Technological innovation pushes agriculture toward a brave new world.

>><<>><<

Since the 1990s, organizations like the California Strawberry Commission (whose members produce nearly 90 percent of the nation’s fresh strawberries) began pumping tens of millions of dollars into research projects to find alternatives to methyl bromide, an effective pesticide that’s also responsible for destroying the earth’s ozone layer. But matching methyl bromide’s effectiveness hasn’t been easy. That’s until Husein Ajwa, a University of California at Davis agricultural scientist based at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Station in Salinas, began working on the problem.

Ajwa, a soil and vegetable scientist with dozens of plaques and awards hanging in his spacious office (including one from the White House), has helped designed the most effective alternative thus far to methyl bromide. The genius of the innovation is that it relies on growers’ drip irrigation systems, those thin little hoses that irrigate a field by releasing water slowly into the ground. Instead of using methyl bromide, growers can now apply less harmful pesticides to the field through the irrigation system.

Mark Murai, chairman of the California Strawberry Commission, says that 50 percent of the state’s strawberry growers are now using the drip irrigation application system with pesticides that aren’t methyl bromide. “Husein’s innovation has been really big for us,” says Murai. “He’s delivered a fumigation system that uses water and emulsifiers to keep the fumigant in the soil, right where we need it. It’s a pretty safe delivery system.”

Meanwhile, other scientists at Salinas’ Agricultural Research Station are also on the cutting edge. Carolee Bull, a plant pathologist, is utilizing DNA fingerprinting technology for the first time to identify new strains of plant diseases in the Salinas Valley. Other scientists are testing out new strains of vegetable crops to discover which are naturally more resistant to prevalent diseases.

Robert Perkins, executive director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau, is particularly excited by the prospect of a biotechnology boom in the Salinas Valley.

“This is an idea whose time is coming,” says Perkins. “It’s a science with such widespread possibilities.”

Perkins believes that soon, biotech researchers will be able to manufacture crops that are more productive, require less pesticide use and have more vitamins and nutrients than anything consumers can find in the market today. “You can speculate endlessly about what this technology will be able to do for us,” he says. “One of the single biggest rewards that’s coming at us is the delivery of crops that can overcome pest challenges without resorting to methyl bromide or other pesticides.”

If and when this technology does arrive in the Salinas Valley, it will represent another major lunge forward in the evolution of a local ag industry that is already bursting with all sorts of innovations. And sooner or later, Perkins believes, the general public will start to catch on to the fact that what’s taking place out in the fields has little to do with the public’s outdated preconceptions of ag.

“People still have this image of farmers on tractors with the steel seat on a steel spring, out in the heat and dust and bugs,” says Perkins. “But go out now and see the big tractors, how they have an enclosed cab and have air conditioning, GPS systems and laptops with a wireless Internet hookup. It’s like a jet compared to a Model T. And it’s all out there. Those are the kinds of steps in technology that will make life better and more productive for all of us.”