From the Guardian:

The flying pips, shattered shells and fleshy shrapnel still haunt farmer Liu Mingsuo after an effort to chemically boost his fruit crop went spectacularly wrong.

Field after field of watermelons exploded when he and other agricultural workers in eastern China mistakenly applied forchlorfenuron, a growth accelerator.

The incident has become a focus of a domestic media drive to expose the lax farm practices, shortcuts and excessive use of fertiliser behind a rash of food safety scandals in China.

It follows discoveries of the heavy metal cadmium in rice, toxic melamine in milk, arsenic in soy sauce, bleach in mushrooms and the detergent borax in pork (to make it look like beef).

Concerns about food safety have lingered despite government promises to deal with the problem after six babies died and thousands of others became ill as a result of melamine-tainted milk in 2008.

For more, see: Exploding watermelons put spotlight on Chinese farming practices