Cost-Effective Asian Pear Thinning for Productivity and Fruit Quality Fact Sheet

To provide Asian pear growers with more sustainable, cost-effective thinning strategies, a SARE-funded team of researchers and farmers in New Jersey studied how effectively Asian pears were thinned by a synthetic plant growth regulator called benzyladenine. They found that MaxCel, one of several chemical thinners that contain benzyladenine, can reduce the cost of hand-thinning by up to 50 percent while delivering fruit yields and sizes comparable to those of untreated, hand-thinned control trees. This fact sheet provides a brief introduction to plant growth regulators and directions on how to use MaxCel as a crop thinner for Asian pears.