Evidence library
At Kumer 1687, research is not separated from production. Active projects connect our working farm with research institutions, while independent research notes explain the scientific evidence behind decisions on weeds, water, nutrients, cold chain and quality. We keep those layers distinct so readers can see what comes from external literature, what belongs to a project and what comes from our own operating experience.
Independent research is linked for context. It is not research performed on Kumer 1687 and does not certify our own practices.
Evidence review updated: 9 September 2026.
All 24 research landing pages in this library have now been checked against the full scientific papers supplied to the project. Methods, tables or figures, results and conclusions were reviewed before the website summaries were updated.
Project pages start with the problem, then explain what is being tested, Kumer’s role and what can be verified independently. They complement rather than duplicate the literature notes below.
IRP38
Climate change reaches a vegetable farm as operational risk: heat stress, uneven water availability, quality variation and a narrower margin for timing mistakes. PRIRAST brings research institutions, advisers and farms together so that proposed solutions can be tested against commercial…
Open project →EIP / IRP31
In parsley, early weed pressure is a production problem before it is a chemistry problem. Parsley emerges slowly, while weeds can capture space and light quickly. The useful question is therefore how seedbed preparation, germination timing, shallow cultivation and later mechanical work can be combined into a…
Open project →EIP / IRP31
Soil is more than a medium that receives nutrients. Structure, organic matter, microbiology and water-holding behaviour determine how effectively a crop can use them. Biochar is interesting because it raises a long-term soil question rather than a simple “more fertiliser”…
Open project →Professional exchange
Agriculture improves when knowledge moves between people who see the same problem from different positions. Researchers can explain measurement, growers can expose field constraints, buyers can define supply-chain requirements, and public kitchens can show the friction of ordering and…
Open project →Kumer uses false-seedbed preparation broadly across crops. The method is preventive: encourage a first flush of weeds before the crop is established, remove it with very shallow control, and avoid bringing a new layer of buried weed seed back to the surface.
Weed Research · 2019
In three organic-vegetable field experiments the authors compared false-seedbed destruction by flaming, hoeing and harrowing, including different numbers of passes and very shallow working depths. About one month after seedbed creation, flaming reduced G. quadriradiata emergence by as much as about 99% and total weed emergence by up to about 73%; shallow hoeing at 1 cm reached roughly 74% and 67%, respectively.
Read more →Weed Research · 2007
Across three years in Dutch lettuce, stale-seedbed preparation followed by pre-plant weed control reduced weed density during crop growth by about 43–83%, depending on year and site. Finger weeding, torsion weeding and hoeing applied without a stale seedbed reduced densities by roughly 88–99% compared with the untreated control.
Read more →Scientia Horticulturae · 2021
The Tuscany experiment repeated three stale-seedbed tillage types five times, roughly 5–6 weeks apart, and measured the weed seedbank by depth. The 10–30 cm seedbank changed little, while depletion was concentrated in the biologically active 0–10 cm layer.
Read more →European Journal of Agronomy · 2022
This is a framework paper rather than a single-crop trial. It organises integrated weed management into five pillars: diversified cropping systems; cultivar choice and crop establishment; field and soil management; direct control; and continuous monitoring/evaluation.
Read more →Independent postharvest research consistently treats time, temperature, airflow and packaging as connected variables. Kumer links this evidence to its own documented harvest, packing, cold-storage and dispatch steps without claiming that each paper describes its exact equipment.
Trends in Food Science & Technology · 2020
The review compares room cooling, forced-air cooling, hydrocooling, vacuum cooling and related precooling approaches. Its key engineering message is that faster heat removal is useful only while product quality, moisture loss, chilling risk, sanitation and energy demand remain acceptable.
Read more →Food Quality and Safety · 2020
This review focuses on the airflow path through produce packages during forced-air precooling. Vent area, vent position, alignment between neighbouring boxes, internal trays/liners, product arrangement and airflow rate jointly determine pressure drop, cooling rate and—critically—temperature uniformity.
Read more →Food Control · 2007
The study used finely chopped, washed and disinfected parsley packed in 40 g portions and stored at 5 ± 1 °C and 90% RH.
Read more →Weed competition, mechanical control, water availability, nutrient management and postharvest storage are recurring research themes around commercial parsley production.
Journal of Applied Research on Medicinal and Aromatic Plants · 2025
Across eight field trials and all tested crops/devices, mean intra-row weed-control efficacy was 66% with very high variability (0–100% among applications). Tine harrows averaged about 68% control and finger weeders about 64%; rotative weeders produced the greatest average crop soil-cover/damage signal, while finger and torsion tools showed much lower crop covering.
Read more →Crop Protection · 2012
In two years of field work on Italian Giant parsley, season-long weed competition reduced parsley dry weight by about 93–95%. When plots remained weed-infested for the first 40 days after crop emergence, dry weight was about 87–91% lower; keeping plots weed-free for a similar period produced roughly 8–10 times more dry matter.
Read more →Scientia Horticulturae · 2008
Two-year experiments on plain-, curly- and turnip-rooted parsley compared a near-field-capacity control with two water-deficit levels (about 30–45% and 45–60% on the study tensiometer scale). Even the milder deficit reduced fresh foliage biomass and usually leaf number; the stronger deficit caused further losses in several cultivars.
