Blackberry harvest prediction WE NEED YOUR HELP

Every year blackberry growers struggle with predicting when their fruit will be ready to harvest. Marketers want to know when and how much fruit you will have during the harvest season.

Harvest prediction models for other crops have used heat units/growing degree days in combination with phenology (flowering and fruiting dates) with reasonable success. In cooperation with the NC State Climate Office (SCO), we are gathering data to help growers predict harvest dates based on accumulated heat units.

We need your help. Can you dig up first harvest and peak harvest of Ouachita for multiple years?  The model will be better if we can get dates from a number of locations, over a number of years and compare that to the heat units that have been recorded that year.

Please complete the short survey for your farm. You can fill it out more than one time for multiple years and multiple cultivars, even multiple fields if you know there is a difference in ripening times. We would like data for Ouachita primarily, but will take other cultivars if you are sorting through your records and have those dates as well.

https://goo.gl/forms/rPm7XdOCqhEvsk8D3

Questions? Contact Gina_Fernandez@ncsu.edu