Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to the Aussie ABC, a 3C rise in nighttime temperatures in Nambour is raising costs for farmers by shrinking the size of strawberries.
Climate change means smaller strawberries, higher costs for farmers
ABC Rural / By Melanie GrovesBeing able to eat large, succulent strawberries may become a pleasure of the past, as the popular fruit is the latest victim of a changing climate.
Key points:
- Warm overnight temperatures are contributing to smaller strawberries
- Smaller strawberries are more expensive to pick
- Consumers may need to adapt to buying smaller fruit
It’s not cold weather causing the strawberries to shrink, but rather warmer temperatures.
And as smaller strawberries take longer to pick, production costs are rising along with temperatures — which means lower returns for farmers and could lead to a price hike at the checkout for consumers.
The principle horticulturalist at Queensland’s Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (DAF), Christopher Menzel, said field tests at the Nambour research centre showed that as air temperatures rose the size of the fruit dropped.
“With [climate change] even here at Nambour the records show the night temperatures have gone up by about 3 degrees over the past 50 to 60 years, which is quite significant,” he said.
“The size of the fruit is very sensitive to temperatures.
…
Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-16/climate-change-small-strawberries-warmer-nights/100071954
Can you imagine the calamity of having to eat smaller strawberries? If further warming occurs, obviously it is not going to be possible for Nambour farmers to switch to a different variety of strawberries, or grow something else, because in the age of the climate crisis no adaption to changed conditions is possible.
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Utter nonsense. Strawberry plants are treated as annuals by professional growers (that is, new strawberry plants are planted each year). Thus the variety can, and does, change often. The highest prices are always for early berries, and therefore farmers try to plant the varieties that ripen the earliest. Early ripening varieties tend to have smaller fruit (for many reasons).
This alarmist article was written by an urban person who has ZERO knowledge of fruit farming.
Plant varieties & plant breeding for traits is worth elucidating. And again I am going to refer to my earlier subject the plant phyto-hormone cytokinin with, this time, adding that different kinds of the same plant can have different cytokinin activity.
When we look at “bonsai” miniature plants what our eyes don’t see is that the plant cell size is normal; only the cell numbers are less than normal. This relates to the fact that cytokinin, which rules things like a cell cycle is integral to the number of cells. Small size strawberries, compared to commercialized modern supermarket strawberries, are relatively small given adequate growth conditions because of a relatively reduced cytokinin level.
Early strawberries are due to the rise in their pre-floral/floral apices of what is called “osmotin”. Osmotin is in all plant tissue, yet it’s level rises in developing floral organs.
The “flower bud” FB gene (FB7-2) encodes the osmotin protein. And increased “ABA” abscisic acid plant phyto-hormone triggers increases levels of osmotin. As stated earlier in this thread when cytokinin levels go up that leads to a decrease in ABA; which is to say that early strawberries relatively lower level of cytokinin allows a counter-part phyto-hormone (ABA) level to increase & trigger a specific subset of the flower bud gene “FB”.
Late, so to speak, strawberries have their inflorescence stem cell niche (meri-stem) held under wraps (the meri-stem doesn’t initiate a floral organ) by the phyto-hormone auxin. Auxin, in general terms, inhibits the accumulation of cytokinin; yet this is non- linear because the ratio of auxin to cytokinin creates synchronicity between what is called a cell’s “S” phase & cell division.
Later producing strawberry varieties have more sustained auxin phyto-hormone in terms of any inflorescence meri-stem. The inflorescence stem’s pro-cambium cells need cytokinin signaling to sustain the activity development requires from the vasculature. In simple terms strawberry plant breeds are different in their ratio of auxin to cytokinin.
A simplified explanation of strawberry plant differences is that they exhibit cytokinin peculiarities; & homeo-stasis of cytokinin is via the enzyme cytokinin oxid-ase, such thst as this enzyme’s levels go up cytokinin goes down (& vice-a-versa). Different strawberry varieties have different response to this enzyme & can express different levels of the enzyme.
In hybrid plants breeders are manipulating for traits; they are often obtaining results due to altered genetic transcription level of phyto-hormones &/or their relevant degrading enzymes.
All our food crops were originally producing small edible parts; the edible part’s cell numbers were relatively limited & our eyes couldn’t see selection/breeding involved more internal cytokinin dynamism.
Meri-stem (stem cell) activity & the size of the meri-stem is reduced under low cytokinin. One earlier commentator observed getting bigger fruit by culling some strawberry flower buds. De-budding & removal of floral buds provokes an increase in cytokinin that can be directed to a meri-stem stem cell niche.
The title of this article needs to be corrected from:
Claim: Global Warming is Causing Strawberries to Shrink
to:
Claim: White Supremacy is Causing Strawberries to Shrink.
From now on (in most cases), we should replace “global warming” or “climate change” with “white supremacy.” If not white supremacy, then “capitalism” would be an excellent second choice.
This is where this is political left-wing leveraging tool is heading, let’s get ahead of the curve.
Global warming is good for fishin’!
My understanding is that if strawberries are not picked, new strawberries on the same plant will be smaller. It is well known rural Australia has suffered a severe shortage of itinerant fruit pickers due to COVID travel restrictions. A lot of fruit rotted because it was unpicked. That could be what happened if what is claimed by the Far Left ABC is actually true (but they regularly lie or misrepresent the facts).
More illogic from the mathematic challenged.
A strawberry is a strawberry is a strawberry. It does not take longer to pick a smaller berry than a large berry. They take exactly the same amount of time.
Maybe they’re getting confused with testicles.
Heres Nambour last 30 years.
I made a complaint to the fact check section of the ABC… lets see where that goes.
Considering how large (and largely tasteless) the strawberries in the shops are now, they must have been the size of apples 50-60 years ago before the nighttime temperatures in Nambour began their horrific rise. I guess no one noticed them getting smaller and smaller until the ABC needed some clickbait.
Smaller strawberries because of warmer nights needs fact checking but if they keep producing this non-scientific crap, they’d have something to fertilise the plants with.