Japanese Ruby Roman Grapes are regarded as the most expensive grapes in the world with a single bunch fetching between $90 and $450. Their unique features that include being fragrant, sweet, juicy and less sour has earned ruby roman grapes the status of a luxury fruit with a lot of demand but limited supply.
Different varieties of grapes are actively grown in East Africa, particularly in Tanzania. Considering that the weather is conducive for growing grapes, youth eager to get rich farming would be smart to research the business of growing ruby roman grapes to produce highly demanded and delicious fruit as a profitable crop. And if you are a grape farmer, the points made below can be relevant in improving your yields.
Here below is a video report on why ruby roman grapes are so expensive, with a few key points from the video outlined below:
Background on ruby roman grapes:
It was not until 2008 that the first roman ruby grapes went up for sale.
The effort to create them started in 1995 when local grape farmers and Ishikawa's agricultural research center decided to create a new breed of large red grapes.
In the start, there were dozens of varieties planted, mixture of red varieties, blue varieties and more. The pollen flew from one of the varieties, it was a cross by chance and it got a fruit. it was very lucky. If those different varieties had not been planted, roman ruby grapes would not be born.
Culture and features of ruby roman grapes:
First thing is Japanese Ruby Roman Grape's size. Just one is four times the size of an average grape. Inspectors look at a colour card and the grapes, and if it matches most prefered colour, one bunch of the grape can fetch between $90 and $450.
Size and colour define these luxury grapes. There is no other variety in the world that is so large and red. Ruby roman grapes variety is only one that exists. In Japanese culture, fruits are considered as a gift and luxury item. Supermarkets often do not sell fruit with deformities.
No matter the grade, all the the roman ruby grapes have a uniquely sweet flavour. Ruby roman grapes are very fragrant and elegantly sweet, and its less sour. And very juicy. When you peel the skin, the juice will drip down. The juice splashes when you put it in your mouth.
Quality control and grading of grapes:
Each grape bunch is scrutinized for the colour, and size of each individual grape grain, which must weigh at least 20grams, and 30 milimeters in size. Next, sugar content in the grapes is measured with a non-destructive sugar meter which must be over 18 percent.
Superior grade grapes make up 90 percent of harvest and special superior grade grapes make 10 percent. Superior grapes can cost between $90 and $140 dollars, while special superior grapes cost between $180 and $450 but one category costs more than these two.
Highest grade grapes are called premium. Average grape grain size weighs 20grams, while for premium grapes, each grain must weigh at least 30grams. Only one or two bunches a year qualify as premium. Farmers hope to sell one bunch of premium grapes for over one thousand dollars. Two bunches of premium grapes were recorded in 2021, while none in both 2020 and 2019.
Farming process and monitoring:
Harvesting starts in July just in in time for Japanese gift giving holidays, ochugen. Grapes are only grown in Ishikawa prefecture and cultivated in green houses where farmers have better control over the growing process.
Each grape is monitored and manicured so that every grain in a bunch looks identical. To produce grapes of a proper size, use of a grape thinning device and a pair of scissors. Grape farmer: it helps to determine which grains and bunches to remove.
Improving grape shape and beauty: It is not good if the colour is uneven in a grape bunch. With scissors, we adjust the size of the grain evenly or make the shape more beautiful.
Controlling light: grapes need to be exposed to certain amount of light to get right colour. You have to be more careful about amount of light more than other grape varieties. One way to control light is by adding or removing leaves near the vines.
To confirm that enough light is entering the greenhouse, farmers have devised a tool. farmer: to measure brightness in greenhouse by holding up camera of a smartphone, the percentage of the open space above the bunch is quantified, using a privately developed application, which informs farmers on how much light they need to add or subtract.
Controlling temperature. When temperature in greenhouse is hot, over 30 degrees celcius, ruby grapes do not turn a nice red colour but becomes whitish. Farmer opens the sides and ceilings of the greenhouse to keep it as cool and as ventilated as possible.
Challenges growin ruby roman grapes:
Not all ruby grapes farmers grow, will be up to standard which is why supply is limited. In 2020, only 25,000 ruby roman grape bunches were up for sale, a tiny fraction of all grapes available for sale in Japan which was 163,000 metric tons.
