HLA Professor Lori Hoagland and her team received $3.5M from the NIFA OREI program to continue working on their Tomato Organic Management and Improvement (TOMI) project. This is the third round of funding the team has received for their project aimed at developing new ways to control foliar diseases in tomato. In TOMI3, they will continue to investigate how to promote disease suppressive soil, identify mechanisms mediating how tomato plants recruit and support microbes with biocontrol capabilities, and integrate selection for microbiome-mediated suppression and other forms of disease control into tomato breeding programs. The team will also develop new decision support-tools that will help farmers apply insights the team has generated over the past 10 years, and work with consumers to evaluate and promote new varieties developed in their project. Co-PI’s on TOMI3 include Ankita Raturi (Purdue-ABE), and colleagues from Oregon State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, North Carolina State University, Virginia Tech University, University of Hawaii, Organic Seed Alliance, and eOrganic.