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January 18, 2010
· Vegetable garden to sail from Japan to Qatar
· Court rules for Monsanto, antitrust case remains
· Big freeze takes huge toll on Florida agriculture
· Netting provides pest control without chemicals
· As gardening expands, so does Burpee mailing list
Vegetable garden to sail from Japan to Qatar
(The
Peninsula) –
The Japan-based Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corp. is the
company that developed the specially configured shipping container. Though
several countries, including some GCC countries and
The insulated 40-feet containers are equipped with water-circulation system, LED lighting. It’s perfectly feasible to supply these containers with solar panel and lithium-ion battery to make them utilise abundant solar energy. Mitsubishi Chemical suggests that the plant can harvest about 50 leaf vegetables such as lettuce per day. For such leafy vegetables as lettuce, 2000 plants can be grown in a single container.
Measuring 12.2(length) x 2.4 (width) x 2.9 meter (Height), the vegetable plants with solar panel and lithium-ion battery costs approximately $659,051- $768,893. These are also available without the solar additions and are priced at $550,918.
The container, which the company calls as “vegetable factory”, is a heat-insulating one featuring air-conditioning facilities to keep the inside temperature constant. It is also equipped with water treatment facilities for water circulation, filteration and recycling. The fluorescent and LED lighting equipment will help photosynthesis.
Furthermore, having equipped with a solar panel and lithium-ion battery, it is possible to use them together with electricity from the grid. The company expects that the plant will be powered only by a solar energy in the future and used in off-grid regions.
“When used in regions where electricity prices are low, fluroscent lighting equipment will be mainly used. But, when the plant is powered mainly by solar power, LED lighting equipment will be used because it consumes less power than fluroscent light equipment “, the company spokesperson revealed in Tokyo while formally announcing the company’s decision to deliver the first container to Qatar.
However, it is not clear the Japanese company is delivering its scientifically developed ‘vegetable gardens’ to a government entity or to private agencies.
Court rules for Monsanto, antitrust case remains
(AP via SFGate.com) – A legal ruling says contracts give Monsanto the right to stop rival DuPont from selling genetically modified soybeans built with Monsanto's technology, but leaves open DuPont's challenge of the restrictions on antitrust grounds.
The ruling in
Monsanto sued DuPont last spring, claiming it was illegal for DuPont to sell its new line of biotech seeds called Optimum GAT. That line of seeds add a new DuPont gene to the older line of Roundup Ready corn and soybean plants that DuPont developed under a license with Monsanto.
U.S. District Judge Richard Webber said in Friday's ruling that Monsanto's licensing agreement clearly prohibits DuPont from inserting its Optimum GAT gene into corn and soybean plants with Monsanto traits.
But Webber said his ruling was narrow, and didn't consider whether Monsanto has the right under antitrust laws to restrict how competitors breed and sell plants with Monsanto traits.
DuPont is challenging its licensing agreement with Monsanto on antitrust grounds, in the midst of a U.S. Department of Justice antitrust investigation into Monsanto that is examining whether there is anticompetitive behavior in the seed industry.
"This litigation is just beginning; we will now vigorously pursue our antitrust, license and patent fraud claims," DuPont Senior Vice President and General Counsel Thomas L. Sager said in a statement Saturday.
Monsanto was not immediately available for comment.
Monsanto announced this week that the Justice Department demanded internal documents related to the company's soybean business. Spokesman Lee Quarles said the company has done nothing wrong and is cooperating with the department, providing millions of pages of documents it requested.
Big freeze takes huge toll on Florida
(Miami
Herald) – Although the freezing weather is finally gone, consumers in
From green beans and yellow corn in
While some farmers have managed to salvage part of their crops and others are already replanting, supply is going to be a problem for at least a month or two, depending on the crop. That in turn translates into higher prices for consumers.
``Tomatoes that were trading for $14 for a 25-pound box, now
they are up at $24 a box,'' said Gene McAvoy, a
vegetable expert with the
The timing of the freeze couldn't have been worse for
Florida Agriculture and Consumer Services Commissioner Charles Bronson told state legislators earlier this week he believes that about 30 percent of the state's agricultural crops were damaged or destroyed. With losses expected to reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars, that's another blow to the state's already fragile economy.
``The industry is going to be hit hard,'' McElroy said, ``but farmers are a pretty resilient group.''
