Phil Coles, then a grad student and now an econ professor at Lehigh, did some nice work figuring out how wholesale buyers (e.g. supermarkets) think about the value of local.  He met the buyers at the New York Produce Show, a big gathering of produce buyers and sellers who are eager to make deals.

The usual questions would be “would you pay more for local?” or “Is it ok that local looks a little different from what you are used to?”

Coles notes that the problem with surveying this group is that they are in deal-making mode and the last thing they want to do is tip a questioner off to what they value. So he had to come up with some ways of gauging their buying behavior despite this obstacle.

We learned that buyers could tell the difference in appearance between a canonic California-grown broccoli and an eastern-adapted variety raised in New York. Both look good, but people have very fixed ideas of what it should look like.

Importantly, we learned that buyers would favor the local supply if they were told where it came from.

Wholesale sellers may not get a price premium, but the many broccoli growers who supply New York city and neaby big markets can use the local source to their advantage (even if they buyers won’t tell them that.)

The paper is Produce Buyer Quality Perception, Preference, and Local Foods: The Case of East Coast Broccoli in the Northeast  by Philip C. Coles, Nicole Amerling, Miguel I. Gómez and Thomas Björkman. Publshed in HortScience 60: 2317 – 2320 (2025) DOI: 10.21273/HORTSCI18974-25

https://journals.ashs.org/view/journals/hortsci/60/12/article-p2317.xml

Here is the story of the collaboration from the Cornell Chronicle.

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/09/public-private-partnership-results-new-broccoli-hybrid-northstar

The variety will be available from Seedway and Stokes.

The BolTBDH mapping population is valuable for . It is now one of the most easily avialable for use by researchers. The availability is due to seed increase, cataloging,  curation and distribution by the USDA germplasm system.

The BolTBDH mapping population is derived from a cross between broccoli and chinese broccoli. The progeny are all heading Brassica oleracea, allowing investigation of many reproductive traits and traits of commercial importance.

Many thanks to curator Becky Povilus and previous vegetable curators Zach Stansell and SS for making this possible and to technical specialist Paul Kisly for producing all the seed that is now available for research.

An valuable feature, in addition to the easy access and associated genetic map, is that there are already about 5000 phenoptypes assessed for each of the lines in the population. If a triat segregates in this poulation, you can not only map it quickly using your phenotype data, you can also look for traits that cosegregate and for related processes without doing any additional lab work.

Please see the original post for more information

A new resource for plant research

Mark Farnham was one of the key instigators of the Eastern Broccoli Project, which was made possible in the beginning because of the advances he made in heat tolerance in the 1990s and early 2000s. His position with USDA-ARS made it possible to invest in a far-sighted goal during that time, and that breeding has now been brought to fruition. Several of his broccoli parental lines and hybrids are, or will soon be, released for use in industry. As of today, August 1, 2020, Mark is a retiree.

In addition to maintaining a vigorous research program, Mark served as Research Leader for the US Vegetable Lab, helping assure the high performance of that unit.

Mark hired Zach Stansell to work in his program for many years. As a result of his excellent work with Mark, Zach went on to do his PhD at Cornell University with Thomas Björkman, and is now working for USDA-ARS in Geneva to complete the circle.

Mark is also known for his high-glucosinolate broccoli and downy-mildew resistant collards.

The Eastern Broccoli Project is fortunate to have Mark continue as an official collaborator through the end of the project so that he can continue contributing leadership in the breeding program, and make sure that his best germplasm is used by industry and his successors in public-sector breeding.

The Eastern Broccoli Project team wishes Mark the best in his retirement and in his continued engagement with us.

One of the challenges with raising broccoli in the East is getting heads to stay dense. In the warmth of summer, the outer branches of broccoli tend to start elongating a little before harvest maturity. They “blow up” in the words of many producers. The result is a head that doesn’t pack tightly in the box and has soft edges that are prone to damage in handling.

The solution is to let growth slow a little during the week before harvest. Growth is promoted by the combination of warmth, water, nitrogen, and sunlight. Warmth is a given for harvests in July and early August, sunlight we have no control over, and abundant water sometimes comes whether we want it or not. The main management tool is nitrogen.

Slowing growth by reducing nitrogen is a considerable challenge because abundant nitrogen is needed during the vegetative growth to get strong, healthy, fast-growing plants. The best approach is to supply nitrogen relatively early in the growing period, and not add nitrogen in the last four weeks.

Many popular broccoli varieties are harvested starting only eight weeks after transplanting. Therefore, the last nitrogen application should be only four weeks after transplanting. At that time, the foliage is near full cover, which a good time for a traditional side-dress application as well as cultivation to get escaped or newly germinated weeds. Fertigation through a trickle-irrigation system would be during the fourth week. At that time, the plants are large enough to take up the nitrogen but not so far along that excess growth at harvest will cause loose heads.

Applying all of the nitrogen before planting is a possibility. Ordinarily, applying 120 to 150 pounds per acre of nitrogen preplant is ill-advised because of the high likelihood of leaching before the crop takes it all up. However, because broccoli is only in the ground for about nine weeks through the end of harvest, and reaches its maximum uptake five weeks after transplanting, the risk of leaching loss is relatively low compared to the typical situation. Pre-plant application of the fertilizer opens up production options that don’t allow side-dressing or liquid fertilization.

This early-nitrogen approach is also helpful in reducing hollow stem. Hollow stem is likewise a symptom of excessive late vegetative growth. The main tool for managing hollow stem is adjusting the plant population. If hollow stem is a problem, it’s likely that both yield and quality will be improved by spacing the plants closer together. In New York we have found an in-row spacing of 8 inches to work quite well. But limiting late nitrogen also tempers the growth rate at the right time.

This article was published in VegEdge on June 5, 2019. A publication of the CCE Cornell Vegetable Program.

We have eagerly awaited the 2017 Census of Agriculture to see whether the Eastern Broccoli Project is having an effect. Today, the results were released, allowing us to compare our early effect (2017) with the pre-project baseline. We are happy to see so many more Eastern farms finding a place for broccoli in their crop mix.