This year, seventy small farmers of the Association of Agricultural Producers in the small village of Uranchacra, will start producing their own cape gooseberry seedlings of the Colombian variety that are free from disease, stated Sierra y Selva Exportadora, who advised the association.
This work is made possible by a business plan developed by the association, which was approved last year by the National Agricultural Innovation Program (NAIP) and will cost S/400,000. The work is being done in agreement with the laboratories of the Faculty of Agronomy of the National University Santiago Antunez de Mayolo (UNASAM) of Ancash.
The project consists in producing cape gooseberry seedlings through the plant's meristem tissue, which is responsible for its longitudinal and diametrical growth. "This new technique involves removing a piece of meristem tissue from the last apex of the plant, taking it to a laboratory, and when it has taken form, transferring it to a greenhouse that farmers have in their respective fields," they said.
Once mature, these seedlings that are free of diseases and were in a room that has a controlled temperature, humidity, and other environmental factors to promote their growth, will be taken to the open fields. This project will help producers have healthy cape gooseberry seedlings, which will allow them to increase their production and have fewer losses.
This organization has about 50 hectares of cape gooseberries and, up to last year, the small farmers were forced to change their saplings because they didn't have an optimal quality due to diseases; a situation that this project expects to remedy.
Source: inforegion.pe