 Good morning, everyone. Today I'm going to share the results of our experiment. This is the first season yield of Crescaven peach grafted on semi-dwarf and pest-resistant root stalks. So everyone around knows that in Alabama, peaches are the number one fruit crop commodity and also a local favorite. So a lot of customers love eating Alabama produced peaches. But the peach production does come with some challenges and here I listed the most significant of those challenges in peach production. First of all, most of them we're experiencing some freeze and frost damage late in the spring when the crop has set, especially on early ripening or even mid-season ripening cultivars. And that often causes a lot of damage and crop loss. And in recent years, we're seeing a problem that is becoming more and more significant and that is the insufficient chilling accumulation and we recently had two seasons and the second one the insufficiency was as deep as probably up to 60% for some cultivars. Another issue that we're encountering is that our peach orchards are being trained to the conventional training systems which of them are most often used are open base or open center. Those systems are not proven to be that highly efficient that some of the newly developed systems for high-density orchards. Another problem that we're experiencing it is the labor cost and labor availability and that is combined with land encroachment and lack of verging replant sites for peaches. This relates to another problem that we're experiencing and this is we're having a lot of sites with history or high incidence for malaria root rot or we're experiencing this disease peach tree short life. Both of those diseases are causing a lot of loss in peach production annually, not only in Alabama but that's what we're most concerned with our production in Alabama. Also we're having bacterial and fungal diseases. We have nematodes and insects that are causing problems. So we're looking for solutions to some of those problems or to alleviate some of the problems that we're having with our challenges. You probably are aware that Alabama is part of a bigger multi-state national study looking at different rootstocks for different tree fruits and in 2017 we have initiated a peach semi dwarf rootstock study. There are 10 states involved in that study and also we have international collaborators but this study is looking at seven different rootstock cultivars that are that are semi dwarf and have the ability to control the size of the orchard or the peach tree. This experiment is planted at the Children Research and Extension Center in Clinton and the planting distance we selected for the study is 6 by 18 feet. This provides a density of our orchard up to 405 trees per acre that's not considered very high but rather this is a moderate high density. This experiment is trained to a perpendicular v-training system and you can see on this picture how our trees are looking in this January of 2020. So I wanted to highlight the rootstocks that are included in this experiment and we have three of the rootstocks of Controller Series. They came from Davis, California and those are Controller 6, Controller 7 and Controller 8. All of them are considered to be semi dwarf rootstocks and all of them are hybrids between Harrow Blood and Okinawa Peach so they are 100% peach rootstocks. What is more important at least to me is their resistance to root rot nematode. All three rootstocks have this resistance. The other two rootstocks that we're looking to evaluate in our conditions in Alabama, those are coming from Agrumelora Iberica from Spain, those are Root Pack 20 also known as Dense Pack and Root Pack 40 also known as Nanopack. Both of those rootstocks are inter-specific hybrids. The first one is a hybrid between plum and almond and the second is peach by almond. The third rootstock that we're going to look at it is MP29. It is a clonal plum peach inter-specific hybrid that was developed by Dr. Beckman from USDA in Byron, Georgia. This rootstock was released in 2012. It is pretty new on the market and it is pretty interesting one because it is shown to be resistant to peach tree short life, armillaria root rot and root rot nematodes. So our controls in this experiment are well known guardian and lower rootstocks. Our cyan cultivar is a virus indexed crest haven. We started collecting data for this experiment in 2017 immediately after we planted the experiment and we continued throughout the seasons but for the first time we collected data on the yield in 2019 because we needed to keep the trees without the fruit on them. We needed to defruit them in the first two seasons to make sure they establish their root system well. So on this chart you can see our data for the three seasons that reflect our trunk cross sectional area and for us it is important a measure because it shows us the vigor of each particular tree or each particular rootstock and as you can notice we have data for 2017 listed here in the blue bar. Data for 2018 are listed in the yellow bars and the red bars represent our data for 2019. It is not a surprise to see that guardian and lower rootstock produced the largest trunk cross sectional area throughout the years but what is the pleasant surprise here we can see that all of the experimental rootstocks were growing at a slower pace like they were weaker growing that lower and guardian so that really proves to us that in our environment they're also having this semi dwarf quality so our MP29 rootstock was the