Project Overview
Commodities
- Fruits: Elderflower
Practices
- Crop Production: agroforestry, food processing, postharvest treatment
- Education and Training: demonstration, technical assistance, workshop
- Farm Business Management: value added
- Pest Management: cultural control, field monitoring/scouting, prevention
- Production Systems: agroecosystems, transitioning to organic
- Sustainable Communities: partnerships
Summary:
Farmers looking to produce small fruits, and particularly elderberry, have always struggled to manage pests. In both organic and conventional settings management practices have been limited to what is safe for the plants and what is safe for the end consumer. As many small fruits are consumed as field fresh products special care has to be given to factors like post-spray harvest windows and transport durability. All drosophila species present a risk to product quality but Spotted Wing Drosophila (SWD) poses a particular challenge. SWD’s ability to lay larvae in unripe fruit means that management needs to begin earlier in the season and extends all the way to the end consumer.
Spotted Wing Drosophila’s life cycle is highly dependent on access to fruit and berries in which to lay their larvae. Elderberry in particular appears to be a favorite host species for SWD in the Upper Midwest as there is a wide abundance of plants growing around farms, ditches, and windbreaks. In commercial settings this host-pest relationship is critical to manage if the farmer wants to yield quality produce. Our project aimed to test the hypothesis that by removing host fruit the number and impact of SWD can be significantly reduced over time.
Our plan to scale forced drying equipment offers a strategy to reduce SWD prevalence in elderberries by creating a marketable product from the flowers. The U.S. currently imports the majority of its elderberry and elderflower products from Europe though many Midwestern farmers are adding elderberry to their diversified operations. An appropriate scale of stand alone forced drying equipment suited for mid sized elderberry and elderflower producers does not currently exist and there has been little effort to develop this type of on-farm processing equipment in our region. Food and beverage companies, and retail health food stores, are interested in sourcing dried elderflower (and other herbs) locally instead of from large-scale herb distributors. Currently, local growers cannot supply these markets with an appropriate quantity of dried elderflower because of the inefficiency of small scale equipment.
Our research approach is two fold, observe the impacts of host-habitat reduction in our elderberry field and test the production and market viability of dried botanical products. We view that it is important for both of these two areas to be tested simultaneously as one without the other will fail to be a commercially viable business. In our elderberry patch we have been focusing our harvest capacity exclusively on the flowers since 2020. At the same time we have been working on improving our dryer system to constantly yield quality botanical products.
Our market and dryer development has so far been a significant success. Through our field day, one-on-one meetings, and word of mouth we have had the opportunity to share our experience and provide feedback to existing and would be farmers. The infrastructure at Sharing Our Roots has also created the opportunity for our land access program participants to develop their own dried botanical based ag businesses.
Our results in impacting the prevalence of SWD in our field has been harder to quantify. Both 2021 and 2022 saw significant drought impacts on our area. One consequence of this was the reduction of potential host plants in the areas surrounding our farm as well as the increased day time temperatures regularly exceeding the max breeding temperature of SWD. We believe our harvest system did reduce the SWD population present in our field but also believe environmental conditions played a significant role in our success. The plan is to continue a flower based harvest regime in the coming years that will continue to provide insight into the impacts of SWD.
While we have provided a number of farmers as well at the Midwest Elderberry Coop with design instructions for our dryer and preliminary observation of our field harvest plan we do not know of any farmers that have explicitly adopted our system on their farm.
Project objectives:
- Scale up on-farm forced drying equipment for herbals, specifically elderflower to meet current yield and
- Increase supply of shelf stable, value-added dried elderflower for local and regional food, beverage, and health
- Share findings with other farmers through field days and conference
- Long term: reduce on-farm Spotted Wing Drosophila presence in elderberry crop by harvesting pre-fruiting flower and reducing overwintering habitat for
- Long term: test and expand forced drying equipment ability to include additional specialty crops.