- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
UC Davis Cooperative Extension post-harvest specialist Marita Cantwell told Bee reporter Niesha Lofing that consumer demand for high-flavor tomatoes has prompted greater availability of a diversity of tomato varieties in hues from golden yellow to deep burgundy.
"Sales are greater if...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
For automated, mechanical weed control to work, scientists must teach machines how to distinguish between unwanted vegetation and the crop being cultivated. A new, high-tech system using x-rays to detect tomato stems is under development by UC Davis Cooperative Extension agricultural engineer David Slaughter and USDA Agricultural Research Service researcher Ron Haff. The output from the x-ray detector is input to a microcontroller that controls a pair of pneumatically powered mechanical weed knife blades.
Slaughter and Haff's work was explained this week in an online newsletter produced by
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
A New York Times opinion piece invited four prominent economists to explain why they believe food prices are rising. The paper had reported that food prices spiked in April, even as oil and gas prices were down.
One of the experts, UC Davis Cooperative Extension agricultural economist Roberta Cook, made the point that food prices are rising because consumers have signaled they are willing to pay more to get what they want.
For example, consider the tomato. "A tomato is no longer a tomato is no longer a tomato," Cook wrote....
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Scientists at UC Riverside will apply compost to wildfire-ravaged land after the flames have been doused to determine whether it helps reduce erosion and water pollution and restore vegetation. The project is one of several to be undertaken with funding from the California Integrated Waste Management Board aimed at finding uses for what is expected to be an abundance of compost made from organic waste diverted from landfills, according to a story in the April issue of BioCycle.
The Waste Management Board plans to cut the amount of organic materials now going to landfills by half in the next 10 years. Meeting that...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Continuing the tomato trend from my last blog post, the loss of nutrients in tomatoes from the canning process was pondered in another San Francisco Chronicle article.
For this one, freelancer Deborah Rich spoke to Diane Barrett of the UC Davis Center for Fruit and Vegetable Quality.
There is controversy, Rich wrote, about the fate of fat-soluble nutrients like the antioxidant lycopene in tomato processing. Studies suggest that processing increases the levels of lycopene relative to the naturally occurring levels in fresh tomatoes, the Chron story...