weakest growing rootstock among all of those that we tested and of course much smaller than our controls guardian and lower. In 2019 as I mentioned we harvested the fruit for the first time we started the harvest season on July 12th and we had four different harvests that span over a 10 day period and the last harvest was conducted on July 23rd so we harvested every second or third day and here is the data that presents the total yield per tree that we were getting in 2019 and on the picture you can see some of the crop of our experimental trees so again it is not surprised that the trees that were grafted on guardian and lower produced the higher yield but what is a pleasant surprise to me was to see that actually trees that were grafted on MP29 were not statistically different than the trees that were grafted on lower so this this is a pretty good sign because lower obviously produced pretty high yield per tree even though it is the weakest growing rootstock in this experiment from this graph we can also see that controller 678 and also root pack produced very low very low yield in 2018 but when we look and determine yield efficiency which is how we come up with that we divide the total yield in kilograms by the trunk cross sectional area for each tree and that's how we determine how much fruit per area is being produced so our yield efficiency is obviously the highest for the trees that were grafted on MP29 rootstock only lower yield efficiency was closer to that of the efficiency of MP29 the trees that were grafted on root pack 40 definitely had a very low yield efficiency as I mentioned during 2019 we had conducted four harvests and we collected data and separated the data on each of those harvests and then we totaled the data on mean fruit size and that's how we determined the mean fruit size for the season obviously from our records it is shown that controller 6 had the largest mean fruit size in 2018 on the bottom of this table you can see that the trees that were grafted on root pack 20 had the smallest fruit size on average and that was an average of 203 grams only what else we are able to notice here we can see that controller 8 and root pack 40 had larger fruit size than the trees that were grafted on lower and also controller 7 and MP29 had larger fruit size than the trees that were grafted on guardian and this is kind of in some cases you can say against any logic because guardian trees are very vigorous and usually this is related to the larger fruit size produced on those trees but you can see the data almost all of our tested rootstocks produced mean fruit size larger than guardian another observation that we made in 2018 relates to the number of cracked fruit that we found per tree so we counted and recorded the cracked fruit on each of the four harvests and we came with the total number for the season you can see from this chart that root pack 20 had close to seven cracked fruit per tree on average MP29 had about five cracked fruit per tree on average and those numbers were considered high when we compared to our trees that were grafted on guardian and lower which had between one and two cracked fruit only we have another good news here we observed that the trees that were grafted on controller 8 had about one and a half cracked fruit per tree on average which shows the ability of this cultivar to produce to prevent this cracking of the fruit in general this is a pretty young study and we are continuing to evaluate all the responses of those trees that are grafted on different size controlling rootstocks but in general up until now we can see that trees that were grafted on MP29 were the least vigorous trees in our experiment also trees on MP29 had the highest yield efficiency and that is one of the wonderful qualities of this this particular rootstock also trees on controller 6 controller 8 and root pack 40 they had larger fruit size than the trees that were grafted on our controls guardian and lower root pack for 20 and MP29 had the highest number of cracked fruit while trees on controller 8 had relatively low number of cracked fruit and it was similar to guardian trees on root pack 40 MP29 produced the greatest had the greatest effect on advancing fruit maturity when we compared the number of fruit that we harvested on each of those four harvests that I mentioned throughout the season we noticed that over 90 percent of the fruit for guardian and over 75 percent of the fruit of Lowell were harvested in the second part of the harvest season while about 70 percent of the fruit of root pack 40 and MP29 they were produced in the first half of the season or within the first two harvest dates so for now we are thinking that probably those two rootstocks root pack 40 and MP29 could be used as a tool by the grower as a tool to time the ripening or to target certain markets also with this study we're intending to evaluate the labor cost and eventually any savings that could be provided by the perpendicular V and by the rootstocks the semi dwarf rootstocks we just collected data on the pruning weights and timing for pruning that is needed for the trees that are grafted on different rootstocks and we will continue to measure the timing that is needed to to hand tin those trees later in the season and also eventually we're going to time the harvest time for each of those trees and we we're going to measure what type of economical benefits the new rootstocks and the training system can provide to our peach growers with that I'd like to thank for your attention