max facts
growing tips, news & trivia
Pigskins and Produce at Levi’s Stadium
Levi’s Stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers, is scoring big in the urban
agriculture category with its 4,000-square-foot herb and vegetable garden.
Dubbed Faithful Farm, the garden is located on the stadium’s roof, which
also houses a hard-working team of solar panels. “Our green roof helps
reduce heating and cooling requirements, and carving out this small
portion to grow crops further minimizes our carbon footprint by reducing
our reliance on outside food sources,” says Jim
Mercurio, the 49ers general manager and vicepresident of stadium operations. Faithful Farm
consists of nearly 40 rotational crops that produce
about 150 pounds of fresh produce each week. The
food is used in dishes served at Levi’s Stadium in
club spaces during games, and at the more than 200
private events hosted at the stadium annually.
- 7x7.com
Teams Win Thousands in Farm Bureau
Rural Entrepreneurship Challenge
Ten teams—four finalists and six semi-finalists—raked in $120,000 worth of prize money
in the 2017 Farm Bureau Rural Entrepreneurship Challenge. The challenge, now in its
third year, provides opportunities to showcase business innovations developed in rural
communities throughout the US. It is the first national business competition focused
exclusively on rural entrepreneurs working on food and agriculture businesses. “The FB
Challenge addresses some of the unique obstacles entrepreneurs typically face, namely,
limited options for support such as startup funding,” says American Farm Bureau Federation
president Zippy Duvall, who also noted that four of the teams were ag tech entries. The final
four teams will now go on to pitch their business ideas to a team of judges in January for the
Rural Entrepreneur of the Year Award and an additional $15,000 in prize money. The public can
watch online and vote for the People’s Choice Award and an additional $10,000.
- fb.org
Searching for a Citrus Greening Cure
According to research scientists at the University of Florida’s
Citrus Research and Education Center, they are on the cusp of finding
a cure for greening disease. Citrus greening, a bacterial disease that destroys
citrus tree production and eventually kills trees, has had a devastating effect
on Florida’s citrus crops. Earlier this week, the US Department of Agriculture
predicted that Florida will collect just 70 million boxes of oranges, down from
81.6 million in the previous harvest, and down from the all-time peak of 244
million boxes in 1998. The researchers have been using a gene-editing
tool, known as CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic
repeats). It’s based on a virus-fighting system in bacteria that uses DNA and
ribonucleic acid to not only eliminate genes that makes citrus vulnerable to
greening, but also replaces them with other genes from the same plant.
- health.wusf.usf.edu
28
Maximum Yield USA | December 2016