Farmer and UC researchers make great team

Issue Date: July 18, 2007

By Ching Lee
Assistant Editor

San Diego County nursery producer Michael Anthony Mellano, left, and UC Cooperative Extension researcher James Bethke examine a pheromone trap for insect pests.

With the diversity of flower and foliage varieties growing in the fields and greenhouses of Mellano & Co.'s San Diego County nursery, it is probably no surprise that the 375-acre family farm has become a research haven for scientists working to solve some of agriculture's most nagging issues.

That the Mellano family has had a longstanding reputation for supporting scientific research is no accident. Over the years, the family has worked on numerous projects with the University of California, contributing land, labor and crops to research trials that benefit not only the Mellano operation but also agriculture as a whole.

"The impact that the university has on agricultural production is very significant," said Michael Anthony Mellano, whose grandfather founded the family-owned and operated business in 1925. "The reason our farm has developed the way it has is because of the Cooperative Extension and the things that they've done over the years."

Farmers and researchers have long depended on each other in what they do. Farmers look to researchers for advice on everything from fighting bugs and diseases in their crops to finding new technologies and practices that could help their farms be more efficient, cost effective and competitive in the world market.

By that same token, researchers rely on the expertise and acumen of farmers to tell them about the latest pest that's decimating their crops or help them with an experiment that requires the farmer's cooperation.

"It's a conscious decision to choose to learn and to be able to advance your operation around the latest technologies," said Mellano. "The researchers gain from interacting with growers because they learn what's going on out in the field."

At Mellano & Co.'s main San Luis Rey farm, which also houses the packing and grading sheds, Mellano noted that many of the practices implemented there were directly influenced by work of the University of California. One of the most important involves post-harvest handling and cooling of the farm's floral products.

Mellano said proper temperature control is necessary to insure that flowers have the longest possible shelf life with consumers, so all flowers are brought directly from the field and into the main 13,000 square foot computer-monitored cooler. Before the flowers are shipped, they are boxed and sent to another cooler to insure that the temperature in each box is consistent.

Keeping flowers at just the right temperature is in line with what is known as the "cold chain" process, a practice recommended by UC Davis Cooperative Extension specialist Michael Reid.

"What we've found is that the life of flowers in the customer's home is basically determined by what temperatures they experience during the post-harvest period," said Reid. "Everybody knows you should keep flowers cool but people didn't really realize what a big difference it makes to keep them at 32 degrees instead of 40 degrees."

Reid's findings influenced Mellano to drop temperatures in the cooling facility and keep them constant throughout the packing process.

Having received his Ph.D. in plant pathology from UC Riverside, Mellano considers himself "a very big believer in the benefits of research and university research." He also comes from a family of scientific minds. His wife, Valerie, who also has a Ph.D. in plant pathology from UC Riverside, is an environmental issues advisor for the UC Cooperative Extension in San Diego.

Mellano's uncle, Mike Mellano Sr., also received his Ph.D. in plant pathology from UC Riverside, and it was this first connection with the university that later brought throngs of researchers onto the Mellano farm.

"Immediately upon him being out of school, the various farm advisors and university researchers started doing trials with him and us on various crops," Mellano said. "It just kind of continued. There's a mutual agreement, a mutual desire to get something done. We have a problem; they're interested in finding solutions. We just marry the pieces up and make it go forward."

An ongoing project that the Mellanos and UC researchers have worked on for years is finding a viable alternative to methyl bromide, a broad-spectrum fumigant that's being phased out by the international Montreal Protocol. But the search has been an exhaustive up-hill battle, particularly for those dealing with floriculture because of the complexity and diversity of the crops involved.

"One product does not work for all the crops they are growing," said Susanne Klose, a researcher in the department of plant sciences at UC Davis. "Growers are in desperate need. They know what's going to happen with methyl bromide in the near future, so they have a very strong interest in conducting this research."