In conclusion, growing ruby roman grapes may be a viable way to get rich farming though further research on the conditions and other requirements needed to earn high yields is needed. One can start with making contact with Japanese farmers in Ishikawa to inquire about ruby mistakes to avoid, grapes diseases, where to get seedlings, and care needed to produce high yields.
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NASA has shared skills that astronauts use to successfully accomplish tasks together while in space - skills that are also very relevant for life on earth. NASA prepares the astronauts on the objectives of the mission at hand and the experiences they are bound to share together, training astronauts in expeditionary skills: selfcare/teamcare, cultural competency, leadership/followership, and teamwork.
If these life skills work for astronauts, they are also bound to work towards the success of your agribusiness, especially when you become particularly aware and deliberately put them into practice in your own environment. For instance, when you choose to practice teamwork, you let the best ideas and suggestions within the team to form the course of action, even when those ideas come from somebody else apart from the leader.
1. Self-care/teamcare
Key points:
Astronauts use technical skills in their missions but also rely on interpersonal skills like collaboration, responsibility, and flexibility. The goal is to help you gain abilities you can apply in your life.
Self-care is how healthy you are mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. It includes taking care of your body, taking care of you belongings, being on time, getting enough sleep and your mood.
Exercising good self-care means you pay attention to yourself and make healthy decisions, so you can be ready for normal and unexpected situations.
And never under-estimate the power of a positive attitude. Believe in something bigger than yourself: singing and humour are great to have in your self-care toolbox.
Teamcare key points:
Teamcare is how well the heads, hearts and hands of your teammates are working together.
Being good at teamcare means you monitor your teammates for signs of stress, fatigue or sickness and take steps to actively manage and support the health and readiness of your team.
Both self-care and teamcare rely on good communication. And the stronger the relationship, the stronger the communication. That's why astronauts spend alot of time working together and get to know each other before they get to fly into space.
You can practice good self-care and teamcare everyday when you are part of many teams: classmates, family and community. By taking care of yourself and watching out for others, you and your team can achieve success that is out of this world.
Teamcare Activities for you:
Create a scenario using self-care and teamcare in your own life.
Suggestions:
Self-care activities: You might consider going out for a walk out in nature or forest (forest bathing), practice meditation, exercise, ride a stationary bike, yoga etc.
Team-care activities: Arrange an-out-office activity such as playing volleyball at the beach, hiking, camping.
2. Cultural competency
Key points:
Every human who travels into space is awe-struck with beauty of earth, gaining a fresh understanding of how fragile earth really is. We're a global society meaning we must work together
When you work with people from different places, you may notice differences from yourself- perhaps they speak a different language, wear different clothing or have different skin colour. They may also have a different opinion on certain subjects. These are cultural differences.
What you consider normal in your part of the world, may be different from their normal. If you do not know how to deal with this, then it can be challenging to work together as a team. Solution is simple - cultural competency, the way we understand each other's differences.
Dangers and challenges faced by group while exploring cave required that they stick together and communicate. Solution to working together successfully with different cultures is to realise that everyone's perspective and contributions has value.
Your team is stronger and improved because of a cultural differences. If you truly respect and value the opinions and contributions of others, then you can set common goals that allow everyone on the team to be fulfilled.
At first, you might think that you are giving up something, but in the end you will see that you exceeded your own expectations. So when you notice, somebody is different from you, listen to them, try to see things from their perspective and focus on your common goals, just as astronauts do on the International Space Station (ISS).
Competency call to action:
-Create a scenario of cultural understanding in your life.
Suggestions: Almost every African country is full of diverse cultures, try visiting a fellow farmer from a different culture from your own to learn and understand how they do whatever they do.
3. Leadership/followership
Leaders find people who are the best, then they encourage, enable and inspire those people to accomplish great things.
Great leaders do more listening than talking because their job is to know every team member and to help them do their best.
Good leaders give the credit for success to their team, but they take responsibility for the failures.
When everyone on team is all in and feels valued, then the leader is doing a good job.
