By Jake Price, Mary Sutton, Doug Collins, Jacob Kalina, Josh Dawson, Holly Anderson, Michasia Dowdy, Sara Curry, Ben Reeves, Tucker Price, Sydni Ingram, and Justin Shealey:
What do you do with all the fruit at the Citrus Research Plot? This is a common question I get from people about the citrus research plot in Valdosta. We donate all the fruit to various groups. The majority of the fruit goes to Second Harvest of South Georgia https://feedingsga.org/. Each year we pick thousands of pounds of fruit and take to Second Harvest. This year the satsumas from the pruning trial were very slow to turn orange but they were still glad to get the fruit. (Figure 1) This works out well because there is always a demand for food around Thanksgiving. In January we were able to deliver a couple thousand pounds of Tangos to Second Harvest for the first time (Figure 2). In addition to Second Harvest we take fruit to Sam’s BBQ. Sam annually prepares meals for the community for Thanksgiving and has become a distributor of fruit. The people are glad to get the fresh fruit as you can see in the photo below (Figure 3). Follow the link to read more about the Thanksgiving meals prepared by Sam’s BBQ https://www.walb.com/2023/11/23/giving-back-thanksgiving-sams-barbecue-feeds-valdosta-community/. We also donate fruit to Lowndes Associated Ministries to People (LAMP) here in Valdosta (Figure 4). LAMP provides meals and shelter for the homeless and serves 8 counties in the surrounding area https://www.lampinc.org/. We also give fruit to the J.L. Lomax Elementary School lunchroom (Fig.5) where they serve fruit to the kids. We also make sure the faculty and staff at Lomax have plenty of citrus as they are gracious enough to let us have the citrus plot at their school. We also deliver plenty of fruit to county supporters. We cannot pick all the fruit without a top-notch picking crew (Fig. 6). Without them, we could not donate fruit and obtain yield data.
