Team:SSTi-SZGD/HP/Gold Integrated

SSTi-SZGD---HP_Intergrated

Potential customer visits

To make sure that our design truly satisfies the needs of potential users in the future, this summer we paid a number of visits to villages, private farm/orchard/gardens, and small size rural cooperative farmland.

New countryside visit

We visited NanXi New Agricultural Science and Technology Village, Jieyang City, which is located in the Western region of Guangdong province. Historically it is economically underdeveloped, and local residents usually grow oranges, sweet potatoes, and sugar canes. In recently years, with the majority of labor migrated to large industralized cities (a tendency happens in all part of China), they gradually switched to grow decorated trees that require less labor force. Despite the change of farming produce, the tendency to use heavy loads of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, including fungicide, herbicide, insecticide, have not changed. The direct consequence was the heavily polluted local riverstream and disapparence of the local marine animals (pictures). With the introduction of ‘New Countryside’ concept, and the efforts of local government, the condition of the land, riverstream and canals started improving dramatically (Picture).

Under this circumstance, the local government hopes to maintain their ecological improvement outcome and continue searching for sustainable method for future farming. They showed great interest in our project and invited us to visit their village. We admired the efforts they made in changing the ecological condition, and learned that they wish to set up a foundation for eco-travel promotion in the village. Eco-travel means that tourists can enjoy a pure and native environment, playing in the rivel without worry about pollution, picking up vege or fruits from the soil without worry about residues. It also means that their produce can be sold in the market as green and residue-free. In this visit, we introduced our project briefly and asked some farmers about basic practices. Inquiries such as the type of pesticide being used, the amount of being used, as well as chemical fertilizers or bio-fertilizer to probe the farming scenarios.

Private garder/Farm visits

We visited three private gardens or farm in Shenzhen region this summer. Sizes range from 300 sqm to 16 hectares. Apart from growing vege/fruits for personal consumption, owners also grow commercialized produces, i.e. dragon fruit, lynchee, longan and papaya, for both personal consumption and gifts to friends, family or business clients. They are very conscious of produce and soil quality, but are little concerned of the product appearance. They always refer their produce as 'green, not polluted, eat from the soil'. Therefore, these owners are usually interested in our product concept, and less conscious of price issue. We got four soil testing appointments in two week time since started promoting our project. Test results showed soil samples inevitably contained small amount of pesticide residues, despite they hardly used any. The possible reason is that they purchased soil from farmers or commercial companies, who obtained soil directly from native land that is heavily polluted by pesticides due to a long history of application.

Visit Leveking

ShenZhen Leveking Biotech. Co. is a leading supplier of lipase products in Southern China. The company owns a 10,000 sqms manufacturing plant and produces more than 100 types of lipase products each year. Their manufacturing plant has a strong R&D base and mainly uses genetically engineered organisms for production. We would like to form potential business collaboration with them and also like to find out how feasible our project was in terms of commercialization. They provided us with a number parameters related to manufacturing enzyme products, such as chassis choice, enzymatic activity requirement, additive selection, mass production bottlenecks, etc. It appears that although our light-controlled expression system is a valuable alternative to traditional chemical induction, the system still needs quite a few of optimization before implementation. Also, our chassis choice, E.coli., might not be suitable for manufacturing purpose as prokaryotic system has coherent disadvantages to produce functional enzymes compared to eukaryotic system. We were suggested to use Pichia Pastoris or Aspergillus as chassis to help increasing production efficiency. In addition, the large size of our light-off vector (~6kb) could make it difficult for E. coli. to maintain normal growth and expression, which we have encountered frequently in the experimental process ourselves. A change of chassis may help overcome this problem. We took their advice and hope to incorporate into our future project.