irrigation or a flood depending on if you’ve put your sprinkler irrigation back in after the harvest process. Which I guess I should start with. Growing a cranberry is an 18 month process. So in June, you have blossom. And then in July, the fruit is setting in July and August, both this year’s 2023’s fruit was setting and growing. And 2024’s bud is being developed. So during you know all of August, all of September, you’ve got two years of crop alive and on the line that you’re protecting. When you harvest 2023’s crop you still have 2024’s, you know urblossoms, that kind of the the fruiting primordia, like what’s going to become the blossom what’s going to become the fruit is already in that bud tip. And so if a bug chews that off, or if it gets too cold in that freezes, you’ve lost next year’s crop potential. So over the course of the year, and we’ll talk about nutrients in more depth, I think shortly here, but in the summer, you are fertilizing to fill the current year crop and without negatively impacting next year’s crop. So there’s a lot of very fine needle threading that goes on in choosing the right fertilizer, you know rates and timing. Then during harvest, and kind of as always we do minimum amount of walking in the beds minimum amount of travel in the beds, no kicking things off in the beds, you are going to frost protect into the fall in the winter, at some point we’ll get a good cold snap. And when we have a really good deep cold snap that’s expected to last for a couple of days, growers will raise a flood set hopefully 12 to 18 inches of ice, and then drain the water out from underneath. And then that ice blanket is going to be kind of an igloo and kind of protect the vines from extra do extra deep cold snaps for the rest of the winter. Yeah, feel free to cut me off and

Will Fulwider 7:48
I did not know that. Oh yeah, that’s really cool. So it’s just like a hollow underneath this ice.

Allison Jonjak 7:56
Yeah, I mean, ice and air down the ice kind of slumps down after a bit but yeah, it’s ice and air. And I feel free to cut this out of the podcast if it’s not interesting, but you know, when we were learning to drive, we had a good ice on a on a big bed and no snow yet and so dad took like the old station wagon and said okay, practice losing control and regaining control here around and nothing can go wrong. It’s it’s it’s yeah, it’s wonderful for driving practice for

Will Fulwider 8:29
what a Wisconsin story there. You’re gonna learn to drive your car out on the pros and cranberry bogs. Yep. Yeah, amazing. Okay, so I continue I get

Allison Jonjak 8:44
that and you know, just this way it’s safe. So then when there is that thick ice protecting them from from cold. It also there’s a lot that goes on in winter protection to in addition to even though the cranberries are dormant. They’re their roots still need oxygen. If you have a wet pocket that didn’t that didn’t drain well, you can wind up basically suffocating your plants and having their leaves drop off. So there’s various kinds of winter damage to watch out for. But under a normal case for your your, you’ve got your you’ve got your ice blanket all set roughly every fifth year. Cranberry growers will do an operation called sanding which is spreading about a quarter two and a half an inch of sand out on the ice so this is the only time you can drive safely on the beds is when there’s ice on them. So you can take a dump truck and put out a finely screened a quarter inch to half inch layer of sand in the spring. That will you know the ice will melt away. This sand will settle down through the canopy but it’ll turn have a couple of vines on the way the vines get a hormonal signal, if they have sand on top of them that they should send out fresh runners. So kind of in the same way strawberry plants send out runners, cranberry vines, if they get this hormonal signal will will send out runners put down fresh roots from those runners. And that’s kind of the way that even if you have plants that were originally planted in 1939, you still have good fruit producing tissue is kind of the cranberry grower’s equivalent of pruning, and always having fresh tissue. So you still get good, you know, vigorous fruit production on the new tissue.

Will Fulwider 10:37
Yeah, that’s what I was gonna ask because, I mean, I used to work with grape growers. And so I’m very aware of winter pruning as the way that you know, it’s the same, it’s a vine, so you have next year’s growth ready to go, that growing season that previous growing season, and then you’re pruning it back to be able to give, you know, the specific buds, the ability to then be like, Okay, we have all of the energy that was going to go to this whole vine into these two buds. So we’re going to produce quality and the right quantity of grapes. And so rather than pruning, which seems a laborious process over you know, 100 acres, or whatever it is, of cranberries, you’re incentivizing this kind of spreading as a way of having new fruit wood.

