HOOD RIVER, Ore. — Backed by a federal grant, Kelsey Galimba, an assistant professor at Oregon State University’s Mid-Columbia Agricultural Research and Extension Center, and others have launched research that could bear fruit for Hood River Valley pear growers.

Galimba and her colleagues at OSU and the USDA-Agricultural Research Center are studying pears with hopes of mitigating the effects of cold weather on the tree fruit and identifying which varieties best withstand low temperatures.

The researchers also are looking into pear sunburn, again with hopes of mitigating its effects.

The bulk of the $6.75 million USDA Specialty Crops Research Initiative grant, which is directed by Lee Kalcsits, an associate professor at Washington State University in Wenatchee, is being used to investigate cold hardiness and sunburn in apples, an area in which Galimba is not involved.

The project includes researchers from WSU, OSU, Cornell University, Penn State and Michigan State University.

The grant is among nearly $121 million the USDA is investing to advance research and Extension activities to solve key challenges facing specialty crop and organic agriculture producers, according to a Sept. 10 USDA press release.

In all, 17 projects across the country are being funded.

“We know specialty and organic crops add nutrition to our diets and value to sustainable agriculture systems,” said Chavonda Jacobs-Young, USDA chief scientist and under secretary for research, education and economics.

“These crops also play a vital role preserving cultural heritage and enhancing economic opportunities across local, regional and global food systems, making them great competitive funding investments that target some of the most difficult challenges facing specialty crop and organic producers nationwide,” Jacobs-Young said.

Galimba said that she and her colleagues decided to focus on investigating cold hardiness in pears in the mid-Columbia growing region because of concerns over the effects of cold snaps in the spring.

“We have definitely had issues with cold snaps in the spring that damage the flowers,” Galimba said. “Extreme and out-of-season temperature events like this are predicted to increase in the future.”

The researchers were awarded the four-year SCRI grant through the National Institute for Food and Agriculture after three previous unsuccessful applications.

“We had really good feedback the first three times, but it wasn’t funded,” Galimba said. “So we decided to just try again, and it ended up getting funded.”

The research involves field work, in which technicians compare how different pear varieties hold up to freezing and near-freezing temperatures; lab work, which involves testing material in the lab with programmable freezers; and gene analysis of the different varieties, which will be conducted at the USDA-ARS lab in Wenatchee, Wash.

“We are looking at the flowers before they bloom and up until bloom, so we are hoping to get a really good physiological characterization of what’s happening,” Galimba said.

The genetics portion, which will be led by USDA-ARS research geneticist Jessica Waite, will involve identifying genetic markers on varieties that hold up well against low temperatures.

“They could use genetic markers if this turns out to be a bigger problem in the future and they want to breed for cold hardiness,” Galimba said.

Researchers also are looking to conduct modeling, extrapolating out how different varieties react to different temperature extremes. And the team will be analyzing different mitigation strategies, such as applying plant growth regulators to induce dormancy as a protectant from temperature extremes.

“There has been some work using plant growth regulators in the fall trying to put trees into dormancy earlier and keep them in dormancy a bit later, so they don’t flower so early in the spring,” Galimba said.

Researchers also will be looking at a liquid material that could be applied at bud break to potentially protect buds from frost damage.

The grant also includes an outreach component, Galimba said, and researchers plan to update growers on their progress throughout the four-year project.

When completed, the project will be the largest-scale look at cold hardiness in pears ever conducted, Galimba said.

“This is something that hasn’t been done in pears, not on any large scale like this, where we’re comparing different varieties to each other,” she said.

The hope is the project will inform growers on strategies for protecting commercial varieties from temperature extremes and aid breeding efforts for testing the cold hardiness of new varieties, she said.

“One of the goals is to get a good characterization of the cold hardiness of our existing commercial varieties,” Galimba said, “and to have the techniques and protocol all worked out so we can very easily test the cold hardiness of any new varieties.”