The Horticultural Development Council (HDC) will be launching a strawberry feed calculator at this year’s Fruit Focus event in Kent.

The strawberry feed calculator will allow growers and consultants to enter quantities of different feed products to achieve target recipes. The quantities can be adjusted as necessary until the target recipe is achieved. It has been designed for use in soil grown crops as well as soil-less substrates, using either a one stock tank or two stock tank system.

HDC communications manager for soft fruit, Scott Raffle said that the calculator “had been produced and constructed in response to the industry’s desire for a tool to help to improve the precision of its feeding regimes”.

Research scientists and consultants often provide recommendations to growers to follow specific feed recipes, which are quoted in figures of mg per litre of dilute feed. Growers are also advised to alter the conductivity of their feed at certain times of year. However, achieving such recipes or changes in conductivity can be difficult for growers unless they have some knowledge of chemistry and molecular weights.

The calculator will allow the user to calculate the correct quantities to achieve such recipes or changes in conductivity, as it has been constructed on an excel spreadsheet with empirical formulas and molecular weights built in.

It can be used in conjunction with a new fact sheet that has been produced for strawberry growers called ‘Principles of strawberry nutrition in soil-less substrates’, which recommends a range of feed recipes for different types of strawberry crops and satisfactory ranges of nutrients in strawberry leaves.

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