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Ontario Fire Blight Prediction Maps Now Available


The fire blight prediction maps for apple and pear are now available for the 2023 season. Bloom is quickly approaching in early areas. Use these maps and predicted forecast for your area to prepare for potential infection periods.

Growers can access the maps on the ONfruit homepage or bookmark the direct link below. Links within the prediction maps page will help users jump to the section they are looking for as both apple and pear maps are together.

Using Prediction Maps
These maps are based on the Cougar Blight model to help support apple and pear growers with their fire blight management decisions. New for the 2023 season, OMAFRA has partnered with Weather Source to provide OnPoint Weather. The locations on the map are based on agricultural production and use all nearby weather data and geography to provide accurate forecasting data.

The maps are animated and will cycle through the daily fire blight risk predictions based on the 7-day weather forecast. Updated maps will be generated and posted three times per week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) until bloom period is over. Follow the animated risk of the region that best corresponds with your orchard location. If predicted risk differs between overlapping locations, err on the side of caution and use the higher risk prediction.

The risk assumes that open blossoms are present and dew or rain will wet the blossom which is necessary for a fire blight infection to occur. If there are no open blossoms or if wetting of the open blossoms does not occurs, infection will most likely not take place. However, it only takes a little dew to wash the fire blight bacteria into the open blossom.

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Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”