Dave Goes on Ag Tours

One of the neat things for Dave about being in Chile is the chance he gets to go on tours.  For example, Dave accepted an invitation to give two guest lectures in agricultural courses at the Pontificia Catolica Universidad de Valparaiso.  During the day between the courses the course sponsor lined up a tour of some local greenhouse vegetable production.

Dave started out the tour at the greenhouses of a company that specializes in hydroponic production.  Above are tomato plants that were brought in as transplants when they had their first cluster of flowers just starting to develop.  At the time of the photo the plants are about one month old.  Below Dave's feet are tracks for carts that roll up and down the rows between the tomatoes.  Eventially these plants will get more than 12 feet high.

Their next stop was a greenhouse for hydroponic lettuce production.  Plants are all grown in holes in a metal frame where the water for the roots run.  Below are the ladies harvesting the lettuce.

Plants are lifted out of the water, a few basal leaves are removed.  Since there is no dirt involved the plants are really clean and are put directly into bags (roots and all) to be sent to specialty markets.  Since the roots are left on the plants the shelf life of the product is much longer than the average bunch of lettuce that is cut from the field.

The next stop on the tour was a company that produces bell peppers.  In this photo from left to right are the head of the entomology department at UC Davis, and entomologist from INIA (Chiles equivalent of the USDA Agricultural Research Service), an entomology professor from a Chilean University (Pontificia Catolica Universidad de Valparaiso) and the grower.

Plants were totally covered with bellpeppers.  However, Dave was more interested in learning about their pest management programs for aphids, whitefly, and worms.

The grower also produced greenhouse tomotoes.  These tomatoes are all used for domestic consumption within Chile.   The varieties that are used are very prolific with lots of tomatoes per bract.

Dave enjoyed watching the picker grabbing the tomatoes and tossing them into his bag.  The fruit is picked while it is just starting to turn red.  At this time it is still really hard and can be tossed around and dumped into buckets without getting bruised.

Here is a portion of the morning's harvest ready to  head to the market.  After the tour Dave headed back to the University Campus to prepare for his lecture that evening.