For the last three years, she has been working with the Mellanos to test a variety of products that are on the market and some that are not yet registered. She has tested the products' application rates, different application technologies and sealing methods, such as the various plastic mulches that are on the market and how they keep the fumigants in the soil, reduce emissions and improve the efficacy of the fumigants.

To do these experiments, Klose said the grower's participation is critical, as the Mellanos provided the land, equipment and labor needed to prepare their fields for the research. The trial also required constant feedback between her and the farm manager so that certain data could be collected at the right time.

Klose noted that while she could have used the university's own research fields to conduct the experiments, the results would not have been as valid had she not done the on-farm demonstration trials.

"We may be specialists in detecting pathogens, microorganisms or weeds, but we are not specialists in growing a specific crop," she said. "We would have to face so many difficulties to just figuring out how to successfully grow a certain crop that I don't think the results that we would collect would have much value."

Another drawback that researchers have when they conduct their trials on small research plots is they don't know if something is going to work on a large scale in real life.

"So that's why it's better to do it in the field and under the commercial production conditions that the crop is really produced," Klose said. "Otherwise the data would not be as valuable to the grower and the industry."

Husein Ajwa, a UCCE specialist at UC Davis who has also worked with the Mellanos on the methyl bromide quandary, said rarely do farmers who participate in research trials ask the university for compensation, even when experiments go awry and they lose some of their crops in the process.

He estimates that the Mellanos' contribution to the university by way of supporting research on their farm is no less than $25,000 to $30,000 a year, covering labor, land and materials. He noted that when planning research trials on the farm, working with Michael Anthony Mellano is "exactly like visiting any of my colleagues or research scientists within the university."

"The Mellanos like to stay ahead of the curve," Ajwa said. "They understand the value of research and that's why they always insist on doing research on their field and they invite us to do that."

Don Cooksey, a plant pathologist and bacteriologist at UC Riverside, has known Mike Mellano Sr. and Michael Anthony Mellano since they were students at UC Riverside. He said the university continues to work with the Mellanos because they are the industry's movers and shakers.

"It's good to work with people like that because they're one of the largest growers in the cut flower industry and they're real leaders," he said. "Technologically they tend to bring in and adopt new technologies very quickly and other growers look to them for leadership and kind of follow them."

Cooksey is currently working with the Mellanos on a soil-borne disease called crown gall, which is affecting two major plants grown on the farm.

Another pest that has become a huge problem on the farm is the western flower thrips. James Bethke, staff researcher for the UCCE in San Diego County, has been involved in finding a solution. Mellano contacted him several months ago after noticing an increase in thrips and damage to crops.

"This is a recent bloom of thrips that they were unable to control, even with the most effective product on the market," Bethke said. "They were very concerned, especially with a disease that could be transmitted in chrysanthemums by this bug."

While agricultural chemicals can be used to control the insect, it has developed resistance to many materials, Bethke added. After taking infested flower samples back to the lab for testing, he concluded that the thrips have now become resistant to the product that the Mellanos had been using, which was spinosad, or Conserve, considered to be one of the more effective products on the market.

Bethke is now working with the chemical company that produces the material to do more thrips resistance testing around the state. He's looking at how well the product is controlling thrips with other growers in different parts of the state.

Mellano said the benefits of the UC system and what it has done for agriculture is sometimes underestimated because research is not immediate and can take years to find a solution. But the beauty of such a system is that research can be done in a collective fashion where individual growers may lack the monetary resources to do the work on their own, he added.

"Even if an individual grower does have the capabilities to do it, once they figure it out, then that tends to be proprietary information because they spent the monies to develop it," Mellano said. "But when it's done through the university format, it's open book. All the growers have access to it; all the growers have the capabilities to learn and advance their operations if they so choose."

(Ching Lee is a reporter for Ag Alert. She may be contacted at clee@cfbf.com.)

Permission for use is granted, however, credit must be made to the California Farm Bureau Federation when reprinting this item. Top