Allison Jonjak 11:21
Exactly. And that you’re effectively like, over time, kind of burying the oldest woodiest tissue and you’ll we have these are our soils are like layers of organic matter sand, organic matter sand, that are the prior years leaves, you know, compressed and so we roughly sand each bed every four years. So most growers have things on a quarter of the marsh gets sanded each year, so that they have a balanced workload. And then you’ll see you’ll have your five, you know, four years worth of, of leaf and stem, and then that layer of sand kind of complex things down and you get this nice, nice striations and that kind of helps with nutrient availability and kind of the whole the whole ball game. So that’s kind of foundational to how we grow cranberries here.

Will Fulwider 12:13
Very cool.

Michael Geissinger 12:15
What are the things look like once that starts thawing out in the spring besides the tiller is kind of going on setting roo is that when they kind of start budding out and start flowering or is there other things happening first?

Allison Jonjak 12:29
Yeah, so coming out of dormancy, and I think we would definitely call them runners rather than tillers and there’s a bunch of fun like terms of art that are very lucky and very specific. And your…

Will Fulwider 12:38
Yeah, what a field crop way to think of things, Michael, tillers? It’s not rye.

Michael Geissinger 12:44
We gotta translate it into something I do know there’s something, uprights uprights, right? In cranberries?

Allison Jonjak 12:52
Actually, there are two things called uprights and cranberries. One are the vines that so runners are the the vines that are spreading out. Stolons would be the technical scientific term. But runners is the colloquial term and everyone understands that. And then uprights are the ones that don’t go sideways, they go straight up roughly finger length to maybe maximum like six inches. And that’s where you’ll have your, your flowers developing into fruit. There’s also what we call the uprights in the irrigation systems, and that is the roughly foot tall riser that lets our irrigation have a good reach so that we’re using kind of the, you know, balancing water use efficiency. So that’s the part of your irrigation system you have to have out of the way for harvest. So two points for one answer. Yeah, so when, when the ice starts to thaw, and we get to start scrambling basically the spring is probably the most stressful time for a cranberry grower. As soon as the ice begins to thaw, you will start lining up your irrigation system there’s there’s no mainline pipe that that might have to be taken up for the winter to avoid bursting and freezing that has to go out. Some growers have buried underground pipe in the beds it’s permanently there and they just have to screw in the uprights into position. Other growers have pipe that gets set and replaced on top of the beds each year and so those people will be scattering pipe on top of the ice as it melts so that as soon as it melts, you can connect everything make sure there’s no gaskets that have suffered over the winter make sure you’ve got everything. Everything tighten and waterproof and then you will be able to frost protect immediately after you know as soon as you can see vines you were putting out temperature sensors in a maybe usually one per 10 Or one per 20 acres. Have you tried to set them in the places that you know are going to be the coldest whether that is, you know, every, every place has a microclimate. So you kind of know over in that swale over there, it’ll be, it’ll be extra cold. And so you are watching you, you set an alarm in your bedroom. And when you’re first coming out of dormancy, the cranberries are able to tolerate, you know, quite cold temperatures, like negative negative 15. Without damage, as they transition from tight bud to cabbage head, suddenly, what used to be able to tolerate negative 15 is starting to push water back up into the bud tissue, and now it’s vulnerable again. So suddenly, you can go from handling negative 15 to only handling zero to handling only 12. To suddenly you can only handle 30, you know, 32 And then there’s the very delicate phases like like roughneck and hook where say, Okay, I don’t even want this to get below 38. And so we adjust the, the, the temperature sensors to send alarms and wake us up and frost protect basically on any cold clear night. So that’s a cranberry grower will get very little sleep. For those first few weeks after after ice out. Spring mostly focuses on frost protection, there are a couple of insects that are very early to show up, that we will sweep for and treat if they become a problem. But those tend to not typically be our more severe pests. So it’s just kind of a monitor situation. And then the cranberry plants when they’re coming out of dormancy are not taking up really any energy yet. They’re using the carbohydrate stores that they already had. So there’s no fertilizer that goes down in that early phase.

Michael Geissinger 16:57
You mentioned pests, do you ever have any weed issues with cranberries? Or does their growth habit kind of knock them out pretty well? Or what’s that, like?

