Organic Continued from Page 13
said they believe the level of consumer interest offers opportunities for smaller farmers looking to go organic. “Over the last decade or so, organic de- mand has grown more than convention- al,” Smith said. “I don’t think there are hurdles that stop a smaller grower from going organic. The smaller growers tend to do well with organics.” Once inflation calms down, the U.S. could offer an excellent market for organ- ic fruits and vegetables, the panel said. “People have more disposable income they can spend on food in this country,” Nunes said. Although COVID-19 kept some people out of supermarkets for a time and infla- tion has some customers looking for pro- duce bargains, there is long-term growth in the number of consumers drawn to organics as a healthy alternative, the speakers said. They said they are optimistic there will be expanding markets for high quality or- ganic produce that looks and tastes good. “Consumers have been resilient,” DuPuis said. “A lot more consumers are interested in plant-based diets. We’re not only in the produce business; we’re in the flavor business.” (Bob Johnson is a reporter in Monterey County. He may be contacted at bjohn11135@gmail.com.)
at Divine Flavor, a distribution company based in Arizona. “We need to go above and beyond in social responsibility to re- tain labor. We offer medical and dental coverage and subsidized meals. We’re seeing in Mexico the younger generation does not want to get into this work.” Divine Flavor started as a 25-acre vineyard in Sonora, Mexico in 1989 and has grown to be one of the largest fair trade produce importers of grapes, mini peppers and berries through its 96,000 square-foot distribution center in Nogales, Arizona. There are also inefficiencies that make organic growers even more vulnerable to market pressures. “In water and labor, organic is not as efficient,” Smith of Driscoll’s said. “That is a challenge because we’re seeing the premium diminish.” Climate change has already forced Driscoll’s to call on information learned in insect-pest control in its earliest days of growing organically. “We’ve had some pest pressure in California that we’ve never faced be- fore,” Smith said. “At the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, there were no materials for raspberries, so we were into biological control.” Meanwhile, DuPuis of Divine Flavor
Michael DuPuis of Divine Flavor, left, says plant-based diets help organic produce sales. Brie Reiter Smith of Driscoll’s says 75% of its organic customers will buy conventional “if it looks better.”
said organic producers are facing new rules affecting markets in the U.S. and Mexico. “We have new regulations coming up every year, especially in Mexico,” DuPuis said. “I think it comes down to being flexible.” It does not pay to respond to any of the challenges and difficulties by cutting cor- ners when it comes to produce quality. Smith warned that “75% of our organic
customers will buy conventional if it looks better.” She added, “The vast majority of organic consumers only prefer them if they are like conventional in quality and at a good price.” The bright side that keeps these grow- ers optimistic is the strength of consumer demand for organic produce as part of a healthy lifestyle, they said. Although the growers on the panel are all in larger, established operations, they
Cloning of hybrid rice strain hailed as key breakthrough
An international team, including re- searchers at the University of California, Davis, has successfully propagated a commercial hybrid rice strain as a clone through seeds, with 95% efficiency. According to researchers’ conclusions published in Nature Communications, the development may help lower the costs of hybrid rice seed, allowing rice farmers worldwide to obtain access to high-yielding, disease-resistant strains. Historically, rice has been costly to breed as a hybrid, with previous yield improvements of about 10%. According to Gurdev Khush, an ad- junct professor emeritus in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, the bene- fits of rice hybrids have yet to reach many of the world’s farmers. Khush has led efforts to create new high-yielding rice varieties, work for which he received the World Food Prize in 1996. He has advocated propagating hybrids as clones that would remain identical from generation to generation without further breeding. He said many wild plants can produce seeds that are clones of themselves, a process called apomixis. “Once you have the hybrid, if you can induce apomixis, then you can plant it every year,” Khush said in statement. In 2019, a team led by professor Venkatesan Sundaresan and assistant
professor Imtiyaz Khanday at the UC Davis Departments of Plant Biology and Plant Sciences achieved apomixis in rice plants, with about 30% of seeds being clones. Sundaresan, Khanday and colleagues in France, Germany and Ghana were part of the rice propagation effort. The researchers reported they achieved the clonal efficiency of 95% using a commer- cial hybrid rice strain in a process that can be sustained for at least three generations. The process involves modifying three genes that cause the plant to switch from meioisis, the process that plants use to form egg cells, to mitosis, in which a cell divides into two copies of itself. Another gene modification induces apomixis. The result is a seed that can grow into a plant genetically identical to its parent. The method would allow seed compa- nies to produce hybrid seeds more rap- idly and at larger scale, as well as provide seed that farmers could save and replant from season to season, researchers said. “Apomixis in crop plants has been the target of worldwide research for over 30 years because it can make hybrid seed production become accessible to every- one,” Sundaresan said in a statement. “The resulting increase in yields can help meet global needs of an increasing pop- ulation without having to increase use of land, water and fertilizers to unsustain- able levels.”
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14 Ag Alert January 18, 2023
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