Team:SSTi-SZGD/HP/Gold Integrated
SSTi-SZGD
To find out what exactly our potential customers need and how we could help meeting their needs. This summer we paid a number of visits to village, private garden/orchard, and Biotech company.
NanXi Village---Guangdong Province
We visited NanXi New Agricultural Science and Technology Village, Jieyang City, which is located in the Western region of Guangdong province. Historically local residents grew oranges, sweet potatoes, and sugar canes for living. In recent years they also started growing decorated trees.
Like thousands of other villages in China, armers in NanXi are accustomed of using heavy loads of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, including various fungicide, herbicide, and insecticide. The direct consequence was the heavily polluted local riverstream and the disappearance of the marine organisms. Since the introduction of ‘New Countryside’ concept, refers to ecological protection alongside economical development, the conditions of local environment have improved dramatically.
Local government wishes to maintain their ecological improvement outcome. When we explained our project, they showed great interest and invited us to their village. During the visit, we learned value information regards to local situation, farming, and pesticide usage.
NanXi village has over 2000 residents, most of them are elders and children, so there is a short of labor force
Farmers mainly use organophosphate pesticide, atrazine herbicide and carbendazim fungicide
Local government has funds and resources to import new farming technologies
Many residents have water spraying system set up in their farms, thanks to the ‘new countryside’ funds.
Our project may help them degrading pesticide residues in soil or on the surface of the leaves or fruits before pick-up. By using their existing water spraying systems, we could add an addition pump specifically for spraying enzyme solution. However, it appears that farmers are not willing to pay for high price enzyme products. After consulting with local officials, we came up with an idea of using whole cell biocatalysts, which is more economical and easily accepted by farmers. Later in the progress of project, we finalized the design of an automatic spraying system based on the existing water spraying system, and added a suicide system in bacteria cells to avoid GMO leaking problem.
Private balcony garden---Shenzhen
We visited a private balcony garden located on the top floor of a commercial building in Shenzhen. The total size is around 300 sqm, and is divided into five sections with different plants growing, i.e. spring onion, lettuce, spinach, melons, etc. Owner is a businessman who is afraid of contaminated food products so decided to grow his own. He is especially concerned with soil quality and would like to know if his produce are ‘green and residue-free”. e collected soil sample and ran tests on HPLC to detect traces of esticide. Results showed soil samples inevitably contained small races of pesticide residues, despite the owner seldom uses any. The ossible reason is that soil was purchased from farmers or commercial companies, who obtained soil directly from native land that is eavily polluted by pesticides due to a long history of application.
The owner was happy to try new methods to keep his precious garden “pollution & residue free”, and was little conscious of product price. He showed interest in enzyme products that degrade specific pesticide detected in his garden. He also spread the news on his Wechat and drew interested customers to us in the following weeks.
Private Orchard---Shenzhen
Family friends of Joyce own a 16 hectra private orchard in Shenzhen. Besides personal consumption, owners also grow commercialized produces, i.e. dragon fruit, lynchee, longan and papaya, primarily distribute as gift to family, friends or clients. They used heavy loads to fertilizer and pesticides, and seemed little concerned with the potential harm associated with them. However, soil quality and condition is less desirable .
They showed some interest in our products, while being price concerned. Enzyme products might be the primary choice for them, while whole cell product with automatic spraying system could be an alternative, as they consider setting up automatic watering system in the orchard soon.
Leveking Bio-tech Co.---Shenzhen
ShenZhen Leveking Biotech. Co. is a leading supplier of lipase products in Southern China. The company owns a 10,000 sqms manufacturing plant and manufactures more than 100 types of lipase products each year. Their industrial production is also strongly R&D based and mainly uses genetically engineered organisms for production.
We visited them for technique supports and industrial production advice. They provided invaluable advice on the feasibility of commercialization of our enzyme products:
1. Chassis choice---E.coli as being ‘too weak, too simple’ for large-scale production, yeast (Pichia Pastoris) or mold (Aspergillus) is a better choice. Eukaryotic cells also help with large vector (~6kb) expression problem.
2. Enzymatic activity requirement for industrial production---our current enzyme activity is low for commercialization, and other methods for testing enzyme activity were suggested
3. Additive selection for enzyme product formulation---a list of additives were provided, such as starch and dextrin
4. Inducible gene expression system---our LightOFF system is a valuable alternative to chemical induction, however its efficiency and stability needs further verification. Other cheaper chemical inducers also available.
Being a giant provider in enzyme product, Leveking also suggested a potential business collaboration opportunity with them, such as production outsourcing, which was a bonus to us. It gave us some ideas on how to reduce initial nvestment for our start-up business (refer to Business plan) and it is reflected in our business plan.
