 Hi everyone. It's a great pleasure to be in this series and to introduce you to Blueberry breeding at Auburn University. So I'm Sushen Rue. I started my position as the Blueberry Breeder and Small Fruit Breeder in 2021. So the program is just over one year old as of today. And the goal is to develop elite blueberry cultivars for Alabama and with a broader application to neighboring regions as well. So you might be wondering why we want to focus on blueberry. Blueberry is considered a super fruit for its rich content of antioxidants and many other health promoting compounds and the global industry has been increasing continuously in the past 50 years and is projected to continue to grow. With that being said Alabama is actually in a great position to increase our blueberry production considering our neighboring states like North Carolina, Georgia and Florida which are the major blueberry producers in the United States. In 2021, the blueberry industry in Georgia created a cash value of 99 million dollars and that value is about 50 million dollars in North Carolina and Florida as well. On the other hand, the blueberry production in Alabama is really marginal compared to those three states and with very similar environments there's great potential for us to increase blueberry production and the cash value of this crop in Alabama. So the current situation of blueberry production is most of the production is on small upig farms and heavily relied on rabbidized species. And on the other hand, southern high bush cultivars have become the dominant cultivars in the southeast industry for its early maturity, better food quality and longer shelf life. For the same reason southern high bush have much higher market share in the wholesale market and also tend to have higher price because of its maturity time and the better food quality. So a lot of growers are actually interested in adopting southern high bush cultivars and a few of them I talked to have actually experimented growing southern high bush on their own farms but overall the success has been limited due to several challenges. So the first challenge is spring frost. If we look at weather data in Alabama, there's frequent frost events in January and February and at least one frost event in March. So a lot of southern high bush cultivars have low chill requirement which means they would flower early like in January, February and last year some of the southern high bush cultivars even started flowering in November and December. So that means they face tremendous challenge and risk for frost. So as of this year Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi actually encountered one of the worst frost events in history. On March 12th and 13th the temperature dropped to 24 degrees Fahrenheit or even lower in some parts with a high wind speed of 30 miles per hour. So the combination of low temperature and high wind speed made frost protection very difficult and so these pictures are shared by Mr. Jimmy Ferguson in South Alabama and you can see the damage to the flower buds after the frost on the right hand side. So in general the crop loss was estimated to range between 20% to even 100% in parts of the three states and parts of North Carolina as well and quite a few farms in Georgia lost the entire crop due to this frost. So the take-home message is it is super super important to consider frost protection if you want to grow southern high bush. It could be overhead irrigation which is the most common and effective approach adopted in Georgia and Florida. Almost all the commercial production out outdoor production adopted overhead irrigation. However it is expensive to establish and it does require a very large amount of water resources to run the system effectively. So for growers which lack those resources some farmers local farmers like Dr. Arlie Powell also developed this low cost low tunnel structure where you can throw the frost blanket over the tunnel prior to a frost event. It has been quite effective and affordable for small-scale production even if you don't have any structure set up for small small-scale production simply throw the frost blankets over the plants can also reduce frost damage. However if there's no frost protection methods adopted it is super important to choose cultivars which can tolerate small frost better meaning those ones either bloom later late in March or after March or some cultivars who can bounce back and recover after frost events. So another challenge is the strict requirement for soil and water pH. So southern high bush is more sensitive to high pH than rabidai. Its ideal soil pH level is between 4.5 and 5.5 compared to rabidai which can tolerate a little bit higher soil pH. Southern high bush would suffer from high pH showing kinds of disease symptoms and iron deficiency. So it is very important to do soil test and water test before planting and also the use of large amount of bark on raised beds is also helpful together with some reduced pH reducing fertilizers and if you have high pH water irrigation water on your farm it is also important to consider lower water pH with sulfuric acid to inject your system. Another challenge faced by southern high bush production is diseases and stresses. You can see these pictures were taken from a blueberry research farm at University of Georgia last year. So this field was deserted for two years and you can see on the left the rabidai cultivars. Plants are still doing relatively well but southern high bush plants are almost gone. So a famous blueberry scientist Dr. Jared Krueger once said southern high bush is a crop looking for somewhere to die. So it's a vivid expression of how vulnerable southern high bush is to diseases and stresses. So that being said growing southern high bush requires a rigorous spray program and also careful cultural management. And another challenge on top of those is the lack of cultivars specifically developed for the local environments of Alabama. In the past there has been breeding programs in our almost every neighboring state supplying their growers with cultivars adapted to their local environments. Alabama hasn't had any breeding efforts before the establishment of this breeding program that means the growers here don't have cultivars specifically developed for their environment. So the goal of this breeding program is to evaluate and develop new blueberry cultivars for Alabama with hope to serve both small-scale and large-scale producers. Specifically we want to improve southern high bush for better spring frost tolerance, soil adaptability, disease resistance, and also better food quality. For rabidai the top priority are early maturity, better food quality, as well as disease resistance. So blueberry breeding is a very tedious and time consuming process starting from making process from two parents. It takes 10 to 15 years to eventually release new cultivars. If we are