AGRICULTURE NEWS - In a unique laboratory in Letsitele, Limpopo, a team of technicians is quietly at work creating what will grow to become South Africa’s entire banana crop.
The process seems more related to medical science than agriculture: the employees, wearing face masks and gloves and wielding scalpels, work in an ultra-sterile environment, slicing and duplicating banana tissue culture as the first step to producing a high-yielding, disease-free banana plantation.
The plants are produced in Du Roi Laboratory through rapid multiplication of tissue culture, which offers farmers the benefit of converting or expanding plantations quickly and efficiently with superior selections of plants that are true to type.
“The benefit of tissue- cultured plants is that they are uniform, so they grow at the same pace and are ready to harvest at the same time. It makes management of the plantation that much easier,” says Suné Wiltshire, the laboratory’s general manager.
Read the full article here on the Caxton publication, Farmer's Weekly.
