The increase in temperatures that is being registered these days in the Region has made the farmers of the Vega Alta have begun to carry out the thinning work in flower of the production of stone fruit. In a few days, some 2,000 workers will be incorporated gradually to be able to carry out all the work that, due to the cold, has not been able to be carried out until now, since flowering has accumulated a delay of more than twenty days.
Manuel Martínez, a producer from the Cieza area, indicated that these thinning tasks “cannot wait any longer, regardless of whether the cold may return from next week, as predicted by the weather reports.” For Martínez, “we are in a very strange campaign whose consequences are unpredictable for the moment.” Thinning is a technique that consists of unloading the tree of more than 60% of the flowers that it can reproduce. It is done so that later the fruit is bigger and so that the branches do not break with the weight. A second thinning occurs with the pieces already formed, so that only 10% of the total potential fruit is left in a given specimen.
The grower recalled that the autumn was very warm, and also Christmas and the first days of January, to the point that many early varieties began to flower. Then, “the frosts arrived with more than a month of sub-zero temperatures in the early hours, which caused a large percentage of the earliest flowering to freeze.”
He also stressed that now “we must make up for lost time and, for this, during the next few days a lot of labor will be needed.” The first contingent with some 2,000 workers will be incorporated in two weeks from now only in Vega Alta and later, when the collection work begins, the total number of laborers may exceed 5,000. In this sense, Manuel Martínez appealed to the “professionalization of the sector”, since, as he specified, “to work in the field there are a lot of personnel available, but people who are prepared and who really know what they are doing at all times there are very few ». However, he thanked “the many seasonal workers who will arrive in the Region in the coming weeks, since without them, neither this campaign nor the future ones could be carried out.”
Absence of rain
The absence of rain practically since last year is the main concern of farmers “and not because of the reserves that may remain, which also, but because of the great dryness that the soil accumulates,” said Martínez. He explained that the natural washing of the surface and of the wood of the trees itself “has not occurred this year, so we will have to wait to find out its consequences.”
“In general,” said this businessman, “we are facing an agricultural campaign that we consider quite atypical because of the weather;” and we still have to wait for the month of April, when it is foreseeable that the rains and storms will arrive.
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