Allison Jonjak 17:07
There are certainly weed issues, and especially in a perennial crop, there’s no, there’s no go back and do overs, right? If you, if you get weeds established, they’re not going to go away, you’re going to have to keep fighting them for years to come. So our most pernicious weeds are woody perennials, the same as cranberries, we have some pretty good tools for a lot of broadleaf. And we have some pretty good tools for, you know, barnyard grasses. But sedges can be difficult to difficult to target without targeting the cranberries, and then things that are close relative to the cranberry, like brownbush, leatherleaf. maples are a thorn in everyone’s side forever. And then dewberries, which are these kind of low yielding, sprawling blackberry relative, that there’s just nothing, there’s just nothing that kills them. And they’re, they make us feel sad.

Michael Geissinger 18:06
Thanks for that overview, it was kind of what things look like. So this is a really unique crop, and there’s lots of management going into it. And I think that just kind of helps us appreciate that a little bit. You mentioned to a little bit about soil fertility management in cranberries. And so I want to open up that conversation a little bit more and see you know, are there any unique management considerations for soil fertility and cranberries? Or how is it usually applied and you know, we talked about losses in like role crop systems and trying to mitigate those are their losses that happened in Cranberry systems too.

Allison Jonjak 18:43
But yeah, so I’m going to start actually with kind of like come out of dormancy and then you blossom and then after you blossom is when people start thinking about fertility because that is when the plant is starting to shift from using its internal storage to now taking external storage, it taking external resources, and putting those into the fruit into into next year’s tissue. So when we start to see fruit from from the date and we kind of go by phenological stage mostly, this is when it’s time to start making nutrient applications. We tend to do blends a triple 11 Like NPK 11-11-11 is really common. You also will see some maybe 14-11-11. I guess the biggest thing to realize about cranberries contrasted with row crops is if you put down too much fertilizer unfortunately, the plant is going to take it up. I mean, I guess fortunately from a from a downstream water perspective, the plant is going to take it up but unfortunately from a growing a crop perspective, the plant is going to take it up because if it gets more than it wants, it is going to turn that new attrition into runners and vegetative tissue instead of into fruiting tissue. So, if we over fertilize, we get great green luscious vines with no berries on them. People started to realize this, as soon as we started commercially cultivating cranberries, like, hey, I’ll add some fertilizer Oh, no, that didn’t do what I wanted at all. So in order to get the right amount of fertilizer, there’s a, we’ll do tissue and soil tests to kind of confirm what our soil reserves are. If we’re seeing high soil test, if we’re seeing low tissue P, for example, but there’s high soil P, that lets us know we have an uptake issue rather than an availability issue. And so adding more granular P is not going to solve the problem, we have to look at actually getting what’s already there into the plant instead. So we do baseline tissue and soil tests annually. Trying to keep you know, keep most of our tissue levels in an optimal range. One we come around to application season, you’ll have a general plan based on your expected yield of a given bed. And that usually that varies by variety. Varieties also vary in how early or late they are. So an early season variety. Sometimes you’ll do your first Nutrient Application a week before you do your first Nutrient Application in the later variety. So we are watching for, you know the berries to set and become almost pea sized before we’ll start so that those nutrients are taken up and put directly into the fruit. In addition to that, we’re doing really small doses. So the plant is filling the fruit slowly. Similarly, we’re going to go out and put a dose out when we first see the the berries swelling to pea size, and then we’ll wait for roughly five days go out and look at a upright growth. And I know this sounds like not the most advanced technology in the world, but go out and a farmer’s understanding of how has my upright pushed? What shade of green is it and I’ve got growers that use like four different polarized sunglasses to check like is it the screen or the screen or the screen and makes comparisons you’re looking for response to the especially the nitrogen, but not too much response. And so most people will put on roughly once a week for four weeks, a very small dose that’s on the order of 10 pounds per acre. If it’s triple 11, it’s all just the same, but we tend to say so many pounds of nitrogen and of course the P and K air are at those same levels. Nitrogen is the one that that kicks off overgrowth. And so that’s what we’re kind of physically monitoring for. But we’ll make four to six applications over the course of the year. When you see overgrowth you stop and you won’t put on any more that year.

Michael Geissinger 23:26
Is the fertility going on through like fertigation through the irrigation system or is it applied separately?

