Producers and professionals from the tomato industry participated last Thursday in a Technology Transfer Seminar, organized by FEDEFRUTA and DUOC UC to celebrate the Tomato Day in the V region for the second consecutive year.
Pedro Garcia, Regional Manager of Fedefruta, said that "consumers are becoming more aware that they should eat cleaner products and tomato growers have incorporated technology from countries, such as Spain, Holland and Israel, that are at the forefront in the use of pollination with bumblebees and anti-aphids nets, among other technology, to decrease the amount of chemicals applied to the crops."
The greenhouse tomato industry in the region concentrates 70% of the domestic production, i.e. about 150 million dollars per year.
Garcia said that, as a result of this demand from the consumers, "the farmer that offers cleaner products will have competitive advantages in the market." Thus, they "must invest in greenhouse, irrigation, and clean production technology to be able to compete properly." As such, these technology transfer seminars, which divulge the latest developments in the field, are very important.
The event began with the New trends in Protected Horticulture presentation by Spanish expert, Juan Eugenio Alvaro, Associate professor from the Agronomy School UCV, who presented the current situation of countries like Spain and Holland, which are at the forefront in greenhouse crop technology.
Interesting aspects of clean production, such as the Tomato industry's sustainability indexes: water and carbon footprint, were also discussed. Jorge Sanchez, a mechanical engineer and master in Environment, gave a comparative view of the economic and environmental costs of tomato production in Chile in relation to other countries and other economic activities.
Almeria, for example, only generates 2 kilograms of carbon for every kilo of tomatoes it produces while the V region in Chile generates 6 kilograms of carbon per kilo of tomatoes. Thus, Chile is less competitive environmentally.
Another major challenge, regarding the water footprint, is the optimization of water resources through the recycling of water, as is done in Israel to combat its scarcity.
Rafael Elizondo, national consultant of the United Nations Industrial Development who is working on the Project to Eliminate Methyl Bromide, presented another important theme: New production model for growing tomatoes without Methyl Bromide. Methyl Bromide is a chemical compound used in traditional agriculture to disinfect floors and eliminate pests. Its use should be completely eliminated by 2015 under the Montreal Protocol.
This new model of producing tomatoes without bromide promotes the use of rootstocks that makes the plant more resistant and the use of bio-fumigation with fresh guano from beef or poultry as a disinfection mechanism, which contributes natural fertilizers that increase soil properties so producers get better yields and calibres.
The event concluded with the Current Status of the Tomato Industry presentation by Hernan Allende, who is specialized in the production of vegetables in the open and in protected environments. Allende spoke about the sector's future challenges and guidelines for producing tomatoes more competitively.
Allende said the major challenges for the tomato industry were removing red label pesticides (the most toxic ones); decreasing the use of yellow label agrochemical; eliminating the use of class A neonicotinoids, because of their proven correlation with the worldwide bee colony collapse syndrome, and increasing the incorporation of pesticides of biological origin.
Source: Fedefruta