Spain: INTIA’s 1st local Fertinnowa showcase event
The meeting was attended by a large group of agricultural professionals, who took the opportunity to approach the new technologies from Europe that are installed in the production of tomato and other horticultural crops.
In the event, Juan del Castillo from INTIA presented the results obtained up to the date of the Fertinnowa project. First, he explained the results obtained through 531 surveys to agricultural producers distributed in 9 European countries, of the following topics: Water management, Irrigation management, Fertilization management. They were carried out to have a clear picture of the strengths and weaknesses of European farms in fertigation issues. Thanks to these results, several tools have been proposed that attempt to solve some of the problems detected. Two of these tools are transferred to field demonstrations in Navarre. In this sense, INTIA the field trial of the Irrigation Tool of the platform sigAGROasesor. A tool that helps to determine the doses and moments of irrigation in horticultural open field crops, in this case, industry tomato. It was also informed the other decision support tool that INTIA will validate soon and within this framework of the project, the VEGSYST tool developed by the University of AlmerÃa, aimed at helping the producers in the management of irrigation and fertilization of greenhouse crops.
He then presented the Fertinnowa technological database. The database is on the project website www.fertinnowa.com. This database collects technical information related to 5 major themes: Water sources and their availability: improvement of irrigation water quality, irrigation and fertirrigation equipment, irrigation management, and fertirrigation and, finally, the limitation of all relevant information is summarized in 1 data sheet.
And finally, the visit to the trial Decision Support Tool sigAGROasesor (4000 m2 of industry tomato) took place. Inmaculada Lahoz from INTIA, explained that in the trial irrigation programming is being carried out with the HADriego decision support tool present on the sigAGROasesor web platform, and it is being validated with measurements of soil moisture and plant water potential, carried out with the portable camera PUMP UP, to determine the water status of the plant, according to the methodology developed by CICYTEX of Extremadura, which recommend maximum potential values in the different phenological stages of the crop. The objective is to establish technologies that allow us to improve the efficiency of the use of water in fertigated crops, and consequently also of fertilizers applied in irrigation.
Source: Fertinnowa