Allison Jonjak 23:33
Right, so it’s a granular application system. Kind of harkening back to the cranberry growers as engineers that I was gonna kick this off with, they developed a boom spreader. And so basically think of, you know, a cart that’s going to drive on the dike. So cranberries are grown in beds there maybe two to three acres on average with dikes in between each bed. And the dike a lets you raise up water for harvest but be lets you drive on something because we can’t drive on beds, we are super paranoid about soil compaction, we don’t like to cause any negative impact on our perennial vines out there. So we stay out of the beds whenever we can. So we travel along the dike with this big long arm that reaches out over half the bed. And this boom is it’s cool. It’s dual use. Most of them have both a wet kit with sprayer drops, as well as a really big fan that blows granular fertilizer out and then little shields that deflect the fertilizer straight down into the crop. And so we’re making these applications by granular fertilizer, you know, granular granular by boom that lets us be super precise with placement. We don’t have to have overlaps. Most people with the advent of the boom, if you rebuild a bed, you’ll build it to be exactly the size of your boom so that you don’t have to don’t have to wonder or worry about overlap. For people who have different sized beds. You there’s this kind of nice xylophone mechanism where you can shut off individual openings. So you you set your boom to match your bed length, or your bed with them, sorry. So that it gets put kind of right exactly in the right place. And that also makes it possible to do these weekly applications. One of the convenient things about a cranberry marsh, if you’re if you’re 50 acres, if you’re 100 acres, it is possible to you know, make a lap of the marsh and get fertilizer applied to everything and in a day or two. And that then you get five days to work on your work on your other issues and then come right back and be ready to do your next lap of of fertility.

Will Fulwider 25:52
Five days to decide which sunglass polarized sunglasses that you’re going to put on that day.

Allison Jonjak 25:58
Exactly.

Michael Geissinger 25:59
One more quick question, you mentioned that they weren’t cranberry production, you don’t worry about susceptibility to losses so much because the perennial vines take up sounds like they luxury consume nutrients when it’s over applied. I wanted to ask too, I’ve heard before that there’s usually a lot of land that’s supporting cranberry bogs. So like, a farm might have like 10 acres of beds, maybe but they have like 200 more acres have kind of resources beyond that, that sort of supporting those.

Allison Jonjak 26:36
Yeah, and I’ll I’ll correct a little bit both. Both, there’s not a whole lot of losses because the plants luxury consume, and also the nature of acidic soils. If you have extra nitrogen, hey, it’s instantly ammonium and that’s not going anywhere. So there’s the the the upside down, you know, funhouse mirror world of our really acidic systems that are kind of still doing what they did, naturally, prior to agriculture was swamps. Wetlands are filters. As water kind of passes through, they lock a lot of nutrients and turn a lot of nutrients into usually fairly useless plants, brownbush does not have, there’s not a whole lot to brownbush, other than using up nutrients that would otherwise be in lakes. Luckily, cranberries are a lot cooler than brownbush. So one thing that is different from people’s expectations about cranberry farms. Right now in Wisconsin, I believe that our average is nine acres of support land to every one acre of crop cranberry beds. So a lot of times a row crop farm, if you if you say I’m I’m 1500 acres, that means I have you know, about 1500 and 80 acres or so there’s a little bit of support land for machinery, you know, machine shops and things but we because we are so interconnected with water, want to have basically water available, that can that can make us able to grow cranberries on the order of 9 to 10 acres of support land for every one acre of crop bed, and therefore you’ve got extra woodlands, you’ve got sometimes extra reservoir area, you’ve got other other lands that that might have been cranberry that that kind of bog, like, there’s a lot of additional land available. And that also usually helps us out. If we’re returning water somewhere, we can usually let it settle out speed wise first and drop any turbidity there’s yeah, there’s a lot of good things associated with having all those support acres.

Will Fulwider 28:45
I think it’s really interesting, you know, coming from a row cropping world where we, you know, one of our main issues with water quality is something like nitrate. And it just sounds like, you know, in a system that uses so much water and has is so associated with water, as you mentioned, you know, in my mind, it would be like nitrate leaching has to be huge issue, but it just doesn’t seem like it is because of the acidic nature of the soils and the, you know, luxury consumption of the cranberry. So that’s fascinating to me.

Allison Jonjak 29:15
It is actually the case, we still care about nitrate leaching. We care about it when it comes from upstream. Right. And so there are growers who are in regions that have high nitrates in the water that’s available and they will do water tests on their way in and reduce granular nitrogen application in order to account for that nitrogen that’s coming in, right. And so that’s you know, cool. You maybe you want to say we save money on it, you know, maybe you spend as much money at the at the water test fees as you would have on nitrogen but we are super concerned about water quality and that we think about it all the time. We’re hyper focused on it because the Can if we’re getting more if we’re getting more than we need like, oh no. And so there are marshes in those areas that can be high nitrogen that that will run kind of a mix of surface water and groundwater to have to kind of modulate and not over fertilize. There are growers who run tests on their own marshes. And you know, yep, we see higher nitrates coming in than going out. So we’re actually kind of serving as a sink for some of that. And we feel very glad to be able to contribute to the watersheds overall.

