California is a great market for berries and vegetables. Even though it is more known as the leading tech place in the world (Silicon Valley) it is also a large producer of vegetables, nuts, berries and grapes ++ It is also the place where 25% of all strawberries in the world are produced, and more than 50% of all strawberry plants. When you grow strawberries on the same soil repeatedly you get problems. Sooner or later you will get soilborn pathogens which ruins the strawberry plants and gives lousy crop. It is very difficult to control these pathogens as they live in the soil. In fact, there are only 2 ways of fighting them. One of them is called fumigation and this is a technique where they inject gas into the soil (methyl bromide or Chloropicrin). The other method which works is steam. Fumigation are getting a lot of critics because it is polluting, but since there are not anyone which offers soil steam equipment yet, it is the only solution on the market. This is what we want to do something with, and this is also why the strawberry growers in California is very interested in our technology. Ph. D. Steven Fennimore has proven, in several tests, that steam is as effective as fumigation. Now he also can show these guys a company which has a technology that they can use. It was a lot of travelling around in California for 10 days. We met several interesting growers and saw incredibly large berry and vegetables -fields. These guys want to work with us and if our technology does the work at the speed we know we can do… they want it! It is easy to understand that they produce so much here. Fantastic climate and good soil. We hope to be back here in 2020 with a machine that is optimized and effective.
