Human Practices for Silver Medal
Judging Criteria
iGEM projects involve important questions beyond the lab bench, for example relating to (but not limited to) ethics, sustainability, social justice, safety, security, and intellectual property rights. Demonstrate how your team has identified, investigated, and addressed one or more of these issues in the context of your project. Your activity could center around education, public engagement, public policy issues, public perception, or other activities.
Our Human Practices
The directions of our human practices are oriented to the issues including food safety, agricultural sustainability, and the growing age of agricultural working labor. The three issues are becoming more and more prominent in the agriculture industry in Taiwan. Here are the human practices designed for the related issues. The context elaborating on the details of each activity, please see the link.
According to our product demonstration, apart from introducing insecticidal peptide—PANTIDE, we also asked them some questions about the device including the detector and the automatic sprinkler to get farmers’ recognitions and recommendations.
Most farmers appreciated our project because, in the recent organic agricultural system, the pests of cruciferous vegetables still rage on the farm. The major pests are Lepidopterans that damage the produce significantly. They had positive feedbacks for Pantide and were willing to take a try if it is effective. For farmers, PANTIDE coupled with the automatic detector and sprinkler device can not only solve the problem of pests but also achieve the functions of monitoring the farm in real-time, thus realizing the idea of labor-free agriculture. Surprisingly, some of them are willing to use the whole system. Additionally, the farmers are glad to let us go to their farm to catch pests for intra-laboratory experiment and provide us with their farm to let us have a real test for the field test. They expect us to finish our project quickly because they hope that they could use our product to solve the problem of pests in cruciferous vegetables—Lepidopterans as soon as possible.
Figure 4. Visiting potential users, a group photo with the manager of Foshan organic tea garden, and she is the third person on the left hand.
Figure 5. Visiting potential users, a group photo with the elder of 石磊 farm, and he is the third person on the left hand.
Business Study—Visit the proprietors
Pesticide residue has covertly jeopardized our health as vegetables, fruits, crops, and other produces sneak into supermarkets, food stands, teashops, and even the domestic dining tables. In particular, the culture of hand-shake beverages is common in Taiwan, and citizens in Taiwan drinks 44 cups of beverage per year on average. We want to investigate the tea leaves sources in teashops further and ask the proprietors of teashops about their views on the related issues. Therefore, we went to the famous organic tea store—Yinchuan and consulted with the owner about the general choice of tea leaves and the tea quality in tea shops.
Yinchuan is an up-scale teashop targeted for affluent customers. He said though the cost of organic tea is high, it still has its market value. He also reminded us that if the upstream farm using pesticides, the downstream farm will be polluted by the pesticides residues, too. This better substantiates the importance of non-toxic pesticide. We think our project will solve this problem due to PANTIDE is biodegradable. He believed that the business trend of local, organic and safe agriculture would become the major in the future as customers are gaining the consciousness of food safety.
Figure 6. Visiting the boss of the Yinchuan organic tea store. The picture shows our team members focused on the sharing of boss.
