Adapting vegetable varieties to organic agriculture
IFAPA Researchers study to adapt vegetable varieties to organic agriculture. The Board has supported the project of the Research Institute, Agriculture and Fisheries Education with 700,000 euros.
A group of researchers at the Research Institute, Agricultural and Fisheries Education, an agency of the Department of Innovation, Science and Enterprise, and the University of Almeria are working on a study to adapt local varieties of vegetables of the methods Modern agricultural production to organic agriculture. The project has a budget provided by the Junta de Andalucía, through FEDER funds, and 700,000 euros for its development, the University of Almería has provided researchers with an experimental farm of 5,000 square meters in which may develop the project.
This will have built seven houses for seeds and fruit and other crops and will launch a fertigation system totally independent of existing ones, which aims to achieve a result not chemically treated with the aim of obtaining an organic product of the highest quality.
Although initially working with zucchini and tomatoes, it is expected to incorporate other crops such as cucumber in order to adapt local varieties of these species, optimizing features such as conservation for them to compete equally with conventional holdings, thus recovering a gap in the market they had lost.
According to Jamilena Manuel, head of the 'Horticultural Genetics', University of Almeria, which also has involved researchers from The CIFA Mojonera, these facilities and the great effort will give a final push to the work already performed in this field and will involve experiments directly on to farmers. This is particularly noteworthy in the methodology used by researchers, since the participation of farmers and consumers in the process of crossing varieties to get the best poses fundamental. This will involve regular open days, farmers participating in trials in their own fields.
As a starting point, researchers have organized an open day to both technical experts and farmers for next February 23rd in collaboration and partnership with IFAPA Bioindalo, where they will discuss organic growth in the greenhouse.