Bart wrote:
> Microbial products are almost always a bad deal for the farmer.
> Depending on how cranky I feel at a given moment, I tend to refer to
> them as foo-foo dust, preacher sweat, or squirrel piss.
That has been my experience with field trials of such things. But there
might be some niches where such things have value.
Douglas wrote:
> The only product mentioned by my neighbors (as being produced under
> license) in relation to what we'll need was "ultradine", which they
> call a "disinfectant and sanitizer". This would be used for washing
> the fruit before waxing.
Apparently that is an iodine-based material, but it got me thinking about
microbial solutions to this problem. Some root-surface pseudomonads are
really aggressive against fungi. These generally produce either antibiotics
or siderophores (iron-removing agents). Although they often fail in the
field as agents applied to seed or soil (for a variety of reasons) they may
be good agents to control fungi postharvest. Or to benignly colonize
sprouts. Pseudomonads are pretty easy to grow in do-it-yourself mode. They
don't survive drying very well so are hard to commercialize.
There has been some promising work on this use of bacteria and yeasts. I
just did a quick lit search. If you are interested in these refs let me
know.
Dale
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Apr 05 2000 - 20:00:34 EDT