Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
There is high demand for strawberries in the US South Central Region due to increasing population and greater urbanization. However, this region, like the rest of the US, receives almost none of its strawberries from local production. The US as a whole receives 98% of its domestic strawberry production from CA and FL. The reason for such a low rate of regional planting is primarily climate. The growing season in the US South Central is relatively short, temperatures are warm throughout much of the year, and early or late season frosts are unpredictable. One way to overcome these climate limitations is to use controlled environment agriculture (CEA). There are many issues with the development of a thriving CEA strawberry industry. They include producer know-how, ability for growers to gain contracts with large buyers, increased energy consumption, and availability of labor. We suspect that these issues can be surmounted. We will use a one-year planning project to discern how. We will conduct three industry meetings to engage growers, transporters, and buyers concerning the needs and opportunities for CEA strawberry production groups. We will then use a 4th 1-day strategy meeting to organize ourselves around industry data we collect to develop a competitive multi-year SCRI project proposal to be submitted at the end of the planning project. This larger proposal will address issues directly identified and prioritized by stakeholders whom we bring into our network. We will use a project system approach that considers the entire strawberry supply chain.
Animal Health Component
0%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
90%
Applied
10%
Developmental
0%
Goals / Objectives
One overarching goalTo develop a multi-year SCRI project proposal that, if funded, will lead to benefits to existing or potential strawberry growers in the form of increased access to strawberry production knowledge, increased capabilities for controlled environment production, and growth of regional strawberry producer networks of growers and sellers.Specific objectivesImprove and establish the system-based network of scientists, stakeholders, and collaborators for strawberry CEA. There are many in the world of research, production, support technology, transport, and sales that know of CEA-strawberry production which could be (but is not yet) more local. Yet we are not convinced that these individuals and the interests/industries that they represent are sufficiently known to one another and unified in purpose. Over time, these individuals may be business competitors, but the state of CEA-strawberry production in the US South Central region is currently so small that those interested in growing the practice need cooperation much more than they need competition. We therefore will use this project to (a) identify and bring more of these individuals together and (b) grow the depth of familiarity, relationship, and trust between them so that collaboration in CEA-strawberry production happens organically. The idea is that if we plant a seed for a wider network, the network will begin to operate in a grass roots fashion, through the interests and passion of individuals supporting each other's ambitions in CEA-strawberry production.Identify issues, needs, and opportunities. As a team of researchers meeting off-and-on over the last four (4) months, we have identified some needs and opportunities related to strawberry CEA. On the needs side, there are concerns about labor and marketing. How big of a scale should a grower envision to be successful? Should they sell directly to the public or to grocery suppliers? On the opportunities side, there is ample demand for strawberries, and there are many agricultural areas with increasing water scarcity. What would it take to transition some growers to a high value crop with overall lower water use? What level of investment, knowledge, and risk is involved? To ultimately have a successful SCRI project proposal, we need to better identify and understand the needs from many different types of stakeholders so that we can use a research and extension project to address the ones we are most capable of addressing for our region. Put simply, we do not yet know what we do not know.Develop a comprehensive SCRI proposal that adddress teh system-based challenged with a high impact in a3-5 year project. In the last 4-5 months of our planning project, we will need to collect all of the information we have obtained from our meetings and organize it into a project plan that will have the potential for high impact on all segments of a potential CEA-based strawberry industry from the point of growers all the way to the final consumer. We have a team that spans much of this supply chain in terms of their knowledge and experience. Yet to be successful in a grant proposal and then in the project itself, we will need to develop a solid plan that will be ready to execute immediately should we be funded. We will also need to take the network of individuals we have met during the planning project to organize them into an Advisory Panel for the ultimate multi-year project.
Project Methods
Being that the efforts in this project are centered on the planning and execution of meetings, our methods address how to garner interest in these meetings and how they will actually be conducted for data gathering from participants.Garnering interest in meeting attendance and participation. Announcement of the Starkville, MS meeting will be distributed through annual grower conference event organized by MSU Extension Service. Announcement of the meeting will also be distributed by direct contact by CO-PI Tongyin Li. For the CEH conference in Dallas, Drs. Niu and Masabni are the organizers for this conference and will include the breakout session on CEA strawberry production in conference promotion advertisements, at extension events that Dr. Masabni regularly does, and through press releases written and distributed by the online newsletter AgriLife Today. The outreach event at the Poteet Festival will be primarily used to gather participants for the virtual focus group. The Festival president, Mr. Carlos Torres, will be able to provide more notice about the virtual focus group on the Poteet Strawberry Festival website and through the live announcements during the event.Conducting meetings. We will work with meeting organizers in advance to fully explain to them the purpose of breakout sessions for their attendees. Once organizers have an understanding of how we need to gather information from meeting participants, they will promote our breakout events. Different leaders from our project team will lead breakout sessions at each meeting. The methods for recording this information include meeting summaries, photos of joint whiteboard or flip charts, survey data collected via Qualtrics, focus group meetings recorded from online video, and audio interviews transcribed from audio files. Several individuals will distill this information down into sets of slides and documents which will inform the larger SCRI proposal planning meeting to be held in May 2025. These summaries will also be used to inform and increase interest from existing and potential future stakeholders which we will be inviting to be on a longterm advisory panel.