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Adam Henrickson, Koppert Biological
[00:00:02] My name is Adam Hendrickson and I work for Koppert biological systems and the company is a worldwide company and market leader in biological crop protection and what the company does is produce or breed natural enemies which can be introduced into crops to combat pest insects. So essentially good bugs to control bedbugs. So alternative to using chemical pesticides or soaps or oils for pest control you can introduce a natural enemy which is much safer for the cross. The company again like I said has been around for 52 years already so primarily the focus has been on traditional horticultural crops and also agricultural crops, but mostly greenhouse production of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and eggplants. And that's where the company started. Of course as time progresses, we transition or expand our market into other other crops as well. So then you get into outdoor cash crops but then, since cannabis is has opened up in the last four or five years, then Koppert been quite involved in in this industry as well that the growers don't have the option to use chemicals. So they're kind of looking for another alternative to help control pests and this is where the biological control comes in. The most common pests that affect cannabis are some of the pests that also attack again traditional horticultural crops, so pests would be thrifts, spider mites, aphids and fungus gnats, and shore flies and white fly broadmite. So there's a wide range of pests that can attack the plant. When we talk about breeding, we're talking about breeding and parasites or predators. So a predator would be something that actively searches in the crop and will feed on the target pest.
[00:02:02][119.8]
[00:02:03] So you have the pest that's feeding on the plant and these predators will search on the plant and actually take a bite out of the pest. And we also produce parasites and those are insects which will lay an egg inside of the pest and then the parasite will develop inside the pests and then hatch out. So you have generations building on top of each other in the crop, and they're kind of limited on what they can do from a regulatory standpoint which makes sense because if people are going to be consuming or smoking cannabis or eating it then it's the same with vegetables they don't want to have chemical pesticides on the plant or they want to limit the amount of chemicals that are applied to the plant. They're trying to limit the amount of chemicals that are being used or synthetic products that are being used on the plant and they have to look for an alternative that's more natural based or a holistic approach. Koppert As the market leader in in crop protection worldwide. Canada is kind of the epicenter I guess at the moment for ground zero for cannabis production and we've expanded quite a bit as a Canadian subsidiary and within Koppert and with the expansion of cannabis but we also recognize that cannabis is not just going to be legal in Canada but it's also spreading to other countries as well. And since we're also active in those other countries with conventional horticultural crops and we're also expanding and paying attention to that and cannabis market in other countries as well. [00:02:03][0.0]
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