Followership
Another form of leadership.
Good followers do not just follow but instead they lead themselves, their peers, and even their leaders when needed.
If you are in a follower role, think like a leader. Ask yourself, as a team, what are we trying to accomplish? what can i contribute? Is what am saying helping or hurting our progress?
Sometimes as a follower, you don't get to set the team's mission or vision but you are absolutely critical to its success.
At NASA, astronauts lead and follow all the time, for instance when they change command at the ISS. Its important to trust and listen to each other because everyone is good at something and will be in charge at some point.
You may not notice, but you switch back between leadership and followership all the time. In sports, when you have the ball, you are leading the team, and then you make a decision and your teammates support by blocking out the other team or getting in position to help, and as soon as you pass the ball, another player becomes leader and you become follower.
Practice being good leaders and good followers, like at NASA and you will be surprised by how much success you are a part of. Trust and listen to the people around you, whether you are the leader or the follower.
Action
-Create a scenario using leadership and followership in your life.
Suggestions: While on a team day event, assign each member a leadership role on a particular task while everyone else remains a follower and have a feedback session at the end of it all.
4. Teamwork and communication
Teamwork happens every time you work with another person to achieve a common goal. so all space missions rely on teams. Astronauts are assigned to a team or crew for their mission to the ISS.
Astronaut crews go through a lot of training before travelling to space: they learn how to work together as a team, get to know each other's responsibilities on the team, and they have to make sure that they all have the skills to overcome challenges together.
So they need their teammates to keep them safe and accomplish difficult tasks, like spacewalks.
Teamwork takes practice and you have opportunities to practice it in your life. You can support others, you can be a good listener and you can work together to solve problems.
Action
-Create a scenario using teamwork in your life.
Suggestion: Play sports, such as a game of soccer or volleyball.
In conclusion, taking care of your health ensures that you are less prone to fall victim to the negative effects of stress and burnout which can derail your focus from working towards success of your agribusiness. When you become good at taking care of yourself, it will be easier to do the same for your teammates to increase understanding and communication with each other across cultural differences to create the trust necessary for solving problems as either leaders or followers in any particular situation. You should do continuos practice, and with it comes continuos improvement until these life skills are part and parcel of your personality.
As a young farmer participating in agriculture with the support of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), you need to be aware that such gadgets are made of software and hardware with security weaknesses. ICTs include mobile/landline telephones, computers, televisions, Internet connections among others.
Software are the intangible instructions running on the device enabling the user to view, interact and send commands to the device to produce a desired result. The hardware is a the physical tangible component that you can touch and hold in your hands. Both software and hardware function in harmony to enable a device to successfully carryout an assigned task.
When an attacker, takes possession of your device, you have essentially lost access to a tool relevant for creating value in your agribusiness. What is less visible is when an attacker, infects your device with malicious software (malware) that gets embedded deep into the device, with the intent of stealing your sensitive business data.
This form of attack, which happens when an attacker gets physical access to your devices or via infecting your device because it is accessible online is increasingly becoming a global challenge to defend against, though with a few measures, the impact of a cyber attack can be reduced.
When attacker has stolen your sensitive data, the result of which is that you get locked out of your devices by ransomware with attacker asking to be paid in cryptocurrency before releasing the key to regain access to your files, folders, applications and databases. And when you refuse to pay the ransomware demands, the attacker autions your data and publishes it online for everyone to access.
Ransomware attacks are especially devasting to small business with over 60 percent going bankrupt after a cyber attack, and others facing damages to business reputation, disruption of business operations and huge financial losses.
There are a few proactive steps you should take to reduce the likelihood of a successful cyber attack against your agribusiness:
Backup your business data, especially sensitive and critical business data, and keep your backups offline. Be sure to test the backups that they work and can be successfully restored when needed.
Segment your network, to separate the network with your most valuable assets (crown jewels) away from all the others.
Use strong passwords and enable two-step verification via a token sent to your mobile phone or authentication app.
Install critical software updates to patch vulnerabilities in your assets when they become available from Microsoft and other suppliers.
