Grafting tomatoes in multi-bay high tunnels as a way to overcome soil-borne diseases

View the project final report

Commodities

• Vegetables: tomatoes

Practices

• Crop Production: continuous cropping, application rate management
• Education and Training: technical assistance, demonstration, farmer to farmer, focus group, on-farm/ranch research, participatory research, workshop
• Farm Business Management: budgets/cost and returns, feasibility study
• Pest Management: cultural control, disease vectors, economic threshold, field monitoring/scouting, integrated pest management, prevention, sanitation
• Production Systems: transitioning to organic, holistic management
• Soil Management: soil microbiology
• Sustainable Communities: sustainability measures

One of the challenges of high-tunnel production is that reduced crop rotation intervals can lead to a buildup of pathogen inoculum in the soil, specifically verticillium wilt. Tomato grafting has been used in other countries but is still new to the U.S. The farmer will test tomato root stocks for resistance to verticillium wilt and other soil-borne diseases and also determine the best cultural management of both grafted and non-grafted tomatoes in a commercially scaled growing system. Outreach will be through a field day, a grafting workshop, and a conference presentation.