Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** our proposed project has the…

Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** our proposed project has the overarching goal of enhancing the supply chain stability, market access, and global competitiveness of the pacific northwest HOP industry, which grows 99% and 39% of the hops produced in the U.S. And world, respectively. We propose a suite of short-, medium- and long-term approaches to this goal through 3 main objectives: 1) address long-term threats to market access and competitiveness through plant breeding (identifying genetic factors that make certain HOP cultivars less susceptible to production stressors; aligned with scri focus area 1, plant breeding and genetics); 2) mitigate short- and medium-term threats to market access (through data analytics, field trials, pesticide resistance identification, biocontrol trials, and economic/sociological studies; aligned with scri focus area 2, pest management); 3) life cycle assessment and sustainability indexing (assessing, benchmarking and evaluating environmental, social, economic and process inputs and developing a grower self-assessment tool; aligns with scri focus area 3, production efficiency; includes a carbon sequestration study). Our trans-disciplinary team has close and longstanding relationships with HOP grower associations and end-user brewer stakeholders, who were essential in identifying the critical needs our objectives were designed to address and they will be directly involved in the proposed research and in evaluating the success of our proposed objectives and subobjectives. Our proposed project includes novel approaches to the most critical challenges in the HOP industry. We propose a comprehensive outreach/education plan that will result in measurable positive outcomes for the PNW HOP industry.