Practice telling fake messages from legitimate ones using free online phishing quizzes.
Prepare short and concise business policy guides, by customizing free online policy templates, to guide your employees on business best practices.
Prepare a list with ransomware detection and decryption services that provide solutions for removing ransomware without paying the ransom, in the event you fall victim to ransomware.
In conclusion, prevention is always better than cure, and becoming proactive greatly lowers risk of a successful attack on your agribusiness. Correcting an adverse event after an attack takes alot of time, money and effort without a guarantee that your business will survive. Be sure to reach out to us if you need assistance.
Exciting news reaching our desk is that Youth in farming has been selected as one of the top eighty farming blogs on the web, ranked as number 51 on the feedspot list. This is great news to the efforts towards inspiring youth to join agriculture as a profitable field capable of feeding the increasing global population.
In addition, the visitor traffic is increasing at the site, soon reaching and surpassing 400,000 visits with an average of 100 daily visits. We greatly appreciate your support. Please continue to follow us on twitter (@youngfarmer2k), youtube and facebook (facebook.com/pages/Youth-in-Farming).
I recently watched a video report below, where Business Insider visiting six companies turning fruit and vegetable waste into biodegradable plastic (bioplastic), hair extensions, fertilizers, sanitary pads, biogas providing energy for lighting and heating, biodegradable plates and other products. It got me thinking.
Lessons and action points I took away:
Look around your home and community for unwanted food items and write them down.
Visit landfills to know what gets thrown out
Research if any of the unwanted food items in your community can be utilised to make biogas energy, fertilisers and several other sustainable products
Understand and figure out how much money you can make from a sustainable agribusiness project providing services in your community.
Investigate level of awareness and community/government policies around food waste, and how this can be relevant for your agribusiness project.
Below are the key points I took away from watching the Business Insider video linked below.
Think of: How can you turn food waste abundantly and freely available in your surroundings and community into valuable products while making a healthy income?
Intro: Dutch Company Fruitleather, produces Vegan Leather made from thousands of mangoes that would otherwise be thrown away, used to make wallets, handbags, shoes.
Quality controls: Due to Dutch quality controls requires importer to cut mangoes which cant be sold ending up as trash. Company collects 1500 mangoes per day from dutch importer. Vegan leather company recieves mango fruit waste for free helping the company to get rid of mango waste without paying trash collection fees.
Process: Mangoes are crushed into pulp, where is mixed with other additives to turn into leather material. They are put on trays to dry, added resins and a coating exposed to 100 degrees to make coating dry. Vegan leather is transformed to appear like animal skin, and it is sold around the world
Founders dream was to turn something value-less into something valuable. Through several experiments founders discovered product they make today.
Fruitleather is able to produce about 250 pairs of shoes per month.
Started out processing watermelons and discovered not many fibers inside watermelons but mainly water. Settled on mangoes because fruit was easy to work with.
And researched how many mangoes Holland imports. More than half of the mangoes in Europe are imported or traded by Netherlands. Around 12 percent of the food in Netherlands is wasted.
Vegan leather company is able to get a large amount of resource to make its products, and thus decided to stay with mango fruit waste processing.
Founders are also able to cut on global emissions affecting the planet, due to chemicals used to tan leather that are dangerous to both humans and environment.Also methan emissions from rearing cattle are reduced.
New environmentally friendly materials are needed that leave a smaller carbon footprint.
Vegan leather challenges: some of it is made from mushrooms and pineapples, most of it is made from plastic leaving a huge carbon footprint.
In 2020, synthetic leather market is valued at $31.4 billion increasing to over $40 billion in next six years, a fraction of entire leather industry valued at $400 billion.
Mango leather does not last as long as cow leather. Company hopes to improve production one mango at a time.
07:48 Bioplastic from unwanted avocado:
Background: In 2021, americans consumed 6 billion ovacadoes, developing alot of food waste. A company (biofase) transforms ovacado waste into Bioplastics that help to reduce pollution because they break down faster and use less fossil fuels.
