 So in this presentation, I will talk briefly about updates of the breeding program and research plans. So my name is Sushen Ru. I'm a small fruit breeder at Auburn University. So the breeding program started in April last year. It's just a little bit over one year old as of now. And the goal of the program is to develop elite blueberry cultivars for Alabama with a broader application to nearby regions. And potentially we'd like to expand to strawberries in the future as well. So you might be wondering why do we choose blueberry? So globally, blueberry is a very popular fruit for its health benefits. And the blueberry industry has been continuously increasing in the past 50 years and its project to continue to increase. The Southeast region is a major production region for blueberries in the United States. If we look at the numbers from Georgia, North Carolina and Florida in those states, the acreage of blueberry ranged from 4,000 acres to 16,000 acres. And every year generates $15 million to $100 million in those states. However, blueberry production in Alabama is really marginal compared to our neighbors. And as of now, there's less than 1,000 acres of blueberries produced in Alabama. So with very similar climates to our neighbors, there's great opportunities for us to double and even triple the production of blueberries in the state. And currently blueberries are mainly produced on small, upick farms and some farms targeting the retail and farmers market as well. And the major blueberry type in Alabama is rabbit eye. It's a native species in the southeastern region. However, in general in the Southeast region, southern high bush is much more popular nowadays for its many benefits. So it has generally earlier maturity, better food quality, such as bigger berries, better taste and fewer seeds. And they also tend to have longer shelf life. For those reasons, southern high bush blueberries are more popular in the wholesale market. And nowadays a lot of wholesale chains, they would only recognize high bush cultivars rather than rabbit eye. Regardless of the many benefits and nice features of southern high bush, they are really hard to grow in Alabama. And the top one challenges spring frost damages. If we look at the weather data in historical weather data in Alabama, and regardless it's in northern Alabama or southern Alabama, it's almost certain that there will be at least one frost advance before April. So if there's no frost protection in the field, it will be very risky to plant any southern high bush cultivars or even rabbit eye cultivars which bloom before April. And so it is the most popular frost protection practice in the Southeast is overhead irrigation. It requires a large amount of water continuously applied on the plants during a frost event to release heat. So when during the process of water condensing to ice it release heat to protect the berries. So on average it requires two tons of water per hour, which is really hard to achieve for most of farms in Alabama. Due to the shortage of water or a lack of efficient pumping system. So that's really expensive to set up and hard to achieve. And we also have some local growers such as Dr. Ali Powell, who developed this tunnel structure and took up to use for frost blankets during frost event, which has been proven to be very effective, but on a large scale it would be hard and expensive to apply this type of structure for either you pick or wholesale production production. And so in this March there's a historical like frost event, which drops dropped the temperature to 24 degree Fahrenheit together with wind speed of 30 mile per hour. And that was once in a 10 year frost event. It cost dramatic crop loss in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi. So in Georgia there's the report was like there are 20% to 100% of crop loss after that frost. Many farms had no crop left at all after that frost. And these are some pictures before and after pictures from the Ferguson farm at Chatham, Alabama. You can see like how bad it was because of the high wind speed. It made it really difficult to use any protection methods such as wind machine or overhead irrigation. So it was really a devastating event. And so the bottom line is it's really important to consider frost protection if you want to try southern high bush. Or if there's no frost protection, it is safer to plant cultivars which flowers in late March or even later. So another challenge for growing southern high bush is the need of acidic soil. So high bush, southern high bush has a higher need and more like stringent need for low soil pH. And so before planting it's important to conduct soil and water test to find out the soil type and soil and water pH. And then for the soil preparation it's beneficial to apply a large amount of prime bark to reduce soil pH and increase organic matter. And it's recommended to plant the plants on a raised bed so the water drainage will be better. And if you have high water pH, it will be important to do some justification such as installing an injector and using sulfuric acid to lower pH, water pH. So again, that takes a lot of investment and it's not cheap to install injector. It also requires a lot of experience to know how to adjust water pH to the ideal range. And on top of all those challenges, it is also very critical to maintain a stringent spray program because southern high bush cultivars tend to have a wide range of diseases such as bacteria, leaf scorch, leaf rust, template, and phytophthora, you name it. So in general, if growers are looking into host cell, then southern high bush would be the cultivar which can increase your income and the volume of cell. But if you really want to go that direction, it is important to establish the proper infrastructure for frost protection, soil and water pH adjustment and disease control. And however, for most small farmers in Alabama, if you're mainly looking at UPEC or retail