Professor Gerda Fourie, Stephen Shange (field extension officer) and Byron Sonnekus (PhD candidate), from the Macadamia Protection Programme (MaPP), recently visited several farms in the Lowveld region of Mpumalanga to conduct pest and disease incidence surveys. These surveys form part of an on-going field extension project which assesses the occurrence of macadamia pests and diseases on different cultivars at various stages of the growing season and are being conducted on multiple farms in the Limpopo, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal growing regions. The field trip also served as training for the newly appointed field extension officer, Stephen Shange, and a visit to a commercial nursery to collect macadamia seedlings for on-going research projects. On Friday, the team also attended the AmberMacs Macadamia Expo where Prof. Gerda Fourie gave a presentation on pest and disease management that highlighted some of the research projects currently being conducted by FABI.