Process: Company biofase in Mexico, exports about half of worlds ovacado. Bioplastics are products made of biological substances instead of petroleum. The process starts with ovacado seeds, which are shredded and turned into sheets
Technology: bioplastics are an improvement over traditional plastics as they take less fossil fuels to produce, contain fewer toxic chemicals, and decompose faster. The technology to make bioplastics has improved to grow to $20 billion industry. Biofase produces 130 tonnes of bioplastic each month, with products shipped around the world.
Challenges: bioplastics require special industrial facilities to properly compost and can contaminate regular recycling stream, and more expensive than regular plastic.
Production capacity for bioplastics is currently low while fossil fuel plastic capacity is much bigger.
Bioplastics are mostly used in restaurants but idea that biodegradables can be thrown into nature and will go away is false. It takes about one year for bioplastics to break down in natural conditions, which is plenty of time to block waterways and harm animal habitats, though its much shorter than time traditional plastics take to breakdown some of which take hundreds of years.
12:33 Cloth from banana stems:
Intro: bananas are one of worlds most wasteful crops, especially the banana stems, with farmers typically burning them and thus polluting the air. Ugandan company, texfad, has figured out how to pulverise them into fibre to make mats, rugs, and hair extensions. Could bananas become a green alternative to cotton or silk?
Enter TexFad: Every banana plant fruits once in its lifetime, and for every ton of fruit, theres two tonnes of debris. Texfad founder, Kimani Muturi saw potential in banana debris due to his love for handweaving while in college.
it takes about a month to weave a rug inspired by east african patterns, starting at about $500.
Texfad employs 23 people with an internship program.
Uganda produces more bananas than any other in East africa about nine million tonnes every year. Founder is not worried about banana materials as long as consumption of bananas continues.
Texfad has grown in past eight years, a fraction of the $30 billion global banana industry. Environmentalists say that composting banana stems into fertiliser would be a more immediate solution.
Texfad produces biodegradable fabrics than are more sustainable than other popular fabrics. Banana fibre absorbs dyes better than cotton meaning that it needs less water and less land to produce
Process:
Banana stems are cut into chunks and left to dry in the sun.
And thereafter feed the stems into an extractor, a crucial step and only one that requires machinery, extractor costs range from $1,000 to $10,000 for a new one, which is an obstacle for expanding the business, while rest of work is done by hand.
Extracted fibres are dried again until they feel like silky yarn, which is later dyed and the weaving shed where making of handicrafts begin.
Challenges: Special equipment and expertise hold back this method from becoming more widespread. Banana fibre may well be the next popular fibre in fashion.
Process: At Lifepack, plates are made from shredded pineapple crowns mixed with recycleable paper and turned into sheets left to dry out in the sun. A machine presses plates into a form, and if the disposable plates end up in places with soil and water, tiny seeds inside will blossom in a few days.
Founders wanted to create not only biodegradable product but rather one that generates life.
Workers at lifepack turn out 10,000 eco-friendly plates.
In addition to plates, company makes sandwich containers and coffee cup sleeves that contain seeds from edible plants like amaranth, strawberry and cilantro.
For every ton of products that company makes, it saves about 16 trees. It sources pineapple crowns from nearby processing plant where owners dont charge anything for the pineapple waste.
Company is trying to promote creation of circular economies, founded 12 years ago by husband and wife pair, when they noticed people in parks polluting environment with products from plastic or styrofoam.
Columbia is trying to reduce plastic waste. In 2018, country introduced a tax on single-use plastics that increase each year.
Lifepacks sells for $2.5 per dozen, more than double price of traditional plastic plates. Its plates are sold in three large supermarkets and company handles large orders via website.
Lifepack has managed to capitalise on increasing demand for sustainable packaging which has increased 40 percent since company started.
Currently there is more demand than what company is able to supply, which means there is a positive response from clients and ready market for products company sells.
Challenges:
Lifepack needs to modernize machinery and improve production and founders hope to franchise the business and expand it to other countries to help more people cut back on plastics.
Getting consumers to buy Lifepack products is not easy, due to people not being environmentally aware.
Intro: India grows more bananas that anywhere else in the world. One company is turning banana waste into biodegradable sanitary pads that help more people have safer periods. With disposable plastic pads on the rise, can banana stems save planet from mountains of trash?