Will Fulwider 30:34
Right, aAnd so that was, I guess my kind of follow up was like, can we think of sometimes cranberry marshes as a way of filtering out nitrates from groundwater surface water?

Allison Jonjak 30:43
Basically, yes. And that’s I kind of, it’s this, it’s the same as a natural wetland, it’s still serving that same function of locking up nitrogen into ammonium, letting the letting go weird, acid loving plants that that eat ammonium instead of eating, instead of eating nitrate flourish from those. So it’s a it’s a really cool system. I’m very proud that Wisconsin, it really kind of doubles down on the natural process.

Will Fulwider 31:15
Right yeah. And Wisconsin, is it? It’s the largest cranberry growing state by far, right?

Allison Jonjak 31:21
Absolutely, we this year, it’s 62% of the world’s cranberries were grown in Wisconsin.

Will Fulwider 31:26
Wow. Very cool. And so you know, you mentioned growers taking, you know, tests of groundwater or water that’s coming into the swamp, check for nitrates to make sure they’re not, you know, overfeeding their cranberries. And so that’s a challenge, making sure that the cranberries are getting exactly what they need. What are some of the other challenges that cranberry growers face? We were talking about earlier, you have these research roundtables, which is awesome. And so growers give feedback directly that researchers at the University that they can work on, but kind of like what are the some of those? Can you tic off some of those main challenges that they face?

Allison Jonjak 31:59
Yeah, absolutely. So we are just this was just two days ago. So it’s very fresh in my memory. But it’s honestly kind of a capstone of the year for me, getting the growers in front of the researchers and giving growers a chance to brainstorm, talk about their challenges. Find out what’s what’s a research shaped challenge. We this year, broke up into five kinds of subheadings. And I’m sure they’ll be familiar to row crop farmers that are listening as well. We have an entomology entomology breakout group, and a genetics breakout group. We have a plant pathology, one on horticulture, plant physiology, and then one that’s kind of general management, which is both machinery, laser leaders, logistics, and farm management questions like labor and those kinds of things. So there’s pick one of those. And I’ll give you a list of examples of things that we talked about.

Will Fulwider 32:57
You said laser weeders, and that perked my interest.

Allison Jonjak 33:02
Yeah, so I mean, the the huge benefit of laser weeders, from our perspective is going to be having finally a tool against some of these woody perennials that we can’t attack without damaging cranberries. And the challenge of adapting that into cranberry use is right now they’re very heavy. And right now they’re wheeled, and we would need to come up with either a really impressive cantilever on a traveling boom, or some kind of kind of tine roller system that would let them transit the beds without damaging vines. So work on work on laser weeders is right now focusing on how do we not damage vines in the application of it. So that’s a fun one that everybody’s eyes light up about.

Will Fulwider 34:00
Very cool. Yeah, I was like, What is this some sort of newfangled, you know, futuristic technology?

Allison Jonjak 34:06
I mean, it totally is and that it is being used in several specialty crops. Especially perennial ones, and especially, especially ones that are in rows that can handle tracked vehicles. So we’re, we’re excited to be soon on the list of rollouts. But that’s still in there. You know, it’s still in the research phase. In terms of like, entomology, we’ve had we have a few kind of really pernicious pests that have really otso the redheaded flea beetle Systena frontalis has a very long emergence pattern. And we have products that can control it early in the summer, but the pre harvest intervals on those chemistries are fairly long. So come come August, we no longer have any control tool. And we still have to watch the flea beetles continue to emerge and continue to eat both the foliage and the berries. And that’s heartbreaking. And so a big research push is on, if we can possibly target the larvae, instead of targeting the adult beetles, they lay their eggs 15 centimeters deep, and so it’s hard to target larvae. And so we’re looking at some nematode applications. So a lot of a lot of discussion in our entomology group this time was was nematode focused and finding ways to handle flea beetles that don’t bump up against pre harvest intervals. Because those are we’re obviously as a direct food crop. There’s pre harvest intervals. And there’s also maximum residue limits that the handlers impose. And especially if you have fruit for export, there can be something with a pre harvest interval of 10 days, but the the MRL from the handler, sorry, you have to be 45 days. And we’re we’re obviously very, very, very careful about that. Because, you know, there would be Yeah, we’re we’re extremely, extremely sensitive to our handlers needs and consumers needs.

