Tamanduá News - March 2007

March
2007

Mini- and micro-watermelons without seeds - Some thoughts about organic agriculture

Mini- and micro-watermelons without seeds

Fazenda Tamanduá repeated last year’s success, managing to produce the famous seedless mini-watermelons by the organic method.

Thanks to our friends at Syngenta Seeds, who accompanied the whole process, we managed to acquire untreated seeds, imported directly from the United States, and planted an area of 2 hectares.

We were able to establish a viable organic production system, with sheets of plastic on the ground in order to avoid the evaporation of the scarce water of the sertão and to diminish the proliferation of spontaneous weeds. At the initial stage, an unwoven cloth was used to protect the young seedlings, male and female, from the scorching sun.

The harvest occurred at year-end, reaching productivity close to 30 tons per hectare. We exported part of the crop to England and Holland, where this organically certified fruit was as yet unknown.

We already have several buyers in Europe interested in the 2007 crop, and we are planning to resume production as from May or June, depending on the end of our rainy season – which has started off strong, to everyone’s joy.

As we also want to work the domestic market, we sold some of the fruit to the “Nordestão” and “Extra” supermarkets in the city of Natal, as well as the “Pão de Açúcar” supermarkets in the cities of João Pessoa and Recife, which were enthusiastic about this novelty.

Finally, applying strict selection, we were able to offer the micro-watermelons, whose size resembles that of the Cavaillon melon, to several fine hotels and restaurants in Recife. When cut in two, the fruit can be eaten with a spoon, thus offering an original product that will please the tourists that come to the Northeast Region. The hotels Atlante Plaza and Dorisol in Recife, the Summerville Hotel at Porto de Galinhas, and the restaurant Chez Georges have already enrolled to receive this unusual fruit exclusively during this year.

We are constantly seeking solutions to enhance the weapons available to organic farmers. The oil from the physic nut (Jatropha Curcas L.), produced at the Farm itself, was tested as a natural insecticide, and was shown to control aphids and cochineal insects very well.

Some thoughts about organic agriculture in the light of our experience at Fazenda Tamanduá, with certification since 2001

Prices

The price paid by the final consumer is determined by the chains or supermarkets that sell our products, and not by the producer.

As it is a differentiated product, and looked upon as a luxury, it is not uncommon to see the retailer add to an organic product profit margins that are much higher than those of a conventional product, even to the point of drastically reducing the presence of some of our products in the market as a consequence of excessive prices.

Take, for example, our coalho cheese, which was the first cheese in the Brazilian market to have both organic certification and federal registration. These two certifications add to our production costs, one because of the percentage charged on sales – and not on the actual profit – by the IBD, and the other because of the frequent refurbishing of installations that is necessary in order to adapt to changes in the legislation. Even so, the selling price of our coalho cheese is similar to the prices of conventional products of the same quality; but the shelf price of our cheese is always much higher, for no specific reason.

Fazenda Tamanduá's coalho cheese

Productivity

In fact, the productivity of organic products is usually lower than that of conventional products. We can even say that it is 20% to 30% lower. Even using natural products coming from the farm itself, such as manure, wood chips and neem leaves, production costs are higher.

This is mainly due to the lack of serious investment in improvement of the organic techniques used. These are usually practiced by small producers, who have neither the financial conditions necessary to invest in research, nor access to technology.

In Switzerland, the FIBL (Research Institute for Organic Agriculture), a private foundation created in 1973 by farmers and scientists connected with the organic movement, carries out serious research and publishes the resulting knowledge and techniques, cost free, throughout the world. In Brazil, no institute carries out this kind of work, and producers have to work extremely hard in order to develop production systems adapted to the region in which they work; and in general they do not exchange their experiences with friends who are also producers.

The scarce resources invested by the certifiers linked to the IFOAM are always allocated to campaigns AGAINST something (usually GM products), and never IN FAVOR of their own certified producers, who are those that sustain them. They have never sought to encourage the exchange of information on production among producers by means of a website, or even favoring the creation of a Brazilian FIBL. A great pity.

We can state that, through more serious empirical work concerned with composting and the use of liquid bio-fertilizer, Fazenda Tamanduá has managed to improve its productivity greatly. One of the most recent examples is precisely that of the seedless mini-watermelon, whose productivity reached a level close to 30t/ha. In the case of mangoes, we have a production system that improves year by year. In the current year, we have started improving the pruning process, with the expectation of a response that may attain 5% to 10% more fruit. Our techniques are made available to third parties, by means of field days and visits.

We are also seeking alternatives to the defensive agents currently available and authorized, as we did with physic nut oil to control cochineal and aphids.

We would also point out that the production of leafy organic vegetables, such as lettuce, costs just as much today as the conventional variety in certain Southern regions that have invested in production systems.

We must invest in research!

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Fazenda Tamanduá
Caixa Postal 65 - Patos / Paraíba - CEP 58700-970 - Brasil
Tel.(83)3422-7070 Fax(83)3422-7071