Climate change has made the weather more unpredictable every day, which has seriously affected agriculture. VOEN covers offer a modern, effective solution with less impact on the environment.
Although Voen Covering Systems has been present worldwide since 2002, it arrived in our country last year, immediately obtaining excellent results.
“We started off lukewarmly in 2008-2009, but for a strategic reason the company decided to leave the market to focus more on Australia, New Zealand and also because there was a strong investment in the plant in Germany; now that it has production capacity, they are returning to South America and specifically here in Chile we started last year in September.”, explains Roberto Johow, brand representative for South America.
Their self-ventilated covers use modern technology that has made it possible to protect crops from rain, hail, frost, but also from certain types of pests.
“These covers are the only ones that manage to regulate the interior temperature of the garden by using air currents and this is achieved with “flaps” which are waterproof covers that are woven on the top and when there is an air current these covers rise and allow air to enter the garden,” Johow explains.
For some time now, climate change has created various complications for having an accurate weather forecast, and has also caused extreme weather events, such as intense rains in summer or droughts, which are very harmful.
for crops.
“This unknown terrain means that from one moment to the next you can have a totally different condition than you had one or two days ago, even with more drastic situations like what happened last year at the end of January, where we had a river of
The rain came in heavily, causing precipitation in practically all of central Chile and, therefore, causing many problems and losses of crops close to harvest.”, they explain from VOEN.
Self-ventilated covers
Over the last 8-10 years there has been a very interesting development of crop cover systems, including those for cherry trees. In this context, VOEN provides the industry with self-ventilated covers, which last eight to ten years, considerably longer than the five years that traditional covers last.
“By using covers, the main objective is achieved, which is to resist, to ensure that the fruit does not break due to rain or hail, and this has worked quite well with the traditional covers that exist today. However, many producers realized that the handling of these plastics requires a large expenditure in labor, so the handling of the traditional cover tends to be quite complicated. This has meant in some cases, even this last year when there was a shortage of labor, producers who basically did not even extend the covers.”, says Roberto Johow, VOEN Representative for South America.
Self-ventilated covers are environmentally friendly, require less labor and are much easier to use: “Our systems have the possibility of being extended only once, because as they are self-ventilated there is no need to open and close depending on the temperatures, but the cover is opened and remains that way until after the harvest and the opening and closing process, thanks to an innovative system that we have which is the use of zippers and a permanent hibernation system, is achieved with very little labor and that is what most producers have liked.”, they explain from VOEN.
Studies carried out in Europe support the capacity of covers to increase the temperature inside compared to orchards that are not covered; this increase can be adjusted according to the purpose of each producer: “This requires specific management, however as our covers are self-ventilated, depending on the farmer's objective, we can make them less or more ventilated, because these flaps are
several layers, like fish scales, and we close some and open others, depending on the type of climate and the objective that the farmer is looking for”, says Roberto
Johow.
Although the use of covers is defined for protection from climatic events and to generate certain conditions that allow, for example, advancing the harvest, these structures are being widely used for the control of Drosophila suzukii, since VOEN covers can be completely closed and create a physical barrier to the entry of the pest.