Will Fulwider 36:11
That sounds like maybe the answer is soil penetrating lasers. Continue on the laser theme.

Allison Jonjak 36:20
I would support that. That’d be fun. But then we’d find out like, what else would be we’d be zapping at the same time, right? So over and over in the horticulture physiology group. The big questions there, especially since we’ve had a few new cultivars of cranberries released in the last 15 years. There’s a lot of research on cold hardiness and breaking dormancy in our older varieties, but there’s not as crisp of research on the newer varieties. So getting the dormancy breaking habits of our new hybrids understood is a top horticulture need. But there’s also what’s going on in the rhizosphere. So we have a molecular biologist who works in cranberries at the University of Wisconsin, and she and her lab have taken kind of a census of all of the mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria and other other cool microbes living near and on the roots of cranberries. And she took this census from commercial cranberries, and from organic cranberry, like organic production methods, cranberries, and from wild cranberries growing in in swamps nearby cranberry marshes and kind of took a complete census and said what’s in here and has found several like phosphorus solubilizing bacteria has found other cool mycorrhiza that that are able to hand. Like we said the phosphorus is super super bound up and are really acidic soil. So how does that get handed over to the cranberry root? So the cranberry root can uptake it? Yeah, lots of cool work on those fronts being done. And now that I know that they’re there, I don’t want any have any mycorrhizae zapped right?

Will Fulwider 38:06
Yeah, maybe some lessons from for row croppers to be learning from in the future with those phosphorus solubilizing. So I use that word wrong, but that’s okay. Bacteria.

Michael Geissinger 38:18
Yeah. Well, well, it’s great to hear, you know, some of the solutions that you guys are coming up with to address these challenges, and that research based roundtables is really cool. I might start kind of wrapping us up here a little bit. So, Alison, this is sort of a variation of a question we kind of asked during each of our episodes, which is basically if someone was interested in either learning more about the cranberry industry or where to get involved, where would they maybe go for that information?

Allison Jonjak 38:54
Yeah, I just double checked that searching Cranberry Back to Basics, does give what I hoped it gave which is our kind of newly released back to basics course, which is a series of videos that handles I think it’s like 15 common and important cranberry topics. We kind of developed this with the idea of when cranberry growers hire new people who are, you know, good workers, but don’t have cranberry background gives them an understanding of agronomy of entomology. So go ahead and type in Cranberry Back to Basics course, you can scan each of those QR codes and watch a video. The other places that I have a lot of information up are fruit.wisc.edu and then backslash cranberries and then there’s a good ol list of all of the cranberry crop management journals that we put out. Another way is reaching out directly to me, allison .jonjak@wisc.edu and also the Wisconsin Cranberry Growers Association, which is wisccran.org is a really good resource. So they’re we’re, we’re happy to share we’re really proud to be part of Wisconsin agriculture. We’re glad to glad to kind of get to. And a lot of you know, a lot of people come from out of state to watch cranberry harvest at the cranberry festivals in Warrens and Eagle River and Stone Lake, and so yeah, we’re we’re happy to be transparent and and communicative. And yeah, very glad if you have questions to reach out.

Michael Geissinger 40:30
Definitely. That’s wonderful. Well, thanks, Alison, for joining us today and sharing all of your cranberry wisdom with us.

Allison Jonjak 40:39
Thanks for the invitation. This has been super fun, I hope I hope it’s enjoyable and I hope everyone has a good dish of cranberry sauce or at least some put some sweet dried cranberries in your apple pie for Thanksgiving this week.

Will Fulwider 40:59
Thanks for listening. This has been field notes from UW Madison extension. My name is Will Fulwider regional crops educator for Dane and Doddge counties. And I was joined by my co host Michael Geissinger outreach specialists in Northwest Wisconsin for the nutrient and pest management program of UW Madison. A big thank you to Joe Ryan for creating our theme music and to Abby Wilkymacky for our logo. If you have any questions about anything you’ve heard today, or about your farming practices in general, reach out to the extension agriculture educators serving your region

Transcribed by https://otter.ai