Recent Innovations In Farming and Food Processing Includes Filtration
Posted by William Vander Plaats on Fri, Jul 16, 2010 @ 01:09 PM
There is a wise old saying that goes “Don’t Complain About Farmers With Your Mouth Full.” The implication being that farmers grow the food that feed us every day, and taking them for granted by minimizing their importance is somewhat foolish. Bad weather, uncertain water supplies, and government regulation are just three uncontrollable variables that make farming today a bigger challenge than perhaps any other time in history.
However, technological innovations in farm equipment and food processing have solved problems and overcome obstacles which had traditionally hurt efficiency and raised food prices. From state-of-the-art tractors to advanced fertilizer chemistry to genetically engineered fruit, science and technology have created a few more choices for farmers today than they have had in the past. New filtration products and techniques are among those choices.
Breakthroughs In Irrigation Technology and Source Water
Agricultural irrigation has seen some big changes over the years, moving from flood irrigation to sprinklers, drip, and microdrip methods. Products designed to maximize the efficiency of these methods and reduce water waste include sand media tank filters and more high tech devices like the Tracker Mobile, a smartphone program to help farmers remotely monitor irrigation pivots from a cell phone or any web connection. It was one of the recent Top 10 New Product competition winners at the World Ag Exposition in California.
Even before the water is ready for irrigation purposes, efficiencies in dealing with source water have increased greatly in recent years, including filtration devices such as those which prevent sand damage in submersible and turbine pumps.
Food Processing and Handling
Once a crop is harvested, the food processing phase begins, and this is where some of the largest leaps in innovation have occurred in recent years. Even a seeminlgy simple process like removing dirt from the harvested product has seen huge improvements in efficiency due to equipment design.
New Tomato Processing Case Study Reveals Huge Savings
For a certain tomato processing plant in central California, more than 15 years was spent trying different options to wash the tomatoes while using the least energy and least amount of water possible. The solution that finally solved their problems was a combination of centrifugal separators installed at strategic locations in their plant.
Want to learn more?
Download the Tomato Processing Case Study and get all the details. See why effective filtration systems are helping to make food processing much more efficient and saving us all energy and water at the same time.