Camagüey foments cultivations covered against solar radiations

The agriculture in the county uses the cultivation covered in almost 17 hectares, in order to harvest in months of high environmental temperatures some varieties of vegetables characteristic of the winter season.

Enormous meshes serve from parasol to the fields and facilitate a reduction of about the third part from the solar radiation of May to September, creating a favorable atmosphere for the development of plants as tomato, carrot, lettuce, beet, melon, cucumber and pepper.

Ricardo Morell, boss of the Department of Science and Technique in the delegation of the Ministry of the Agriculture (MINAG), said to the AIN that the cover is one of the actions directed to adapt the agricultural exploitation to the effects of the climatic change.

Also, it constitutes an advance in the purpose of elevating the production of those foods in any time of the year.

The use of this technology has two variants, that of protected cultivation and that of semiprotected.

In the first one the mesh covers the whole seed area, included the lateral ones, while in the other one it is only the part of up.

Benito Vega, specialist of the MINAG, explained that one works in the recovery of little more than hectare and he mediates of the calls houses of protected cultivation, damaged by the hurricanes of 2008 when could not be disassembled.

The crops in those facilities that ascended to some 200 tons during the current year, are dedicated to the service of the tourism, in order to take advantage of part of the revenues in the maintenance of the infrastructure and in the acquisition of inputs for the plantations.

Guillermo Rivera, also of the MINAG, pointed out that the semiprotected is developed in organoponics of the movement of the urban agriculture, with more than 500 tons of products gathered in 2010.

At the moment one works to create cultivation conditions covered in other two surfaces in agricultural use.(LuciloTejera Díaz)