Development of disorders during postharvest ripening and storage of fruit depends on a range of preharvest factors. The most obvious of these is maturity of fruit at harvest. However, a number of other factors may be just as important in ripening-related disorders and in determining how fruit respond to low temperatures or other imposed postharvest conditions. Fruiting position on the tree and ...

In discussion related to the planning of the present workshop on 'disease resistance in fruit', the question arose as to whether fruit harvested from stressed plants have increased, decreased, or unchanged susceptibility to pathogens whose disease symptoms are expressed after harvest. For example, does preharvest water deficit stress affect the incidence and severity of stem-end rot (endophytic...

Physiological storage disorders continue to cause sizable economic losses in a range of commercially important pomefruit cultivars. Given similar regimes, the incidence and severity browning apple cultivar ‘Braeburn’ can vary different years way that be explained by interaction preharvest seasonal orchard factors. Over three-year period (2016–2019) at Kompetenzzentrum Obstbau Bodensee (KOB) Sou...

A comparison of the invasion of flowers, aerial pegs, and kernels by wild-type and mutant strains of Aspergillusflavas or A. parasiticus along with aflatoxin analyses of kernels from different drought treatments have supported the hypothesis that preharvest contamination with aflatoxin originates mainly from the soil. Evidence in support of soil invasion as opposed to aerial invasion was the fo...

To avoid marketing fish with environment-related off-flavors, fish must be screened for flavor quality before harvesting. Quantitative chemical analysis is inadequate for flavor quality control because of time constraints, costs involved, and the limited number of odorous compounds that can be detected with available methods. Sensory analysis (taste-testing), which treats trained “tasters” as a...

3. DECAY PREDICTION. Unfortunately, decay prediction models for stone fruit have not been developed yet. A possible method of disease prediction might consist of prior to commercial harvest placing fruit of more advanced maturity into a plastic bag with wet paper to induce decay development. If decay develops rapidly, this may suggest that some lots of fruit receive additional preharvest fungic...