The Greening Challenge

Executive Director of CRDF Tweaks Approach to Research

- HEATHER MACHOVINA

RICK DANTZLER, executive director of the Citrus Research and Development Foundation, recently spoke to a group of citrus growers from Highlands County about the future course of Florida citrus. Since 2009, CRDF has funded 462 projects and spent $165 million in an effort to keep the Florida citrus industry thriving and competitive through innovation.

“While we now know more about HLB than ever and several good things are in the works, we can’t act as though the research has been more successful than it has,” says Dantzler.

“The truth is that the most important metrics – production, the number of citrus acres, and the number of growers – are still going the wrong way, so we must do things differently, and we are.”

Some of the changes happening around CRDF may not seem grand, but they are big changes in the world of research funding. Other revisions underway are more substantive than procedural, like CRDF taking on the responsibility of conducting all last-stage field trials of the plant breeding programs they help fund.

“The point is we are going to get there even if that means breaking the mold,” Dantzler emphasizes.

Some promising work is being done with peptides to help control citrus greening and other plant pathogens. Every peptide does something different and provides different modes of action within the plants. So far, two peptides have shown hope in fighting citrus greening and increasing yields in HLB-infected trees.