A few years ago, Austin Wrenn noticed something unsettling in the strawberry greenhouses at Wrenn’s Farm in Zebulon, North Carolina. Plants that should have been moving toward harvest were instead showing damage in the places growers watch most closely: the crown, the fruit and the leaves. The problem did not arrive with a dramatic flourish. It worked its way into a crop.
The disease is Neopestalotiopsis, often shortened to Neo-P, and it has now been confirmed in North Carolina. For strawberry growers, the concern is less about one ugly plant than about what an infection can do before anyone has a reason to pull it. The new disease threat is considered significant for the state’s strawberry industry.
A Problem That Can Travel Quietly
Neo-P can spread without announcing itself, making management a matter of timing as much as chemistry or sanitation. By the time symptoms are visible, infected material may already have moved through a production system. That is especially awkward for nurseries and growers who depend on planting stock passing through several hands before it reaches a field or greenhouse.
Austin Wrenn, president of the U.S. Strawberry Association, described Neo-P as a “significant threat” to the industry. The burden is not evenly distributed: smaller operations have less room to absorb a failed planting, and the expense of discovering a problem late can include lost plants, disrupted harvest plans and the labor of sorting out where the infection began.
The disease also complicates a familiar grower instinct: inspect the crop and act on what is in front of you. A clean-looking plant is not necessarily a clean source of planting material. That gap between what a plant carries and what it shows is where routine scouting starts to lose some of its usefulness.
Research Moves Upstream
Researchers at North Carolina State University are expanding work on several fronts to help affected growers. The goal is to move detection earlier, before latent infections have a chance to become a nursery or field problem, while also giving growers better information about how to respond once Neo-P is suspected. NC State’s program combines plant disease research with AI and genomics aimed at early detection.
That approach shifts some of the work away from the harvest bed and toward the less visible parts of the supply chain. Testing protocols, cleaner propagation material and faster confirmation may matter as much as what happens after a symptomatic plant is found. The unglamorous work is also the useful work: figuring out how to identify a problem before it becomes expensive.
Neo-P is a major threat for the industry, especially small growers who invest heavily in their crops.
Austin Wrenn, president, North American Strawberry Association
The Nursery Is Part of the Field
For growers, the practical question is increasingly where plants came from, how they were tested and what records follow them. Disease management does not begin when a runner is planted in North Carolina soil; it begins with the health of the material that arrives at the farm. That makes communication between nurseries, researchers, extension personnel and growers part of the control strategy.
NC State’s research will need to turn sophisticated tools into decisions that fit the pace of a strawberry operation: which samples to submit, when to test, how to handle suspect plants and what level of risk justifies rejecting a lot. Until those tools are routine, growers are left balancing the cost of extra scrutiny against the much larger cost of finding Neo-P after a crop is established.
The work is being expanded because the disease has already crossed the line from a research concern to a production problem. For North Carolina’s strawberry growers, the next useful answer will not be a dramatic cure. It will be a reliable way to know what is arriving on the farm before the plants have had time to tell them.