HLB Playbook for Growers in the Works

Michael Rogers, director of the University of Florida’s Citrus Research and Education Center, discussed the planned HLB Playbook at the recent Citrus Expo. The playbook should be available in print and on the Internet by January.

Rogers says the playbook will feature “all the information we know about managing citrus groves in the face of HLB and how growers can use that information to better manage their groves.”

He outlines the four parts of the playbook:

One: “What you can do now to manage mature, bearing trees in the presence of HLB.”

Two: “Establishing new groves and how you care for those new groves.”

Three: “Future tools – things that are coming down the road that one day we think will actually be useful for growers.”

Four: “Things that we’ve tried that didn’t work. That’s an interesting chapter because … we get questions all the time: ‘Have you tried this? Have you tried that?’ And the answer a lot of the times is yes and it didn’t work, so we don’t publish that anywhere.” Rogers says this section offers an opportunity for growers “to see the whole broad range of things we have tried that didn’t work. And I think it’s going to be very useful for everybody to see things that have been done.”