Frozen dew on plants in the Arava

Here's a story of a farmer who woke up one fine (cold) morning to find that his peppers had turned into frozen vegetables overnight....

Our story begins one bright, cold winter week in a "little house on the prairie", the home of the Shuner Family on Moshav Tsofar. The Shuners came to the Arava from the central part of the country about 20 years ago, and settled on Sapir, where Albert Shuner had been offered a job in an export company. In 1994 the family decided that they would like to become farmers, and they were accepted onto Moshav Tsofar, where they began growing various types of vegetables, focusing mainly on peppers, which has been a fairly successful crop over the years. Last season was a particularly good one, so the family, like many others in the Arava, decided to invest in new and technologically sophisticated equipment, which carefully monitors the use of every drop of water and fertilizer getting to the plants.

However, equipment to control Mother Nature hasn't yet been invented, and the mercury dropped further and further until one sunny morning the Shuners woke up to fields turned white by frost. They were devastated, and Albert only worked up the courage to actually walk through the fields two days later. The plants were completely destroyed by the frost, the yield was gone and the water pipes were all burst by the freezing water.

The Shuners are only one of the families whose fields were damaged by the frost this past winter, all of whom wish (as do we all) that we could take ten degrees off the hottest temperatures of the summer and tack them on to the winter, so this would never happen again!

The Regional Council established a committee led by the Chair of its agricultural branch in order to prepare a plan to help farmers protect themselves from the ravages of nature in the future by assisting them to purchase greenhouses, which afford better protection to the crops than the net houses, which mostly in use today.

For a look at one of the "frozen vegetables" from the Arava fields, you can watch a video on youtube at this address:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP3226g-frg