Warehouses employ a variety of strategies to prevent superficial scald from spoiling apples during storage, but, in most cases, the only sign that those techniques aren’t working is the appearance of scald itself when fruit is removed from storage for distribution. By then, it’s too late to save the fruit — often high-risk Granny Smith apples. But a new diagnostic tool that identifies scald signals months before the disorder becomes visible could help packers better manage their storage conditions to prevent it. That’s the idea behind a tool being tested for industry use at the USDA Agricultural Research Service Tree […]