MSU’s ‘little California,’ where almost anything grows

If Michigan were the United States, MSU’s Mike de Schaaf knows exactly where California would be: the southwest corner of Michigan.

California is known for its extraordinary agricultural diversity. Michigan has its own version in the southwest corner of the state, where farmers grow an unusually wide range of fruits, vegetables and other specialty crops.

“We are like the little California of Michigan,” said de Schaaf, farm manager at MSU’s Southwest Michigan Research and Extension Center, or SWMREC.

Across SWMREC’s 350 acres near Benton Harbor, researchers work with apples, peaches, plums, pears, grapes, blueberries, raspberries, chestnuts and an extensive assortment of vegetables. Apples, grapes and pickling cucumbers are among the center’s major crops.

What makes southwest Michigan capable of growing such a remarkable range of crops can be traced in large part about 10 miles west of SWMREC — to Lake Michigan.

The lake acts as a giant temperature buffer, de Schaaf said. “It keeps us a little bit cooler in the spring, so plants and trees don’t bud out early and get hit with spring frosts. And then it also extends our growing season longer into the fall.”

That extended growing season doesn’t just benefit farmers. It also gives MSU researchers a valuable outdoor laboratory where they can study this extraordinary range of crops in the same place.

At SWMREC, the question may be whether a new blueberry variety developed somewhere else in the country will thrive in Michigan. Researchers may deliberately infect vegetables with disease to determine which treatments work. Or they may send a drone over a vineyard to find out whether it can protect grapes as effectively as a tractor-pulled sprayer.

The common thread is simple: Try it here first.

A place to take risks

Agricultural research can be messy. Sometimes the point is to grow the best crop possible. Sometimes the point is to make a crop sick.

“Most growers don’t like having someone come to their farm to do trials in which you are deliberately infecting the plants,” de Schaaf said. “And so having a safe space to do that, it pays in dividends to the whole industry.”

The research center provides that safe space.

“A lot of people are like, ‘Not in my backyard’ about it,” he said. “But this is the backyard where you can do that and then everyone can benefit from the results.”

Taking risks doesn’t just mean deliberately making a crop sick. Sometimes it means planting something that hasn’t been proven to thrive in the region yet.

A blueberry that performs beautifully in the Pacific Northwest or South may respond very differently to Michigan winters, soils and growing conditions. SWMREC has tested about 40 blueberry varieties from breeding programs around the country, allowing researchers to study everything from plant growth to how a variety responds to local soil.

“What we do is to determine what a grower can expect if they try to plant that here,” de Schaaf said.

For growers, having someone else answer those questions before they make an investment is part of SWMREC’s value.

Ben Smith sees that value from two perspectives. He is executive director of the Michigan State Horticultural Society, which funds research conducted at fruit research stations including SWMREC, and co-manager of Hinkelman Farms, a Benton Harbor–area farm that grows grapes, corn and soybeans.

“It is helpful for growers to see the research being done so they understand the process and know they can trust the results,” Smith said.

A pickle powerhouse

Among all those peaches, grapes and blueberries is a crop visitors might overlook. Literally.

Michigan is the nation’s leading producer of cucumbers for pickling, making the crop an important focus of research at SWMREC.

When de Schaaf named pickling cucumbers among SWMREC’s major crops, he joked about why they might not attract much attention.

“They’re pretty low to the ground,” he said. “They’re easy to miss. You can look right over them.”

But the research happening in those rows is serious business.

Ben Phillips, station coordinator and a vegetable specialist based at SWMREC, studies pickling cucumber varieties and diseases. The work includes a long-running effort to understand varieties known as parthenocarpic cucumbers, which can produce fruit without bee pollination.

For growers, these parthenocarpic cucumbers offer an intriguing advantage. Traditional pickling cucumbers depend on pollination, while parthenocarpic varieties can continue setting fruit even when weather keeps bees from flying. They also size more slowly, giving growers more flexibility at harvest.

“If your pickles are sizing up too fast, then you miss it,” Phillips said. “You just lose money and they just outsize themselves in the field.”

But solving one problem can create another. Some parthenocarpic varieties have tougher skins that withstand mechanical harvesting well but can make it more difficult for brine to penetrate the cucumber during processing.

That means a successful new variety has to satisfy two customers.

“There are all these questions about how to make a pickle that growers love and also briners love,” Phillips said.

That balancing act is also central to the work of Chris Dyk, a regional product development specialist with BASF Corporation, who works with SWMREC to test experimental pickling cucumber varieties.

BASF sends varieties to the research center to be grown and evaluated under Michigan conditions. Dyk then uses data from those trials and others to help determine which varieties should continue toward commercial production.

For Dyk, the goal comes down to finding the same sweet spot Phillips described: higher yield for the farmer and the quality processors need.

“I have to have a higher yield for a grower, and higher quality for the processor, and we gotta marry the two,” Dyk said. “I have varieties that yield well, but don’t have the quality. I have varieties that have great quality, but no yield. So, there’s a balance.”

From drones to ‘weed warfare’

Drones flying over vineyards, autonomous sprayers navigating fields and lasers targeting weeds are among the technologies being explored at SWMREC.

The center provides researchers and agricultural companies a place to test technologies that could change how farmwork gets done.

For three years, researchers conducted side-by-side trials comparing a drone spraying grapes with a traditional air-blast sprayer pulled by a tractor. Researchers then compared disease levels between the two sections of the vineyard.

The goal isn’t to replace tractors; rather, the research can help growers determine where a technology makes practical and economic sense, whether that means reducing soil compaction, using less fuel or getting into a vineyard during a wet spring when a tractor could damage saturated ground.

SWMREC has also worked with autonomous sprayers and hosted demonstrations of technology such as a laser weeder — a machine that identifies weeds and targets them with lasers.

De Schaaf’s description is considerably less technical.

“It’s lasers on turrets,” he said. “And it just sees a weed and pew, pew, pew, pew — destroys the weeds. It’s essentially weed warfare.”

Whether the technology involves drones, lasers or something far simpler, the question is the same: Does it work for Michigan growers?

Sometimes the answer begins with something as straightforward as the posts holding up a row of grapevines.

Smith points to concrete vineyard posts, which have become popular in other parts of the world but have not been widely adopted in Michigan. Rather than asking growers to invest in an unfamiliar system without knowing how it will perform here, SWMREC installed a row so the posts could be evaluated under Michigan growing conditions, and growers could see for themselves how well they work and how easy they are to use.

“SWMREC also does an excellent job of testing real-world items that growers are interested in,” Smith said.

Research that leaves the farm

Ultimately, the value of the research at SWMREC is measured by what happens when those solutions reach a grower.

MSU Extension specialists based at the center answer growers’ questions, visit farms and help diagnose problems in the field.

A crop may be dying. A grower may be seeing something unfamiliar. Or conflicting advice may leave someone looking for another perspective.

The calls can also come from farmers well outside southwest Michigan — including growers who kept Phillips’ phone number from years ago.

“You’re a public resource when you work for Extension,” Phillips said.

Smith sees that connection on his own farm. He said Hinkelman Farms regularly relies on information from people like Mike Reinke, MSU Extension viticulture specialist based at SWMREC.

“He is always available for a phone call or to come out to the farm to look at a problem,” Smith said.

It is where the pieces of SWMREC come together: researchers exploring questions, Extension educators who carry the answers beyond the research farm, and growers who put those answers to work in their own fields and vineyards.

And in Michigan’s “little California,” there is always something new to put in the ground — and another question worth answering.