Orchard-based collaborations with UMass Amherst expanded
Hokkaido University (HU) is known for its heritage of Sapporo Agricultural College, which was established nearly 150 years ago, with significant contributions by Dr. William Smith Clark from the Massachusetts Agricultural College, the current University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst). The initial collaborations were naturally in Agriculture, and even after a century, it continued as inter-university joint faculty appointments in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design, Turfgrass Pathology, and Plant-microbe Interactions.
As the longest-standing international partners to each other, the two universities agreed to deepen their key partnership by promoting new research seeds and established the HU-UMA Joint Research Seed Fund. The selected research projects in FY 2025 include a joint project on AI-driven Precision Agriculture for Sustainable Blueberry Production proposed by Extension Assistant Professor Jianyu Li from the Stockbridge School of Agriculture, UMass Amherst, and Professor Yoichiro Hoshino from the Field Science Center for Northern Biosphere, HU.
In late May 2025, the Principal Investigators gathered in Amherst to initiate the project, together with their potential collaborators, Ms. Taena Uemura from the Office for International Collaborations and Mr. Xiangji Meng from the Graduate School of Environmental Sciences, HU, Assistant Professor and Extension Specialist Emmanuel Torres Quenzada from North Carolina State University, and Visiting Professor Qi Wang from the Stockbridge School of Agriculture, UMass Amherst. The team had communicated online for months, yet this marked their first experimental site check at the UMass Crop and Animal Research and Education Farm in South Deerfield and Cold Spring Orchard in Belchertown, as well as an actual visit to commercial blueberry farms around Massachusetts.
Funded by the Massachusetts Fruit Growers Association, Dr. Li started his evaluation of new northern highbush blueberry varieties for sustainable field production, using five cultivars: Bluegold, Reka, Chandler, Northland, and Last Call. Professor Hoshino’s student Mr. Meng collected leaves to detect and compare stomatal characteristics in each cultivar via AI, and that will be used for harvesting timing monitoring and prediction in the future.
The discussion at the Center for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment, UMass Amherst, led to the possibility of the two universities’ joint products using berries from their orchards, which indicates another step in fruitful extension collaborations for the agricultural partnership between HU and UMass Amherst.
Text and photos are provided by the Office for International Collaborations and the Field Science Center for Northern Biosphere, HU, and the Stockbridge School of Agriculture, UMass Amherst