Fruit and vegetable shelf-life is vital to crop productions and sales, including growers that use plant protection products, chain store buyers that purchase the fruit or vegetable, and consumers who demand value for their family’s food expenditures. Strawberries that rot from gray mold (Brotrytis) in just a few days in the refrigerator, apples with internal browning, or lettuce that is ruined from bacterial slime (Erwinia), have preventable post-harvest defects that are unacceptable in today’s discriminating produce marketplace. 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 specializes in these high-cash commodities, we operate a comprehensive post-harvest laboratory and have pioneered many 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 shelf life and therefore can assist in protocol development of field usage patterns that assure maximum benefit.

Similarly, fermentation processes in the winery or other value-added processes 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 fermentation slows or halts, it is referred to as “stuck fermentation.” Stuck fermentation can be common, may persist for months at a time, and is often 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 occur at high enough concentrations to be biologically active on fermentation yeasts.

New pest control products, and fungicides in particular, must be tested for their potential impact to these processes to mitigate concern about field chemical impacts on post-harvest processing in the winery or brewery. Pacific Ag has operated a complete wine laboratory for many years and has tested numerous fungicide compounds for effects to fermentation. We have proprietary SOPs 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 crush (wine grape harvest). The San Luis Obispo facility is uniquely positioned for this service, being located in the center of one of California’s premiere wine grape growing valleys.