Agriculture plays a crucial role in ensuring food security and nutrition worldwide. Crop quality traits are essential for their marketability, consumer acceptance, and overall nutritional value. Ensuring high-quality crops in agriculture, particularly fruits, vegetables, and potatoes, involves overcoming several challenges. These challenges span from pre-harvest to post-harvest stages and can significantly impact the marketability and nutritional value of the produce.
In the following article, we will present the solutions that Biostimulation 360º can offer growers to overcome challenges and enhance the quality and, thus, profitability of their crops.
Quality traits in agriculture
Several physical, chemical, and biological traits determine crop quality. These traits influence the crops’ usability for food, feed, industrial applications, and seed production.
Internal and external quality parameters
Various parameters define the quality of agricultural production, which can be summarized into two main groups. External parameters include caliber/shape, homogeneity, color/pigments, and firmness/cracking. Internal parameters encompass flavor, texture, and Brix grade. These parameters collectively determine the overall quality and marketability of agricultural products.
- Size, homogeneity, and weight: For easy packaging and processing, consumers and processors prefer uniform sizes and weights.
- Colour and appearance: Bright, attractive colours indicate freshness and high nutritional value. For instance, vibrant red tomatoes and deep green leafy vegetables are preferred.
- Brix grade: In many crops, the Brix grade is the key parameter that determines the quality level of the produce and significantly enhances its commercial value. This measurement, which indicates the sugar content in fruits and vegetables, is crucial for assessing sweetness and overall flavor, making it a vital factor in agricultural production.
- Texture and firmness: Crops like fruits and vegetables should be appropriate to withstand transport and storage.
To help our growers reach the desired quality traits for their crops, Biostimulation 360º introduces Biimore, the first Rovensa Next biostimulant, and one of the first in the market, to receive the CE mark under this new regulation. Biimore is a microbial extract ultra-efficient quality promoter biostimulant able to increase the sugar and nutrient movement, photosynthesis, and plant cell wall organisation in plants, with the ability to improve fruit quality in terms of size, weight, and sugar content.
Want to know more about Biimore? Check this Link
We know it works: More than 61 trials have shown positive quality results in tree vegetable and potato crops.
In all crops, potassium is paramount to yield and quality. Especially for the brix, starch levels, and potassium, these chemical traits will be the main factor in increasing them. Due to the challenges related to climate, such as abiotic stress, plants’ low energy levels due to closing the yearly cycle, Biostimulation 360º developed Final K, our highly absorbable and safe Potassium solution for fruit swell and quality. Final K can be absorbed even in challenging conditions like low humidity and high temperatures. It also brings a highly efficient nutrient capable of increasing crop quality.
We know it works: A summary of 30 Trials with Final K shows that it increases quality traits in fruit, tuber, and vegetable crops.
Conclusion
The quality traits in agriculture determine the usability and marketability of crops, influencing global food security and economic sustainability. However, crop production faces numerous challenges, including environmental factors, pest and disease outbreaks, technological limitations, and socio-economic constraints. Addressing these challenges requires a combination of scientific innovation, policy support, and sustainable farming practices. By improving crop quality and overcoming production barriers, Rovensa Next Biostimulation 360º strategy can continue to offer high-quality yields to the growing global population while ensuring economic stability for farmers worldwide.
