Overview
In order to develop a solution for the problem and have a real impact we need to go toward the core of the situation to first of all, understand the perspective and hear from the people who are actually living the problem, and second, take this information to improve our actual solution to one which will really contribute to mitigate the problem. With this way of thinking we went to talk to the people involved, in this case Agave farmers.
Due to the pandemic and the situation we are living in Mexico we contacted Agave farmers via Zoom in order to know more about their way of living, how they worked their lands and the cares they take in order to avoid Fusarium oxysporum contamination. The answers we received were really discouraging, they told us that most of the losses they had were because of this fungus, and that the only way by which they were certain it would not propagate to more agaves was by burning the parcels that had the fungus. Also there were other types of diseases which attacked agave plants but they did not know how to treat them or differenciate them.
By knowing this, we were encouraged to realise that the problem we are attacking is real in our country and its situation is preoccupying. Another thing that we noticed by talking to the farmers was that most of them were elderly people, around 50-70 years old. Meaning that they have lived all their lives working in the field gaining a lot of experience, but they were not aware of all the new research that has been coming out.
Because of this we decided to create a handbook with all the different types of diseases that affect agave combining the things we know in literature and the experience the agave farmers have in order to develop a complete handbook with both perspectives. This handbook is focused on agave farmers who take care of all the agaves in order for it to be easier to identify the infection by the visual symptoms that the illness causes so they can identify it and notify the person in charge to get rid of the plant to avoid the disease from spreading.
Contacting the Agave farmers
Contacting the Agave farmers gave us a perspective that we could not have gotten otherwise. During our time searching we contacted a farmer in Leon, Guanajuato. During the conversation he told us that the best way to get rid of the infected plants was by burning them completely, because it was the only way they were 80% certain that the disease will not affect the other crops, the other 20% persisted because most of the fungi produced by Fusarium are spread by spores so even when the field was burned up they persisted on the soil, meaning that when they wanted to plant new agaves they could be contaminated as well, by this he expressed that it will be more helpful for him to create a cure instead of an early detection system.
We also contacted an agricultural engineer called Mr. Gerardo Torres from Nombre de Dios, Durango and had the opportunity to visit the field in which he worked. During that visit Mr. Torres showed us how the work of a phytopathological agricultural engineer is really important in the field at the time to take good and correct samples. He told us that making a good analysis in ELISA or PCR test in laboratory could take around one month to get the results, this because a phytopathological agricultural engineer had to come from the lab to take the sample, go back to the lab, considering that the distances between the field and lab are long, make the analysis, and send the results back to the farmer.
By that time instead of having 1 plant contaminated, now the farmer had around 50 and it's harder for them to try to identify which plants are contaminated and which are not. Meaning that besides making the test, bringing a specialized person into the field, which costs a lot of money, they did not give a solution to the farmer, because at the time they had the results a greater percentage of their fields had the disease.
And besides all of this they did not know how to treat the field, because they are not even sure if a treatment exist to save their agaves, they only know what was passed onto them by the elderly people who know some home remedies to help treat some of the diseases, in which most of the time are not 100% effective, because the disease is so advanced that there is nothing else to do, but to burn the plant.
The agricultural engineer also showed us that most of the diseases of agave come with them when they are very little (1-3 months). To understand this we need to recall that the way agave is reproduced is by 2 ways: seeds or agave pups, most of the time grown agave plants from 5-8 years produce 2-3 agave pups which are recollected and then sold to agave farmers in order for them to plant them in their fields and start their growth until their time to harvest (7-8 years old). This means that a lot of the diseases are carried from the agave pups that are sold to farmers, and because when they buy the hijuelo the disease is in a very early stage of infection most of them do not show visual symptoms.
Knowing all of this we decided to contact the CRT (Consejo Regulador del Tequila) which is the society in the country that certifies the agave and farmers that are able to make tequila, mainly because they will have more information about the diseases and will give us a bigger picture of how agave farmers struggle them. While we were talking to the CRT we started to realise that they had phytopathological laboratories to make the tests we mentioned earlier, which means they will be a “competition” for our product. We also noticed that they were really discreet about the information they gave to other people. We assumed this is because of the cost of the industry it implies to give information to other people rather than their own, and because of their intrigue and insistence in knowing how our solution worked we decided to stop the communication with them.
Agave regulation
Realizing there were other routes we had not explored we decided to make a probe of the different areas that the agave cultivation implies, which were the governmental and the law that regulates the use of agave, the business of agave and continue with the contact with agave farmers. By the part of government and law we contacted a lawyer in Durango, Durango who helped us realize that the laws that regulate agave are based on the maguey plant, this due to the taxonomy of the plant, but this regulations don’t refer to the plant directly as agave, so it gives a lot “legal” use for the big companies to do what they wanted, not in the process of how to make the fermented beverage but on the way of how they manage their business with the agave farmers and how they obtain their raw material, most of time in an unfair way.
By this we did a little research in literature where we found information that said how agave farmers were abused unfairly by big companies for their raw material in their fields. This is because the big tequila corporations have 2 ways of obtaining their raw material: by having their own lands in which they produce their own raw material or by renting the lands to the farmer. By taking the second choice the company gives the capital to start the plantation until the time for harvest and the farmer that owns the land and his workers are in charge of taking care of all the process until harvest, in here the famers take the 10% of the total price of the agave.
