A new way of shipping fresh produce that puts fruits and vegetables "to sleep" for the journey while destroying hitchhiking insects has been successfully demonstrated by a collaborative project involving the military, business and University of California, Davis. The pesticide-free process helped rescue more than $60 million in annual California produce sales and will save the U.S. Department of Defense several million dollars annually in freight costs. It also revived shipments of fresh produce to soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines in Guam, Hawaii and Japan. "The program was an unqualified success," said Navy Cmdr. Thomas Anderson, who honored the campus and other participants with an award today in Oakland for their contributions. The Department of Defense sought help from UC Davis more than a year ago when its Pacific region support group had been ordered to stop shipping produce because of problems with spoilage and contamination with quarantined insects. The department needed to develop a program that successfully put fresh U.S. produce on military plates overseas in the Pacific. Joe Ahrens, a Cooperative Extension specialist at UC Davis who studies problems and trains people in the transportation and distribution of produce, provided guidance as the Defense Subsistence Region-Pacific group retooled and retrained. In addition, Ahrens tapped the latest laboratory findings and applied them to the shipments, with the assistance of shipping specialists in the military and industry. The team demonstrated on a large scale the successful use of a new pesticide-free controlled-atmosphere system, according to Ahrens, who expects the system to be adopted increasingly by industry. The process involves controlling an atmospheric mix of oxygen and carbon dioxide gases in specially adapted shipment containers so that produce is preserved and hitchhiking insects are destroyed. "The process can be thought of as putting fruit and vegetables to sleep," said Ahrens. "It dramatically slows chemical reactions in the produce, placing it in a kind of suspended animation. This same process kills the insects." Using changes in the container environment, rather than fumigants such as methyl bromide, to control insect pests is attractive for several reasons. The reduced use of chemicals is appealing to consumers, and the environment can benefit from the reduced use of ozone-depleting gases. Moreover, the process has "important implications for improving international trade by providing an environmentally safe means of complying with insect-quarantine requirements demanded by many nations," according to a Defense Department statement. "This is an excellent example of how research, extension, government and industry have worked together to both save taxpayers dollars and boost the California agricultural economy," said Kent Bradford, chair of the vegetable crops department at UC Davis.