Description
The problem
In spite of the significant leaps achieved in the field of food safety, various foodborne diseases, food-related outbreaks, and different types of product losses during the food supply chain still occur and many plant and animal pathogens continue to pose serious concerns for the agricultural community. Acute food-borne disease infections and intoxications are much more of a concern to governments and the food industry today than a few decades ago. As an indication, food-borne infections are estimated to cause 76 million illnesses, 300,000 hospitalizations, and 5000 deaths annually in the USA. Thus microbial safety appears to be a critical point of concern within the agricultural industry today.
Based on the above an efficient disinfection program is required to ensure that microbial safety is achieved and guaranteed. Such a disinfection program can be applied both as a pre-harvest step in seed treatment, product yield improvement, product quality improvement, pathogen suppression, and plant disease control as well as a post-harvest intervention aiming not only to eliminate pathogenic bacteria but also to control product loss, for the shelf-life extension, against undesirable fungi, for chemical removals such as pesticide inactivation and toxin inactivation or mitigation procedures.
How Kirkmayer can assist you to overcome your shortcomings in microbial control
Anolyte (HClO) solution produced by Kirkmayer on-site generators has been proven to be an effective antifungal agent against various types of diseases in the field of agriculture. These diseases have been dealt with up to now with the application of fungicides during the crop season or prior to harvest. This practice imposes growers with a significant amount of added cost. In addition, fungicides have other disadvantages such as negative environmental impacts and occupational exposure danger during fungicide applications on the field. Moreover, there is a growing demand by consumers for limiting the application of chemicals such as fungicides in the agricultural production of all crops. Hence, alternative methods with similar or even better efficiency and fewer negative effects are necessary and Anolyte (HClO) solution has proven to be one of these new types of antifungal treatments.
A typical application of Anolyte (Hypochlorous Acid) in this field is the spray of agricultural products with the solution through an overhead irrigation system. This technique has provided excellent results in the microbial control of various plants and fruit such as strawberry, cucumbers, tomato, etc.