Enter Saathi: In 2015 when Saathi started, only about a third of women in India had access to pads, meaning missing out on school or work every five days every month which sets women back.
Just one banana plant stem can yield up to 3,000 pads saathi says. Bananas bear fruit only once, and one harvested, farmers clear the field for new growth
research found out that turning banana waste into fertilizer, fabric, and even candy.
Process:
banana stems are cut in half and peeled layer by layer, that are fed into machines that turn them into fibres and hanged to dry.
banana stem fibre extration machines are setup around so that farmers to extract the fibres, and saathi pays farmers for the fibres.
At saathi factory, dried fibres are fed into machines to cut them further into small sizes, and turned into cotton-like fluff material using saathi secret technology. And then pressed into thinner and thinner sheets which forms the absorbent layer of the pads. And workers manually arrange the layers of the pad together.
After pads are cut to size, they are tested using water and ink from each batch, and thereafter samples sanitized via light to kill off bad bacteria and viruses.
All pads and packaging are biodegradable, and would break down in under six months and if left in the open, takes 18 months. Conventional pads are made mostly of plastic, which if all menstruating women in India used them would create a huge amount of trash
Product:
farmers can also use the liquid from the stems as fertilizer in their gardens.
Before disposable pads were invented, people used cloth, dried plants and other absorbent substances. Many women still use cloth which can cause infections if not washed and dried frequently.
Saathi sells pads in shopping stores and online, and for each pad it sells, saathi gives one away free to people in rural areas where they are needed most. Distributed almost 2 million pads now.
Challenges:
When pads are introduced local women are taught in menstrual health. Issues include cultural taboos and price of pads.
In some communities, women's behaviour is limited while menstruating. Art, activism and government programs are used to make it easier to talk about periods.
30:14 Biogas energy from unwanted vegetables:
Intro: 10 tonnes of food go unsold at the market instead of going to a landfill, its turned into electricity that powers street lights, buildings and a kitchen preparing food for 800 people using biogas which experts says its plentiful and low-tech and burns cleaner than any fossil fuel. Why cant we make energy from 1.3 billion tonnes of food thrown out every year?
Process: Larger vegetables are chopped into smaller pieces. Coveyer belt carries them into factory where they are shredded further, and food pulp pumped into digesters where bacteria are bred in absence of oxygen. They feed on the food waste giving out carbondioxide and methane, gases emited by any organic material as it decomposes.
Reasons why food is thrown out: Some are thrown out because they are spoilt and some because it will cost farmer too much to transport back home. Vegetables are useless if rotten, thats why they are used in biogas.
Massive amounts of food waste makes landfills third largest source of human-caused sources of methane emissions just behind fossil fuels and agriculture.
Burning biogas to make electricity is a way to harvest those gases before they enter the atmosphere
Product: At Bowenpally, biogas is stored in four huge balloons until its ready to use, serving enough power to a kitchen serving 800 meals per day.
Aside from energy, the biogas plants creates another byproduct - fertiliser. Farmers buy it back to spread in their fields where the vegetables grow, improving yields.
Biogas can be produced from any organic material including animal and human feaces.
Challenges: If biogas can be locally sourced to cut down on emissions and reduce food waste, why are we not all doing it?
Because in most countries its still cheaper to burn fossil fuels. In North america biogas costs five times more than natural gas, though gap is smaller in Asia where price is less than $2 per unit. Worlds largest biogas plant was recently built in Denmark and new facilities are being built in Europe and Africa.
Biogas will never replace natural gas, theres just not enough waste to keep up with the demand for electricity, but it does reduce on landfill waste, something natural gas cant do.
A missed opportunity in US, where 30-40 percent of food gets thrown out. These projects need to happen to make life more sustainable
In summary, growing food results in a lot of waste or unwanted plant fibres left behind that can be harnessed to produce fertilizers or feed bacteria to produce biogas energy that can bring cheap energy for cooking, lighting and heating in many rural communities in Africa.
Let this get you thinking and please share with us your ideas in the comments below.
