Abstract
Cultivar selection is an important managerial task for commercial farmers. Numerous available options provide marketing opportunities for farmers; however, they can also make cultivar selection time-consuming. For the past 13 years, a team of Penn State Extension educators and university faculty has implemented a new model to evaluate cultivars for key vegetable crops to assist farmers. Our approach started by building relationships within the vegetable industry with farmers, seed company representatives, and farmer-driven organizations who support our program with funding and gift-in-kind donations. We also added rigor to cultivar evaluations by conducting trials of key vegetable crops over 2 years at three locations. The results were used to develop cultivar recommendations, which were disseminated through various face-to-face and distance Extension avenues. The results were also published in refereed journals. The combination of funding, Extension products, and refereed articles led to university support. A drawback to our approach was the difficulty implementing uniform production methods at three experimental sites. The input of a statistical consultant assisted with overcoming this drawback. This model also required the use of strategies common to successful teams. Our methods are described here for those who desire to build a similar program.
Highlights
Cultivar selection is critical to the success of commercial vegetable farmers
Initial decisions were to conduct parallel cultivar evaluations at three sites sites to evaluate three to account account for forgeographic geographicenvironmental environmentaldiversity diversityacross acrossPennsylvania, Pennsylvania, evalueach vegetable typetype for 2for years to account for year-to-year environmental variability, and ate each vegetable
It has remained a research priority partly because of the relationships we have built with Pennsylvania Vegetable Growers Association (PVGA) leadership and members
Summary
Against this backdrop, a team of Penn State Extension educators and university faculty has been conducting annual cultivar evaluations since 2008 with the overall goal of helping farmers select cultivars for key vegetable crops. The objective of our program has been to provide farmers in Pennsylvania and the mid-Atlantic region with recommendations for top-yielding cultivars, primarily in conventional systems [6,7,8,9,10,11]; performance in organic systems has been Provide our methods for building industry and university support for cultivar evaluations
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