The agave is sold by Kg so depending on how much Kg of agave is at the end, the owner of the land receives a certain amount of money. The prices of Kg of agave depend a lot in how the plantations are being affected by diseases, having prices between 23 pesos per Kg (1.13 dollars per Kg) in a good year or 0.6 pesos per Kg (0.029 dollars per Kg) in a bad year and to add at this the contract most of the time is not written in paper, it’s a contract by word, meaning that if the company fails in giving the corresponding money to the landlord they are not obliged to give it because there is nothing official, leaving the farmer without his income and not by a year, but from 7-8 years that took the plants to grow until the time to harvest. And there is no labor union that supports them in this type of unfair situation.
By talking with the lawyer we realized that the government institutions that were in charged of this laws and regulations were: Secretaría de Innovación, Ciencia y Tecnología (SICYT), Secretaria de Hacienda y Crédito Público (SHCP), Secretaria de Desarrollo Agrario, Territorial y Urbano (SEDATU), Secretaría de Gobernación (SEGOB), Servicio Nacional de Sanidad, Inocuidad y Calidad Agroalimentaria (SENASICA), meaning that the agave is regulated by many different institutions making it hard for the agave farmers to identify where to go, in which we also find that the institutional pages to search for certain certifications or information for what to do or where to go are not easy to navigate and without updated information, which discourages the farmer and wastes his time and money.
Pest control Handbook
In the aspect concerning entreprises we tried to contact them but we did not get a lot of answers from sent mails, most of the time because they were big companies so they could not answer our mails, and we could not visit them because they were in other parts of the country and COVID-19 restrictions did not allow us to make a trip to have a better knowledge of how the market works. However, the information we obtained previously helped us understand that agave farmers do not have enough support from the government or private institutions nor the sufficient knowledge to help treat their agave in an effective way, this because agave is not only harmed by Fusarium oxysporum but also by other diseases and we wanted to make our solution of real impact. This helped us to come up with the idea of creating a handbook for the farmers who take care of the plantation.
This will be a great tool for them because we combined both types of knowledge: the experimental knowledge they have by taking care of the plants all day and the knowledge we have by scientific literature. Making a complete handbook for the visual detection of symptoms to identify the different types of diseases that afflict agave.
By the discussion we had with the agave famers, we had a close relationship to one of them, a collaborator of AGMEL SA DE CV who said that the use of the handbook will be very helpful for his people as a training course to make a faster visual early detection of the disease that afflict his agave in order for him to take action and avoid its spreading to other agave plants.
Participation in iGEM’s Global Shipping Policies Hackathon
Also, in order to establish networks with other iGEM teams, our team participated at the Synthetic Biology Shipping Polices Hackathon, organized by the After iGEM Governance and Policy Network, which took place from September 24 to 26, 2021. In this event, our team performed a bibliographic research and consultation of data about the applicable legislations to the transport and production of genetically modified organisms and their products in Mexico and the United States of America, with a special focus on the import and export processes of this type of material.
It is important to note that our research was performed considering the biosafety regulations applicable to all iGEM teams, so that all laws and regulations consulted were applicable only to materials that can be used in laboratories with biosafety levels 1 or 2.
As a result of our participation in this event, our team produced a document containing an overview of the shipping policies with two diagram flows regarding the importation/exportation process between Mexico and the U.S. as well as a proposal to improve the shipping process of biological products. Also, we submitted all of the individual shipping policies we found in a common database between all of the participating teams.
In the same way, our team was chosen as one of the winners of the event, which made us worthy of the corresponding awards.
Click here for download the Shipping Policies overview document created by our team
References
- CRT. (2019). Bienvenidos Consejo Regulador del Tequila. Available at: https://www.crt.org.mx/index.php/es/.
- Herrera-Pérez, L., Valtierra-Pacheco, E., Ocampo-Fletes, I., Tornero-Campante, M. A., Hernández-Plascencia, J. A., Rodríguez-Macías, R., Herrera-Pérez, L., Valtierra-Pacheco, E., Ocampo-Fletes, I., Tornero-Campante, M. A., Hernández-Plascencia, J. A., & Rodríguez-Macías, R. (2018). Agricultural contract Plans for the Production of Agave tequilana Weber in the Region of Tequila, Jalisco. Agricultura, Sociedad Y Desarrollo, 15(4), 619–637. http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1870-54722018000400619&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en . ISSN 0036-3634.
- SEDATU. (2019). SEDATU. Secretaria de Desarrollo Agrario, Territorial Y Urbano. Available at: https://www.gob.mx/sedatu.
- SEGOB. (2019, September 11). Secretaría de Gobernación | Gobierno | Available at: https://www.gob.mx/segob.
- SENASICA. (2019). Servicio Nacional de Sanidad, Inocuidad y Calidad Agroalimentaria | Gobierno | Available at: https://www.gob.mx/senasica.
- SHCP. (2018). Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público | Gobierno | Available at: https://www.gob.mx/shcp.
- SICYT. (2013). Secretaría de Innovación, Ciencia y Tecnología. Secretaría de Innovación, Ciencia Y Tecnología. Available at: https://sicyt.jalisco.gob.mx/.