In its quest to help ensure the sustainability of food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production through sustainable agriculture, Greenmark works daily to make products that meet these standards available to the agricultural industry. In this context, Greenmark is a partner of Greenhas Group, importing and distributing its products in Chile.
“As a company, we are present in more than 60 countries around the world. In most of them we have local partners, i.e. importers who distribute them on the market with direct sales or, in most cases, through resellers, distribution chains. We are present in Latin America, the Mediterranean and the Far East. When I say Mediterranean, I mean countries in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The main headquarters are in Italy and we also have the commercial subsidiaries Green Has do Brasil in Brazil, Green Has Iberia for the markets of Spain and Portugal, Green Eco Poland, a participating company in Poland and a second production plant in Jordan, dedicated only to a limited part of products, which are water-soluble and paste NPKs.", explained Agricultural Engineer Laura Bona, South America Regional Manager of Greenhas Group.
The Italian company offers various solutions for cherry orchards, distributed in Chile by GreenMark. One of the best known by producers and advisors, as well as by the distribution chain, is Siberio, a biostimulant that helps to standardize the flowering and sprouting of deciduous fruit trees and also M10 AD (Alta Densità), a specialty for ripening.
“(M10 AD) is applied to standardize ripening: the idea is to help concentrate, in order to get the majority of the fruit out in a single pass, which generates a series of advantages such as harvesting fruit with fewer days of plant life. This fruit is physiologically younger and can travel further; on the other hand, the plant is less stressed, avoiding many harvest passages. And, of course, on an economic level, it generates an improvement in the task of harvesting for both the farm and the harvesters,” said Laura Bona.
M10 AD concentrates, increases and uniforms fruit ripening (more sugars and colour); ripens buds (ripening of branches for the following season); improves flowering and fruit setting in case of excessive vigour. It also strengthens plants in case of frost and helps plant recovery after hail, together with copper-based products.
“M10 AD is a very interesting product, because it generates that effect of uniformity in ripening, mainly in colour, through a nutritional relationship. It is one of the oldest products we have in the company, which comes precisely from the research that was done from the first steps in the world of nutrition through soilless cultivation. Greenhas Group works a lot on those nutritional relationships that generate an effect on the physiology of the plant. Siberio, for example, is already a specialty that we began to work on later along with a whole series of products, studying more the aspects of physiology, at the level of stimulation of metabolic pathways. Currently, we are working in our Research Center that has different microbiological, physiological and chemical research units and we also collaborate with many universities within the field of omic sciences. So, it is not just about developing a product that generates the desired agronomic effect, but also doing studies to find which gene is being stimulated in a positive or negative way and to better understand all the metabolic pathways involved,” said the representative of Greenhas Group in South America.
Other solutions for cherry trees
Sibero and M10 AD are not the only solutions offered by Greenhas Group in Chile through GreenMark, there is also Molystar, a product based on molybdenum activated with phosphorus.
“This is what we call a nitrogen regulator, which helps the plant to make better use of mineral nitrogen. It supports its rapid transformation into organic form, with which we aim to regulate the vegetative-productive balance, favouring the growth of the fruit or the setting, depending on the time of application. And this, by controlling a little the vegetative excesses that often generate competition with this growth,” Bona explained.
Applied to plants, Molystar promotes flowering and fruit set; stimulates the synthesis of amino acids; reduces the nitrate content in plant tissues; prevents and corrects molybdenum deficiencies; and improves the formation of rhizobia nodules in legumes. Its use in cherry trees is recommended before and after flowering and post-harvest.
“(Molystar) is used a lot in post-harvest to help generate good lignification of the branches, a correct transfer of leaf reserves to the branches, to send the plant to sleep with a good dinner. In this way, when we apply Siberio at the beginning of the following season, the effect will be even better. These two factors need to be worked on, and even more so in this context of climate change, which has generated increasingly warmer and wetter autumns,” stood out from Greenhas Group.
Greenhas Group is aware of climate change and its effects on agriculture, which in the case of Chile leaves very dry summers, less cold autumns and winters, which generates unfavorable conditions, for example, for the entry into recession of plants and extreme droughts, respectively.
“We have a whole line of products focused on this aspect, to mitigate the effects of climate change, which is generating less water availability and thermal variations. So, it is basically a lot of water, thermal and saline stress, that is the reason why, in Chile, through GreenMark, we are beginning to introduce a very interesting biostimulant called Eranthis. This product aims to support the producer in stress control, it works to improve the use of water by the plant, therefore, it is very interesting in situations of water and thermal stress, which often go hand in hand. It also helps maintain good photosynthetic activity, due to its antioxidant activity: in the case of abiotic stress, the photosynthetic structures are the first to have problems. That is why it is important to maintain a photosynthetically active plant so that it can continue to feed the fruit, so as to achieve good production in terms of quantity and quality of the fruit.”
Eranthis is one of the newest products that Greenmark is importing and making available to the Chilean agroindustry. The entire validation process has already begun with field trials and the help of renowned advisors, however, it is a solution that has already been validated in Italy and other countries and has been on the market for several years.
“(We seek) to generate all the security of use in local conditions and, for this reason, we work with many local advisors. It is very important to take advantage of the knowledge of these advisors to provide a tool, which can be interesting to help manage a situation by applying it in the best possible way in the agroecological and technological condition of each country,” said Laura Bona.
On the same subject, Bona added that: “The first works we did with Eranthis have been very interesting, taking advantage of the drones with which we measured the photosynthetic activity, the stress state in the applications made in budding due to problems of thermal stress due to a drop in temperature, some phytotoxicity problems that sometimes also occur. There we began to reap interesting results in Chile with this biostimulant. That is what we are going for, targeting an increasingly important problem in Chile, which is the problem of water stress and the problems of thermal stress, in the sense of very wide temperature variation, cold wave or heat wave. Also light stress, given that there is an excess of UV radiation, because in this part of the world in some places the protective layer of ozone is thinner, with the consequent problems of photo-oxidation.”
As for the comparative advantages of the products produced by Greenhas Group and distributed by GreenMark in Chile, the research behind each solution stands out.“The company was born to work with a hydroponic system patented in 1985, and for that it had to develop fertilizers. What does this mean? Many times nutrition companies are born because “they have a residue of something or a mine of something”, so they look for how to sell this basic source that they have. Not Greenhas Group, our entire approach to developing a product comes from a strong knowledge of plant physiology and the needs of producers. That is why we have invested heavily in our research center and collaborated with many universities. Our idea is precisely to be specialists in the nutrition part, starting from physiology until we understand which gene we are triggering within the plant, not just “producing more”. That is a little bit what sets us apart”, concluded Laura Bona.
