A 2-year study was conducted in Spring 2024 and 2025 in Cairo, GA, USA, to evaluate the crop yield and fruit size of jalapeno (Capsicum annuum) cultivars and to provide recommendations for growers in our area. The trials consisted of five cultivars: Megatron, Orizaba (grower standard), Soundwave, SVHJ5816, and Unicron. The trials were conducted in a commercial grower’s field each year and managed the same way as their crop. Cultivar treatments were replicated three times and arranged in a randomized complete block design. Two harvests were conducted in 2024 and three in 2025. Fruit were separated into marketable and unmarketable categories and weighed. Five representative marketable fruit per plot were used to determine average fruit length and width. ‘Soundwave’ and ‘Orizaba’ were the only cultivars that consistently produced more than 1000 boxes/acre in both years and achieved more than a 95% marketable yield. ‘Orizaba’ is already very popular among growers in southern Georgia, but now ‘Soundwave’ is another option for growers seeking a high-yielding cultivar with added resistance to bacterial leaf spot and Phytophthora compared with ‘Orizaba’. Although ‘SVHJ5816’ has a promising disease package, it had the greatest unmarketable fruit yield due to fruit cracking, resulting in the lowest marketable yield percentage of all cultivars tested. ‘Unicron’ had the largest fruit in both length and width, which might be important in markets where a larger size is preferred, but does not look like a typical jalapeno. Based on our trials, we recommend ‘Soundwave’ and ‘Orizaba’ for spring production in the southeastern United States because of its consistently high marketable yields and percentage of marketable fruit across both years of our study.
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