UF/IFAS PO Box 110180
Office of the Senior Vice President Gainesville, FL 32611
An Equal Opportunity Institution
352-392-1971
ifas.ufl.edu/svp
At the UF/IFAS Gulf Coast Research and Education Center, we’ve been working on making a
great thing better.
In recent years, the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences has built in
Balm:
• A 5,000-square-foot addition with offices, a conference room, and equipment rooms to
help us do more work focused on making area growers’ operations more efficient
sustainable and profitable;
• A lab for processing strawberry samples;
• A lab for constructing and testing smart machine technology;
• Residential space for eight more graduate students.
More important than the buildings are the people. A little more than a decade ago, we opened
GCREC with about 75 people. Today, with our expanded facilities, we employ about twice that
many to work on producers’ challenges.
Each of the dozen off-campus UF/IFAS research and education centers has its own mix of
expertise. What they share is a common purpose: addressing local growers’ challenges. We
know they’re not the same in the Panhandle or down near the Keys as they are in Hillsborough
and surrounding counties.
In addition to its well-known blueberry and strawberry programs, GCREC faculty are pursuing
alternative crops such as pomegranates, artichokes, blackberries, and hops. They are developing
precision machine vision to spray only weeds, not crops. They support our producers’ advocacy
for fair trade by delving into Mexican government records to reveal the agricultural subsidies that
our international competitors receive.
Though it’s a research center, Gulf Coast REC experts are dedicated to all three functions of the
land-grant university mission. This vegetable production guide is just another example of our
service to Florida growers. In it you will find the latest and best information to support your
success.
Of course, all of these programs build on a base of great science that Gulf Coast REC has been
building for decades in entomology, agricultural economics, plant pathology, weed science, and
more. Gulf Coast REC’s record of impact is another one of the things that prompt me to say,
“You can expect great things from IFAS.”
Sincerely,
Jack M. Payne
UF Senior Vice President
Agriculture and Natural Resources
/svp