2019 ASHS Annual Conference

Crop land in the Intermountain West is being developed for housing, pushing agriculture to peripheral salty land. Existing apple rootstocks exhibit salt stress symptoms as soil salinity increases. The USDA apple rootstock breeding program has some germplasm that is putatively salt tolerant. The purpose of this project is to evaluate the salt tolerance of this germplasm. This is done in a two-part project. Using a near-continuous dosing system in a greenhouse we grew apple rootstocks for 50 days and evaluated their response to a salt gradient. In 2018 all tested rootstocks exhibited parallel reductions in growth to increasing salt exposure. Three orchards have been established on salty or non-salty sites to test rootstock sensitivity to soil salinity.