In Miami-Dade County alone, the losses are estimated at just over $250 million, which is about 40 percent of the more than $600 million in revenue agriculture generates each year, said Charles LaPradd, agriculture manager for Miami-Dade County.
Hardest hit in Miami-Dade were the row crops like green beans, squash and corn, said Katie Edwards, executive director of the Dade County Farm Bureau. About 30 percent of the county's tomato crop took a hit, Edwards said, but growers are still trying to assess the damage.
``We got some stuff that got hurt and some stuff that made it,'' said Freddy Strano, a Homestead tomato grower, who estimates his losses could range between 20 percent and 50 percent of his 250 acres. ``It's hard to tell. Anything on the outside of the plant got exposed and is no good. We're trying to salvage what we can.''
In the Immokalee area, which is one of the major areas for tomato production, produce losses are estimated at over $100 million, McAvoy said. Tomatoes in Immokalee were nearly wiped out for the winter season.
Bob Spencer of West Coast Tomato says about 95 percent of the tomatoes that he would be picking over the next 45 days in Immokalee are gone. He estimates he lost close to 250 acres of crops, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
``We haven't experienced a freeze like this in 20 years,'' Spencer said. ``It reminds the ego what can happen. Farming is a tough sport. It's not flag football. It's tackle football.''
The last freeze of this magnitude
``Typically if you water the crops ahead of the cold period, it will help,'' said John Alger of Alger Farms in South Miami-Dade. ``A bulletproof vest works only to a certain size gun. If you keep getting shot in the same place, eventually it's going to get through.''
Alger, who grows sweet corn and landscape trees, estimates he lost ``way over a million'' dollars from the freeze, which destroyed about 75 percent of his 1,250 acres of sweet corn.
``It's not only the farmer, but everyone in related businesses from the truck drivers to the crop dusters, the harvesting crew and the packing houses are going to be impacted,'' he said. ``The multiplier effect on the economy is devastating.''
``The tomatoes we have are going to be metered out to try to meet our customer demand,'' said Reggie Brown, executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange.
``It's going to be an opportunity for
Netting provides pest control without chemicals
(jpost.com)
– Meet Avi Klayman.
He's the man who saved
Vegetable greenhouse netting may not be as "sexy" a high-tech innovation as, say, the invention of instant messaging, but the nets created by Klayman's company, Meteor Agricultural Nets - which are patented in Israel and around the world - are just as revolutionary.
It all began in 1988 when much of
Whiteflies are extremely difficult to control and quickly build up resistance to pesticides. Farmers were spraying their crops three times a day - to no avail, it turned out - as the whiteflies infested almost the entire tomato crop, causing a yellow curl epidemic.
Desperate farmers began to examine alternatives, among them the possibility of covering crops to prevent infestation. Following consultations with scientists at Israel's Agricultural Research Organization (also known as the Volcani Institute) Klayman developed a solution - a mesh called the Antivirus Net that blocks the whitefly's physical access to plants, while allowing sunshine in and enabling air circulation
The Antivirus net seems like a simple idea, but determining just the right balance - holes that are small enough to prevent insects from entering, but are big enough to ensure that the right amount of sunshine and air can get in -0 involved a great deal of research. Oddly, says Klayman, very little work had been done in the area before 1988, probably because farmers were still enamored of pesticides, which they had always used.
"When the first pesticides came out in the 1920s and 1930s, farmers had great success in keeping bugs out of their crops," Klayman relates. "But as time went on, the bugs developed resistance to the standard pesticides, so more powerful ones were needed. By the late '80s, it was clear that a different approach was needed."
In the early 1990s, says Klayman,
the most common agricultural pest in the world, the Tobacco (Silverleaf) Whitefly, was responsible for billions of
dollars of damage to
The Antivirus net took the farming community in
"When the first pesticides came out in the 1920s and 1930s, farmers had great success in keeping bugs out of their crops," Klayman relates. "But as time went on, the bugs developed resistance to the standard pesticides, so more powerful ones were needed. By the late '80s, it was clear that a different approach was needed."
In the early 1990s, says Klayman,
the most common agricultural pest in the world, the Tobacco (Silverleaf) Whitefly, was responsible for billions of
dollars of damage to
The Antivirus net took the farming community in
To meet more specific needs, Meteor started to produce other, more advanced nets, such as the BioNet, for use on vegetables and flowers. In addition to physically blocking the bugs, including tiny ones like aphids and spider mites, the BioNet also limits their perceptions of their surroundings, playing tricks with filtered light that essentially leave the bugs blind.
