Fall Appeal, End of Year Giving
Great news! There is still time to contribute to our Fall Appeal! Donations for lift rentals will be accepted through the end of the year!
As shared in our print and online newsletters, as well as through our social media accounts…
In this year’s fall fundraising appeal, we hope to raise $10,000 to go towards lift rentals in the 2026 season. The national program of recurrent genomic selection requires lots of controlled pollinations, and bagging flowers on treetops is challenging work. To do it safely, we use towable lifts to get into the trees three times every season: once to bag, a second time to hand pollinate, and a third time to collect the nuts. The bagging and pollinating take place in June, and the harvest between late September to early October. (Check out this video made by Lake while in a lift, bagging trees for controlled pollination, and this post of Noah and Persephone harvesting in a lift.) You can see from these linked videos and the photos above just how important the lifts are in our orchard work! After a season of this program, we realized that having more lifts for different locations at the same time made far more sense than purchasing one lift that could only service one location at a time, and then sit idle for 10 months of the year. Lift rentals allow us far more flexibility to work in multiple locations during pollination season. So please consider contributing to our fall appeal and help get those pollinations done!
Make checks payable to PA/NJ TACF and send to:
PA/NJ TACF at Penn State University,
108 Research A Modular Lab
118 Serviceberry Road
University Park, PA 16802