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Integrated Farm Management Strategies for Sustainable Production of Horticultural Fruit...
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Integrated Farm Management Strategies for Sustainable Production of Horticultural Fruit Crops

A Special Issue of Agriculture (ISSN 2077-0472) belonging to the section "Crop Production".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2026 | Viewed by 684

Editors

Dr. Nay Myo Win

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Horticulture & Life Science, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan 38541, Republic of Korea
Interests: smart farming; cultivation technology; horticultural machinery; plant physiology; crop production; plant nutrients; bioactive compounds; post-harvest technology; fruit quality
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Jingi Yoo

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Horticulture & Life Science, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan 38541, Republic of Korea
Interests: cultivation technology; crop physiology; post-harvest technology; fruit quality; bioactive compounds
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Inkyu Kang

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Horticultural Science, Kyungpook National University, Daegu 41566, Republic of Korea
Interests: cultivation technology; post-harvest technology; crop physiology; fruit quality; cell wall; plant metabolites
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Horticultural fruit crops are an important source of carbohydrate, vitamins, minerals and organic acids for human nutrition. Therefore, the production of high-quality fruits with high nutritional values is essential to achieve better marketability and ensure food security. However, the factors including elevated daily temperature and climate change, pests and diseases, postharvest losses and market volatility have been significant challenges for the sustainable production of fruit crops. These challenges can lead to reductions in fruit quality, nutritional values and productivity, resulting in food insecurity. Therefore, the integrated practices of farm management strategies are essential to ensure the continued growth, productivity and sustainability of horticultural crops, securing benefits for future generations.

This Special Issue invites submission of high-quality articles focusing on plant physiology and biotechnology of fruit trees, cultivation technologies improving in productivity and nutritional values of fruit crops, water and nutrient management strategies to enhance yield and quality of fruit crops, controlled-environment technologies to improve tree performance and integrated farming practices that support the sustainable production of fruit trees.

We also encourage submissions that study advanced farming approaches, including, but not limited to, the following topics:

  • Mechanization and automation of fruit trees
  • Climate-smart farming systems
  • Application of plant-growth regulators
  • Precision agriculture

Dr. Nay Myo Win
Dr. Jingi Yoo
Prof. Dr. Inkyu Kang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Agriculture is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • cultivation technologies
  • sustainable agriculture
  • plant physiology
  • smart farming
  • precision agriculture
  • fruit quality
  • nutritional values
  • bio-active compounds
  • antioxidants