market, or if you're doing some organic farming, rabbit eye cultivars are still the recommended species to grow in Alabama. So with that, that's the current situation of challenges of producing southern high bush. The goal of the breeding program is actually to improve the existing cultivars for better management and better performance. So overall, the goal of the breeding program is to evaluate existing blueberry cultivars for Alabama and also to develop new blueberry cultivars for this region as well. And the uniqueness of our breeding program is that we're not like other major production areas, we're not only serving the big scale, large scale producers, we're serving the small farmers as well. So it is important for Alabama to have southern high bush cultivars with better spring frost tolerance, better soil adaptability, better disease resistance and also improved food quality. So those are the areas we're going to improve on for southern high bush. In the meantime, rabbit eye still have a lot of features that's attractive for local growers, and it is the goal of the breeding program to improve its maturity, speed up its maturity and continue to improve its food quality and disease resistance. To do that, currently we're conducting a cultivar evaluation trial using materials from all the major breeding programs in the southeast region. So we're introducing cultivars and advanced selections from North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Poplarville, Mississippi to test them in two regions of Alabama, one in central Alabama and one in southern Alabama. And these are the list of cultivars and selections we're going to test. So cultivars from University of Florida include Arcadia, Colossus, Farthing, Kikris, Optimus, Patricia, Centeno, Wayne, San Joaquin, and also we are testing some high bush and rabbit eye cultivars from University of Georgia, including Victoria, Arculacne, Alapha, Croix, Titan, Vernon, and also a new hand over a new cultivar from North Carolina, Gumball and Bradwell from Mississippi, Poplarville, Blue Ribbon over time from Fort Creek, Nursery, and Oregon. On top of the released cultivars, we're also testing advanced selections from the major breeding programs in multiple locations of Alabama. So right now the plants have been planted, half of the plants have been planted at Yves-Mins Research Station in central Alabama and Bruton Research Station in northern, southern Alabama. And we'll continue to receive plant materials later this year and plant all of those in the field by the end of this year. And so on top of cultivar evaluation, I have already conducted the first round of crosses during this spring and we have berries and seeds collected already. This picture showed some parental materials we got from University of Georgia and you can see they have very large and firm berries from multiple selections. And if you taste them, the taste and fruit quality is exceptional. So hopefully we'll have some seedlings from this process to test in the coming year. And so in addition to breeding efforts and cultivar evaluation, we are also focusing on improving disease resistance for blueberries in Alabama. So Boutrospheria stem bled is a top limiting factor in Alabama for blueberry production. And it is a devastating disease caused by fungi in the family of Boutrospheria and the fungi can enter the plant through natural openings or mechanical wounds and to block the xylem vessels and cause drought-like symptoms. If you see dry leaves and dry stems and that might be the initial symptoms of this disease and eventually in severe cases the entire plant would die. And a very useful diagnosis tool is to cut across the stems, infected stems. And if you can see a pie shaped discoloration on the cross section, that's usually a good sign of stem bled infection. So far there's no single fungi site that can be effective to this disease. So it is recommended to use a series of cultural management practices and also early detection and prevention for this disease to reduce the chance of outbreak. And right now my lab is conducting a research project to identify the distribution and causal species for this disease. And we're offering free disease screening service to our growers. So if you notice any similar symptoms like drought-like symptoms or died stems or plants and you're wondering if it's stem bled, feel free to send me an email or give me a text or call. And so we'll come over to your firm and provide the disease screening for you. You don't have to be stem bled if you have other diseases that you don't know what those are and you need some diagnose service, let me know. And I'm happy to provide that screening for you. And so those are the updates for blueberry breeding. And on top of that, I'm working with Dr. Edgar Vincent right now to plan some cultural evaluation trial for strawberries as well. Strawberry is like a very popular fruit crop in Alabama and the need for a new cultivar is increasing. So we're hoping to establish a cultivar trial starting from central and northern Alabama and eventually add another location in the southern region. So at this planning stage, it will be really helpful if growers can tell us what cultivars are interested, what are the challenges you're facing. And just let us know what are the areas we can work on to further help our growers. So again, this is my email, my first name Sushen.ru, last name, at Auburn.edu and myself is 509-942-9811. Feel free to contact me anytime. My role here is to serve our growers and whatever are your needs will be the goal of my research. So with that, I'd like to thank my colleagues and collaborators from all over the country and especially our growers in Alabama and nearby regions. It's so fortunate for me to work with such great community and I'm really fortunate to have your support. Yeah, thanks for your time and feel free to ask me any questions or give me any suggestions for the breeding program.