extremely lucky and work very hard and efficiently there's a chance to reduce that time to seven to eight years but in general that's still a very long time. With that being said great accomplishments have been making the breeding program in terms of germplasm introduction and crosses and so on. So I've been diligently working with other breeders across the country to introduce the most advanced materials to our breeding program. So so far we have introduced parental materials from University of Georgia and other resources and using those materials I was able to make the first season of crosses this spring and you can see the berries of some of the parental materials. The materials we have they tend to have very large berries, firm and very tasty with a high level of sugar and a balance of sugar and acidity and so with this collection of materials we're hopeful to develop something unique and elite for our local growers. In addition to introducing parental materials I've been also working on introducing seedling populations created from bi-parental crosses. So we were able to introduce 25 seedling populations from University of Georgia and thousands of seedlings have been germinated and maintained in the greenhouse to be evaluated later on in the field. So the ability to start with these seedling populations will put us ahead of our timeline for at least two to three years. And so even with the advance in this breeding program I think I ordered some step-lead. It's still it's a long-term investment for breeding. In the short term the program also works on evaluating existing cultivars and selections from other breeding programs. And the first thing to do is to look at the weather data of Alabama in our neighboring states to know exactly what cultivars in which region would work well for different parts of Alabama. So if we look at the weather data for for regions in Alabama starting from the very north the Coleman region to the north south the Bruton region. So in Coleman the average chill chilling hour is about 1700 hours a year in central Alabama that ranged from 1100 to 1300 and in south Alabama it's about 800 hours. And now if we look at the chilling hours of North Carolina it is a 1300 hours it's very close to central Alabama which is a Clinton the shorter area. And it's kind of surprising that even North Carolina is much to the north than North Alabama the chill hours in North Carolina is still much lower than Coleman Alabama. So that tells us if you're a grower in central Alabama it's good to look at cultivars perform well in southern region of North Carolina to make the reference. However, if you're a grower in the north Alabama you would prefer some cultivars that's more cold hardy than cultivars used in North Carolina. And now if we look at the weather data from south Mississippi it is a little bit lower than central Alabama than shorter. So in general if for farmers in central Alabama a good reference would be south Mississippi and south southern region of north Carolina. And if we look at the weather data of south Georgia which is their major production region of blueberry in the southeast it is quite similar to Bruton Alabama. So if you're a grower living in the south Alabama simply looking at what cultivars perform well in south Georgia that would give you very good information on what cultivars you can use in your region. It's very likely those cultivars used in Georgia would perform similarly in your region as well. On the other hand the chill hours in Florida is in general much lower in most parts of Alabama so it requires additional caution to introduce materials from Florida. So that's the some estimation based on weather data. Eventually we still need to test those cultivars in Alabama in order to know how exactly they perform in the local environments. So we have worked out material transfer agreements to reintroduce materials from all those regions and test them in two locations of Alabama. One at Elvis Smith which is central Alabama and one at the Bruton research station which is south Alabama. So these are the list of cultivars we will be evaluating. We will have quite a few cultivars from Florida, some Ravida cultivars from Georgia, a new Hanover, a new Southern Highbridge cultivar from North Carolina, Gumbo-Breadwell from Mississippi and a few cultivars from Oregon, Fall Creek and we will also look at advanced selections from the public breeding programs as well. So the field in both locations have been established and half of the plants have been planted in the field and we're still waiting for the other half of the plants to arrive and plant them in the fall and overall the plants are doing well in both locations. I want to share with you the picture of Bruton station where we have relatively high soil and water pH. So we need to install an injector system to amend water pH with sulfuric acid. So the process of working out the right amount of sulfuric acid into the water has not been that smooth. So our station manager is still working on lowering water pH to the ideal range. But that like once the system is established that will also serve as a template for our local growers to adopt for high bush production. And although it takes about one or two years for the plants to fully develop and for us to collect reliable data, this year we do have some observations of berries from some of the much older rabidae plants at Yves Smith. So Clore and Titan are known to have large berries and there are several selections which are offspring of the two cultivars also inherited the large berry traits. And you can see the berry size are uniform and very large. Some of them are even bigger than the quarter. But some selections do show some tendency of splitting after rain, which is a trait in Titan as well. So we'll do careful evaluation on splitting and fruit quality and other traits in the upcoming years. And in addition to improving cultivars for fruit quality, another focus of the breeding program is to develop disease-resistant cultivars, especially for Boutrosperia stem blight. So if you observe any disease symptoms similar to stem blight, usually it's dried stems, dried leaves, or the entire death of the plants, please feel free to reach out to me and my lab can do a free disease test for you. So the goal of the program is to isolate the causative pathogens for stem blight and eventually to test cultivars for resistance for this disease. So that'll be all of my presentation and I want to give my thanks to the breeders, collaborators, our station managers, and extension specialists, especially our growers in Alabama and even neighboring regions. It's been humbling for me to work for you and I'm super grateful for for your support and trust. So my role here is to serve our blueberry community. So if you have any challenges or there are things you want me to work on, please feel free to let me know and I will do my best.