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

28 pages, 6217 KB  
Article
Effects of Different Chemical Thinning Strategies on Yield Performance, Fruit Quality, and Multivariate Responses in Intensive Apple Production
by Ádám Csihon, Marianna Sipos, Tamás Szentpéteri and Imre J. Holb
Agriculture 2026, 16(18), 1998; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture16181998 (registering DOI) - 17 Sep 2026
Abstract
Optimizing crop load through chemical thinning is essential for yield stability and fruit quality in intensive apple production, yet the relationships between tree growth, yield components, and fruit quality remain insufficiently characterized. This three-year study (2022–2024) evaluated four thinning strategies (control, ammonium thiosulfate [...] Read more.
Optimizing crop load through chemical thinning is essential for yield stability and fruit quality in intensive apple production, yet the relationships between tree growth, yield components, and fruit quality remain insufficiently characterized. This three-year study (2022–2024) evaluated four thinning strategies (control, ammonium thiosulfate [ATS]+ethephon, benzyladenine [BA]+ethephon, and ATS+BA+ethephon) across parameters of the apple cv. ‘Gala Schniga Schnitzer’: trunk cross-sectional area (TCSA), fruit yield (Y), fruit number per tree (FNT), crop load-number (CLnm), crop load-kg (CLkg), fruit size (FS), fruit weight (FW), water-soluble solids content (SSC), and fruit firmness (FF). Chemical thinning and year significantly but differentially affected yield components and fruit quality traits. In the ATS+BA+ethephon treatment, FS in 2023, FW in 2023 and 2024, and Y in 2024 significantly exceeded the control treatment in the respective years. Correlation analysis revealed strong positive relationships between FNT–Y, CLnm–CLkg, and FW–FS, with the strongest association observed between FW and FS (r = 0.98 in 2022 and 2023). Regression analyses confirmed significant linear relationships between FW–FS, FNT–Y, and CLnm–CLkg across thinning treatments. PCA explained 66.93, 54.89, and 50.91% of total variance by PC1 and PC2 in 2022–2024, respectively, with FS and FW showing the longest vectors in all years. The PCA structure varied among years, reflecting differences in the relative contributions of yield, crop load, tree growth, and fruit quality traits. Overall, chemical thinning should be considered not merely for reducing fruit number, but for regulating crop load and balancing productivity and fruit development, with effects varying by trait and year. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Integrated Farm Management Strategies for Sustainable Production of Horticultural Fruit Crops)
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27 pages, 4143 KB  
Article
Decoupled Foundation Models for Instance Segmentation and Automated Detection of Humidity-Induced Tomato Leaf Necrosis
by Emmanouil Savvakis, María del Carmen Martínez-Ballesta, Dimitrios Kapetas and Eleftheria Maria Pechlivani
Agriculture 2026, 16(18), 1997; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture16181997 (registering DOI) - 17 Sep 2026
Abstract
Tomato cultivation is highly vulnerable to both biotic and abiotic stressors, which together constitute major constraints on global crop productivity and food security. Among these, abiotic stressors such as excessive humidity are particularly challenging because they often induce physiological disorders and necrotic leaf [...] Read more.
Tomato cultivation is highly vulnerable to both biotic and abiotic stressors, which together constitute major constraints on global crop productivity and food security. Among these, abiotic stressors such as excessive humidity are particularly challenging because they often induce physiological disorders and necrotic leaf symptoms that resemble biological infections, complicating early diagnosis and timely intervention. Manual scouting is labor-intensive and prone to missed early-stage symptoms, motivating automated deep-learning-based detection systems. In this study, a multi-step AI pipeline for the automated segmentation and classification of humidity-induced necrotic leaf spots in tomatoes is proposed. A dataset of 218 RGB images was collected, yielding 3218 annotations across three classes (brown necrotic spots, yellow necrotic spots, and no necrotic leaves). Six end-to-end instance segmentation pipelines combining YOLO26m (for detection and segmentation), SAM2 (for zero-shot prompted segmentation), and either fine-tuned DINOv2 or EfficientNet-B3 (for downstream classification) were systematically designed and evaluated. Fine-tuned DINOv2 reached a macro F1-Score of 0.926 for per-instance crop classification, above EfficientNet-B3, ResNet-50 and Swin-Small baselines (0.886–0.901). The best-performing configuration (YOLO26m-det + SAM2 + DINOv2) achieved mAP@50 of 0.828, outperforming the single-model YOLO26m-seg baseline by approximately 8%. These results demonstrate that decoupling localization from classification through task-specific foundation models consistently outperforms single-model training on small, class-imbalanced agricultural datasets. By leveraging zero-shot segmentation foundation models like SAM2, this approach effectively bridges the gap in diagnostic performance for data-limited agricultural settings. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Integrated Farm Management Strategies for Sustainable Production of Horticultural Fruit Crops)
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19 pages, 1532 KB  
Article
Calcium Chloride and Boron Foliar Applications Reduce Fruit Cracking and Improve Antioxidant Activities in “Arisoo” Apples
by Nay Myo Win, Van Giap Do, Soon-Il Kwon, Jung-Geun Kwon, In-Kyu Kang, Jingi Yoo and Seonae Kim
Agriculture 2026, 16(16), 1727; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture16161727 - 12 Aug 2026
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Abstract
Fruit cracking negatively affects apple quality and marketability, reducing profitability. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the effects of foliar applications of 0.5% (w/v) calcium chloride (CaCl2), 0.1% (w/v) boric acid (H3 [...] Read more.
Fruit cracking negatively affects apple quality and marketability, reducing profitability. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the effects of foliar applications of 0.5% (w/v) calcium chloride (CaCl2), 0.1% (w/v) boric acid (H3BO3; hereafter referred to as B), and their combination (CaCl2 + B) on fruit cracking, quality, and antioxidant metabolism in “Arisoo” apples. Treatments were applied 45, 30, and 15 days before harvest, while control trees received water sprays. Foliar application increased calcium and B concentrations in the leaves, fruit peel, and flesh tissues. Compared with the control, the CaCl2, B, and CaCl2 + B treatments reduced fruit cracking incidence by 52.6%, 32.4%, and 87.4%, respectively, and cracking severity by 55.6%, 44.4%, and 77.8%, respectively. Among the treatments, the combined CaCl2 + B treatment showing the greatest effect in both cracking incidence and severity. Additionally, the CaCl2 and CaCl2 + B treatments improved flesh firmness by 5.0% and 5.6%, compared with the control. However, foliar applications did not affect fruit weight, soluble solids content, titratable acidity, starch pattern index, and color. Foliar treatments reduced lipid peroxidation, increased antioxidant enzyme activities, including catalase, superoxide dismutase, and peroxidase, and enhanced total phenolics and DPPH radical scavenging activity. Polygalacturonase and pectin methylesterase enzyme activities also decreased, particularly in the fruit peel under combined treatment. These findings suggest that foliar CaCl2 and B treatments can reduce fruit cracking in “Arisoo” apples, with the combined treatment showing greater effects than individual treatments. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Integrated Farm Management Strategies for Sustainable Production of Horticultural Fruit Crops)
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