During the second day of Fruittrade, the specialist advisor on cherry production, founder and technical director of Avium, spoke at the cherry hall to a full house. In his talk, the specialist revealed important information regarding fruit development, which has been obtained through the joint work of the R&D team and Avium's advisors.
«This time we focused on analyzing a little bit of the fruit development; we have modeled the phenology in relation to degree days, we have developed the curves where you can see the fruit growth of the main varieties and it is super good that the producer and the industry understand what the differences are from one variety to another, what the nutritional contents are, but at the same time, what the relationships are between nutrients in the cherry; that is like the lever of change for the modifications that we have to make, the management that we have to do, very, very fine in the production of cherries, both from the point of view of irrigation, as well as production to achieve a product of excellence and that, generally, in my presentation is a series in development. This is the first approach and probably in the next instances when I have to present at some event, we will be complementing the work that we deliver and that is part of the joint work of our entire team», said Carlos Tapia.
During his presentation, the specialist also mentioned that according to historical records, this season should be a year of high productivity, although considering that the years of high and low productivity are increasingly closer in terms of the amount produced.
«Although history says that it could be a year of high productivity, the years of high and low production are becoming too close together; for us a high year is 9,500-9,700 k/ha, and a low year is 9,000 k/ha. If that were the case, we could project, by default, 90-92 million boxes for this year, but there is still a long way to go; we are experiencing a dynamic El Niño phenomenon that brings us surprises, we do not know what is coming in the future, but at least we can say that we have the same amount of fruit as last year, which was 83 million boxes, and from there on up, no less», Tapia said.
Regarding whether changes should be made to the nutritional program during a year of presumably high productivity, Tapia emphasized the need to pay special attention to this: «The fine tuning of nutrition is super important to somewhat cancel out these high and low effects. We need to give the plant back its consumption and a little more, because remember that the phenology is one season ahead, the post-harvest, which is very important, is what will support the first part of the following season. So there is a nutritional aspect that we must understand and I think that as an industry, technically we are still a little bit behind. I think we need to understand a little more about how the dynamics of nutrition are in each of the rootstocks and varieties, and to add that to the combination. The combination is a world apart. We believe that we have started off on the right, the indicators that we have been able to reveal are logical, they are entertaining, they are interesting, but I think that we still need a little more. This industry is in development. 10 years ago we did not know even half of what we know today, so we also have to feel proud of that. We are lacking, yes, but we are lacking less.», explained Carlos Tapia.
Are we ahead?
Another of the topics that attracted the attention of the attendees was Carlos Tapia's analysis of whether we are ahead of our time in phenological terms or not; the answer to this question was: «At this time, with the thermal changes, phenology comes and goes; one day we can think that we are ahead and two days later we are on par with the phenology. I think that it takes weeks to understand how phenology is moving based on environmental changes, temperature. We have just gone through a tremendous storm in the central zone, historic, unfortunately with damage associated with part of the productive industry, there are areas that are evaluating the damage, we hope that they do not have such a powerful damage on the production potential, we do know that there will be some impact, but we do not yet have the number. In phenological terms we believe that we are concentrated there in history, in the great average of the years, we cannot say that we are early or late», the advisor concluded.
