The shelf life of fruits and vegetables is vitally important to everyone involved in the production and sale of the crop including the growers that use plant protection products, the chain store buyers that purchase the fruit or vegetables, and finally, the consumers who demand value for their family’s food expenditures. Strawberries that rot from grey mold in just a few days in the refrigerator, apples with internal browning, or lettuce that is ruined from bacterial slime, are preventable post harvest defects that are unacceptable in today’s discriminating produce marketplace. It is well known that field usage of fungicides and insecticides can profoundly affect the post harvest shelf life of a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. Since Pacific Ag Group specializes in these high cash commodities, we operate a comprehensive post-harvest laboratory and have pioneered many post-harvest testing protocols. for evaluating the benefits of field applied products to shelf life and post harvest quality. We routinely test products on fruits and vegetables for improvement in post-harvest shelf life, and can assist in protocol development for field usage patterns that assure maximal opportunity for these effects to be realized.

 

Similarly, fermentation processes in the winery or other value-added post harvest processing can also be affected by chemicals used in plant protection in the field. In the case of wine fermentation, when a vat of wine looses biological momentum, and the fermentation processes slow markedly or stop all together, it is referred to as “stuck fermentation”. These events can be common and can persist for months at a time and are many times unexplainable by the wine maker. Farm chemicals are frequently implicated as causal agents, even though they may not be present in the harvestable portion of the crop, or at high enough concentrations to be biologically active on the yeasts associated with the fermentation processes.

Nevertheless, new pest control products, and fungicides in particular, must be tested for their potential impact to these processes, since business managers and others associated with these operations need data for owners and investors who are rightfully concerned about the impacts of field production chemicals to the post harvest processing activities in the winery or brewery. Pacific Ag Group has operated a complete wine laboratory for several years and has tested many fungicide compounds for effects to fermentation. We have our own proprietary SOP’s for testing a compound’s impact on alcohol production and rate of fermentation. These tests are relatively inexpensive and can be conducted over a period of several weeks during the crush (wine grape harvest) season. The San Luis Obispo facility is uniquely positioned for this service since it is located in the center of one of California’s premiere wine grape growing Valleys.