The cultivation of coffee, together with banana and avocado trees , fruit trees adapted to the conditions of the Zona da Mata Mineira, has generated promising results that could positively impact coffee growing in Minas Gerais.
This is the outcome of the research, done by researcher Waldênia de Melo Moura from the Agricultural Research Company of Minas Gerais (EPAMIG), together with a team of scholarship holders and agronomy students at the Federal University of Viçosa (UFV). IT is titled ‘Effect of different forms of management on the agronomic characteristics of Arabica coffee’; the work received the award for best abstract presented at the XI Symposium on Postgraduate Studies in Agroecology at UFV, which took place at the beginning of this month.
The experiments were carried out considering the 2022 coffee harvest, at the Vale do Piranga Experimental Field, in Oratório (MG). Four cultivation systems with approximately 600 coffee trees each were analyzed, in which different managements were applied.
The group of researchers concluded that that productivity was slightly higher in full-sun systems, but the coffee trees were much more vigorous when planted in consortium with fruit trees, due to the shading generated by afforestation.
Source: abrafrutas.org