The adoption of agricultural practices and new cultivars highly depends on potential increase in profitability via reduced costs, increased revenue, or both. Representative farms for each selected cucurbit product will be used to collect relevant economic information about costs of production and profitability by farm size and location by NC State assistant professor and extension specialist, Dr. Daniel Tregeagle and his research team in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at North Carolina State University. His work is focused on the economics of specialty crops and the economics of agricultural policy more generally.
Potential Economic, Social and Environmental Benefits
The proposed work will contribute to robust, internationally competitive, cucurbit industries by helping to deliver superior cultivars with genetic resistance against major diseases. Resistant cultivars reduce production costs and application of potentially environmentally damaging fungicides and insecticides used to combat insect-transmitted diseases, while increasing yields and improving product quality. This work will aid the cucurbit breeding community by developing breeder-friendly databases and molecular markers for efficient trait selection and gene pyramiding, and will benefit the larger scientific community by producing undergraduate and graduate students and post-doctoral researchers who have received state of the art, trans-disciplinary STEM training.
Socioeconomics Objectives
- Economic impact analyses, disease control information
– Perform economic analysis, cost of production/disease control
– Define, parameterize, simulate, validate production variables - Estimate the potential economic impacts to the cucurbit industry
- Perform economic analysis, cost of production/disease control
– Define, parameterize, simulate, and validate production variables based on cucurbit production crop budgets