"Even if a pest gets through a BioNet, it just sits there, immobilized by its inability to see," says Klayman.
And Meteor's latest invention - the SpiderNet - keeps out even the smallest pests, like thrips (small to minute sucking insects with narrow, feathery wings), using strong filament fibers designed like a spider web.
Nowadays, Meteor nets are used in dozens of countries around
the world, including Latin America, Africa and even countries in the Middle
East, such as
The company has sold some nets in the
Then there's the Kashrut angle. While nobody wants to eat insect-infected produce, observant Jews are bound by specific biblical strictures against ingesting them and many prefer not to take a chance.
As a result, a large industry has sprung up where rabbinical
supervisors inspect produce - especially leafy vegetables, where there are many
places for insects to hide - and if the vegetables are seen to be free of
insects, grant them a certificate that identifies them as kosher. The
vegetables are grown beneath nets throughout
That business only exists because of Meteor, Klayman asserts. "The truth is that vegetables that
come to
And perhaps there's some symmetry in Klayman
being the one to come up with a patent that helps to preserve a facet of Jewish
heritage: "My father was in Auschwitz, and came to
Today, with some 50 highly skilled workers, Meteor, based in Petah Tikva, produces anti-insect nets for agriculture, enabling all of us to enjoy our vegetables without worrying about pesticides or bugs.
As gardening expands, so does Burpee mailing list
(The Sacramento Bee) – Gardening grows on you. That's one reason so many people discover the hobby later in life.
Baby boomers are gravitating toward gardening as a way to
exercise, unwind and spend time together. It's one of a number of trends that
converged in backyards across
Those newbies fueled a major boom for Burpee, the go-to seed source for generations.
"It's been a wonderful two years for us," Burpee
owner George Ball says by phone from his
Burpee saw its sales go up 20 percent to 25 percent in 2008 and again in 2009 – the biggest surge for the 134-year-old company since 1973, itself a recession year.
Spurred by the current economic downturn, many American families returned to gardening or tried it for the first time as a way to save money. Growing one's own food also is a way to assure its safety, another major concern.
"But there's this big background trend behind all that now," says Ball, 57, an avid gardener himself. "We're getting older. We have more time. We may finally have a home of our own and a backyard. We have space. We want to garden. That trend will continue even as the economy improves."
Last month, Burpee mailed out almost 1.8 million copies of its signature catalog. About 600,000 catalogs under its other nameplates will be delivered soon.
As always in its catalogs, Burpee trumpets what's new and unusual.
"We scour the world looking for them," says Ball. "We're always trying to push the envelope. It's not the same old seeds we offered 30 years ago."
Burpee keeps fresh every winter with a plethora of eye-popping, never-seen vegetables and flowers. Those new introductions – such as Tie-Dye Tomatoes and RSVPeas – take five to six years to develop as hybrids. Some fruit trees take decades before they reach the catalog, which has 75 new introductions for 2010.
"Gardeners want to know what's new," Ball says. "They want all that sweat to pay off every year with something they can't find anywhere else. It's a really big deal. It's hard to find something exciting every single year."
Ball understands what gardeners want. For decades, the Burpee owner and chairman has seen fads come and go, but his brand has remained supreme.
The main Burpee catalog is supplemented by two niche catalogs: The Cook's Garden for gourmet veggies and Heronswood for rare perennials and weird plants.
"We're an old company," Ball says, "but we're actually the youngest company at heart."
He has kept his company in step with modern trends while keeping the Burpee name synonymous with vegetable seed. Not only does it have the country's top catalog, but it sells seeds in supermarket kiosks and home-improvement stores.
The most popular sellers are the standards: zucchini, sunflowers and zinnias.
"They're easy" for gardeners, Ball says.
Judging by early sales, Ball expects another great year for Burpee.
"This boom will continue for now," he says. "But there will be some fallout (eventually). I can't make people gardeners."
Gardening is not for everyone, he admits. Many people try it and give up, frustrated by lack of success after all that work. Keeping a large vegetable garden also is a major responsibility, like owning a horse.
"You have to be able to put up with dirt and bugs," Ball says. "You're going to sweat. But if you survive a year and want to plant again, then you know. You're a gardener, and you'll probably stick with it for life."
End Transmission