Read more →Scientia Horticulturae · 2016
In a commercial Spanish parsley field, the highest fresh yield occurred at the highest irrigation dose tested (1788 m³/ha), while the highest concentrations of many key volatile compounds and the strongest parsley-like/citrus/green-grass sensory notes occurred at the lower 861 m³/ha treatment.
Read more →Scientia Horticulturae · 2008
Across three parsley types, three years and two sowing dates, nitrogen supplied as ammonium nitrate increased foliage and root growth mainly up to about 150 mg N/kg substrate. Raising N to 300–450 mg/kg often produced little or no additional yield but increased nitrate accumulation in leaves and roots. The authors therefore identified 150 mg N/kg as the best compromise under their Mediterranean pot/outdoor conditions.
Read more →European Food Research and Technology · 2026
Parsley was stored for 25 days in a cold chamber divided into green, blue, yellow, red, white LED and dark-control compartments. Under the authors’ conditions (about 0 ± 0.5 °C and 50 ± 5% RH), blue light produced the largest reported increases from baseline in ascorbic acid (13.2%), chlorophyll a (6.32%) and chlorophyll b (6.31%); green light gave the largest reported increase in antioxidant capacity (34.97%).
Read more →Season, growing environment, cold-chain temperature and storage history influence the agronomic and postharvest quality questions around lamb’s lettuce.
Food Science & Nutrition · 2023
At Jablje, Slovenia, four crisphead-lettuce and five corn-salad varieties were grown in replicated soil trials in 2017. Corn salad was compared in spring greenhouse, spring open field and autumn open field: mean marketable yields were about 3.19, 5.15 and 4.10 t/ha, respectively, with growing period significantly affecting yield.
Read more →Frontiers in Nutrition · 2021
The Slovenian study compared home-grown lamb’s lettuce, a locally produced supermarket sample and two other supermarket sources during seven days at 4 °C. Home-grown material generally started with the highest sugars, organic acids, vitamin C and many phenolic/pigment values; the locally produced commercial sample also ranked highly for several components.
Read more →Talanta · 2014
Fresh-cut lamb’s lettuce was stored at 4, 10 and 20 °C and followed with reference quality measurements plus an electronic nose and Vis/NIR spectroscopy. Using selected e-nose variables, the average correct classification among “fresh”, “acceptable”, “spoiled” and “very spoiled” classes was reported as 95.5%, with 8.7% cross-validation error.
Read more →Scientia Horticulturae · 2016
Across two autumn and two winter greenhouse cycles, six supplemental-light treatments were compared in lamb’s lettuce harvested after 30 and 60 days and at noon versus evening. The 90% red + 10% blue LED treatment significantly reduced nitrate compared with HPS in the overall study; the largest reported difference was about 1600 mg NO₃⁻/kg fresh weight after 60 days in winter during evening illumination.
Read more →Postharvest Biology and Technology · 2016
The researchers collected Vis/NIR reflectance spectra from nine lamb’s-lettuce cultivars over multiple seasons and deliberately included variable origins and storage treatments to make the calibration more robust. A full-spectrum partial-least-squares model had a cross-validation error of about 6.0 days; after wavelength selection, only about 10% of the original wavelengths were retained and the error fell to about 3.6 days.
Read more →Agricultural Water Management · 2012
A two-year Sicilian early-potato experiment compared four irrigation windows. Supplying 100% of calculated maximum evapotranspiration from tuber initiation to about 50% of tuber growth produced yields statistically comparable with irrigation through the whole tuber-growth period, while using roughly half as much irrigation water.
Read more →Plant, Soil and Environment · 2015
The University of Ljubljana field trial mapped individual tuber positions in ridges with a 3D coordinate device for four cultivars over two seasons. The first “minimum ellipse” approach included too much empty ridge space, so the 2013 method incorporated tuber mass and a compact cluster geometry; this better separated cultivar space requirements.
Read more →Scientia Horticulturae · 2005
Pickling cucumber under a rain-excluding tunnel was irrigated when 20 cm soil-water potential reached −150, −300 or −600 hPa. The −150 hPa treatment used about 1.7–2.3 times as much irrigation water as the driest threshold, while −300 hPa used about 1.5–1.7 times as much.
Read more →Packaging Technology and Science · 2021
Fresh seedless cucumbers were compared in open crates or 37.5 µm LDPE bags under ambient conditions, mechanical cool storage at about 10 °C/90% RH, and evaporative storage averaging about 19 ± 3 °C/82 ± 9% RH. LDPE packaging consistently reduced weight loss and better retained firmness.
Read more →Irrigation is first an agronomic water-supply tool. Research also shows the physical link between adequate plant water status, transpiration and canopy temperature. We keep that scientific context separate from Kumer-specific claims about its irrigation equipment.
Hydrology and Earth System Sciences · 2021
The mechanistic model couples canopy energy balance with soil–plant water transport and was parameterised for wheat. Under well-watered conditions, canopy temperature broadly followed air temperature; once soil water potential became more negative than about −0.14 MPa in the model, further drying caused canopy temperature to rise rapidly.
Read more →Water · 2022
Using soybean as the case crop, the authors estimated the evaporative-cooling contribution of irrigation at ten-minute resolution between irrigation events. Average cooling attributed to evapotranspiration was about 4.4 K within the canopy and 2.9 K above it during the middle and late season. Model agreement was stronger above the canopy (R² 0.98, mean absolute error 0.3 K) than within it (R² 0.87, MAE 0.9 K).
Read more →