Katia Deng/ Shanghai Daily news

A seeding expert ate an unwashed Jimao vegetable at the Urban Garden yesterday, a newly opened market selling fresh vegetables, as an attempt to show its customers that the market only sells healthy and organic vegetables.

To produce these value-added agricultural products with the city’s limited land resource, an agriculture base in Shanghai will be set up soon, the department of agriculture said.

Organic produce is typically grown in greenhouses rather than planted in the earth. The plants are given specially nourished soil and even have automatic sprinklers. Yellow sticky boards are used to kill aphids and other pests instead of chemical pesticides.

A staff member at a cucumber production farm said that the greenhouse environment is hermetic and the irrigating water is purified, so all the produce grown is pre-cleaned.

Moreover, this type of agriculture requires high-tech production methods. Some agriculture gardens have adopted these organic growth techniques to adapt to the “organic only” customer market, especially on the heels of the growing number of customers demanding fresh, chemical free produce.