At this year's Fruit Attraction, Eurosemillas presented to some 150 entrepreneurs and farmers the first avocado variety launched by the Green Motion Avocados platform; a variety that will begin to be marketed before the end of this year.
LUNA ucr is a type B flower avocado that is called to revolutionize the current concept of pollinators (pollinators, in the strict sense) in this crop. Mary Lu Arpaia, responsible for the avocado improvement program of the University of California Riverside (UCR) and also an international expert in post-harvest, stated that the LUNA ucr trees are much smaller than the Hass avocado trees but that they are almost 7 times more productive (the LUNA ucr trees yield 1.6 kg of avocados per treetop cubic meter while the Hass trees yield 0.23 kg/m³). The avocado it yields is almost identical to the Hass avocado, the most successful avocado.
What differentiates this new avocado tree is that, unlike the rest of the type B flowers that are green-skinned (Bacon, Zutano, Ettinger, etc.), LUNA ucr produces fruits with black and rough skin that have the same taste quality as the Hass avocado.
The tests carried out by the UCR confirm that this variety will meet three of the strategic objectives of the Green Motion platform: "Achieving greater productivity, facilitating management by reducing costs (for example, in terms of pruning), and being more efficient in the use of water," stated José María Fontán, Eurosemillas' Innovation director. "With LUNA we'll be able to move to high-density structures with narrower frames," he added.
Since LUNA Ucr is smaller, we'll be able to go from conventional designs in which pollinating trees account -at most- for 5 to 10% of the entire farm to more than 50%. We'll be able to better optimize the space and gain profitability both for the greater production of Hass and especially for our variety, which is Hass type, he added. In some cases, farmers might even consider making this pollinator the main variety of their farm, he concluded.
The presentation was led by the director of Green Motion Avocados, Javier Cano, who highlighted the importance of Eurosemillas' strategic allies to bring innovation to the field.
For more information:
Eurosemillas
www.greenmotionavocados.com