Protection against threats ...
Among the main environmental factors that threaten the genetic potential of crops are low soil fertility, pests, pathogenic diseases, unfavorable climatic conditions, such as lack of water and high or low temperatures.
Modern agriculture develops trends, and these go hand in hand with the rapid development of technology. These are tendencies that do not have to do with the consumption of new tools only, but that arise in response to the demands and threats of the modern world.
In the last fifty years more information and knowledge has been generated than in the whole history of man. With the development of information and communication technologies, ICTs, nowadays it is enough for a farmer to search for that information, adopt it as knowledge, appropriate it and incorporate it and implement it in its production process.
The TIC's have allowed to achieve a considerable progress, encompassing or universalizing new concepts and tendencies for the human task, and agriculture has been the productive sector that has best known how to take advantage of it.
Threats and challenges
The effects of Climate Change have become a threat to agricultural activities in almost the entire world, and especially in our region if we add the impact of the El Niño phenomenon. This reality, added to the urgent need for food for a population that is growing exponentially, are two gravitant elements for agriculture to seek strategies and modes of development that are increasingly productive and sustainable, based on new technologies.
For these reasons, crops have experienced an increasingly evident tendency to achieve anticipated and hopefully permanent production, which is not fully achieved in the traditional way.
Protected agriculture
Then the tendency to produce under closed structures systems, covered by transparent or semitransparent materials, that allow to obtain artificial conditions of microclimate, which we know as protected agriculture, develops.
This trend in modern agriculture has created the need to use different elements, materials and structures in the protection of crops, in order to obtain high yields and better quality products. The use of these systems predicts great advantages for producers, which are made visible when comparing the results of production under protected agricultural conditions and without it.
Protected agriculture, to a large extent, has been the result of the development of the petrochemical industry, which since the mid-twentieth century has produced and perfected plastic materials for agricultural use, so it is also called "plasticulture".
Among the main environmental factors that threaten the genetic potential of crops are low soil fertility, pests, pathogenic diseases, unfavorable climatic conditions, such as lack of water and high or low temperatures. All these factors affect outdoor crops and result in low yields.
On the other hand, the system of protected agriculture manages to give results of high quality products, with better selling prices and higher safety levels, because the well-designed structures offer the farmer control over frost and low temperatures; the excesses of humidity; insect transmitters of diseases; radiation and high temperatures; wind; The pests; the damage by hail; better diffusion of light; the management of CO2, among other advantages.
Structures
Regarding the types of materials for the structures of this system, the most commonly used are: wood, coligues or bamboo, wire, PVC hoses, plastics and meshes, and in terms of their shapes and designs, are the arches, which shape to macro and micro tunnels, and roofs of two waters, in the case of shadows, meshes or plastics. In the case of plastics, these have been perfected quickly from normal, absent any special treatment, to those that favor the diffusion of light in the interior in order to promote and achieve higher rates of photosynthesis. There are also plastics that block ultraviolet (UV) rays, white-milky plastics with certain percentage of shade, as well as three-layer plastics and others with anti-drip characteristics, in addition to photoselectives, in order to counteract pests, and there are also anti dust.
In short, protected agriculture seeks the development and use of a production system that allows to modify the natural environment in which the crop develops, protecting itself from its inclemencies and with the purpose of achieving good growth and a high productive yield.
Source: Blueberrieschile.cl - Blueberriesconsulting.com
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