Fruit Harvest Research Articles

Phenotypic Selection to Avoid Discarding Target Genotypes for Four Fruit Traits Based on Environmental Variances in a Pineapple Cross-seedling Population

Early ripening [earlier than 1 Aug during fruit harvest time (FHT)], large fruit weight (FW; >1000 g), high sugar content [>17% soluble solids content (SSC)], and low acidity in fruit juice (<0.7%) are important breeding targets of pineapple for table fresh fruit use in Japan. We investigated the efficiency of primary selection based on the four fruit traits using 129 first-fruiting F1 offspring population of ‘Yugafu’ × ‘Yonekura’ without replicates. Separately, environmental variances were estimated by an analysis of variance using evaluation data from 50 or 49 offspring in three replicates and two-year repeats. The phenotypic distribution in the 129 F1 population approached a normal distribution (P > 0.05). The genotypic distribution was obtained as a normal distribution with the population mean as the mean and genotypic variance obtained by subtracting the environmental variance from the phenotypic variance. The target genotypes were estimated at 14.4%, 58.7%, 5.0%, and 50.0% of the F1 population for FHT, FW, SSC, and acidity, respectively. Critical phenotypic values were established as the upper (FHT and acidity) and lower (FW and SSC) limits of the critical genotypic values at the 95% probability level. The phenotypic selection was made based on the critical phenotypic value, resulting in 45.0%, 88.4%, 27.1%, and 79.1% of the offspring selected for FHT, FW, SSC, and acidity, respectively, and 12.4% simultaneously for all four fruit traits. The results showed that the phenotypic primary selection reduced the population size to 12.4%, avoiding the discarding of target genotypes with a low risk. If breeders intend to further reduce the population size, then increasing the number of traits subject to primary selection would be effective.

Carpochron: a concept for the time interval between the appearance of fruits in consecutive harvests

The aim of this research was to estimate the base temperature for the appearance of fruits at harvest point in the strawberry and to propose a concept to represent the time required for the appearance of fruits in consecutive harvests. The experiment was conducted in 2021 in four seedling transplanting seasons: May (season 1), June (season 2), July (season 3) and August (season 4) of two cultivars: Fronteras and Merced. Twenty-four consecutive fruit harvests were carried out from September 9, 2021, to December 1, 2021, when the number, length (cm), diameter (mm), and fresh weight of the fruits (g) were evaluated. The base temperature for the fruit emission of the strawberry was calculated using the method of the smallest mean square error. Carpochron was estimated at each season and for each cultivar, obtaining a simple linear regression between the number of fruits and the accumulated thermal sum (ºC day) and the number of days after transplanting (DAT), using as base temperature the one estimated in this work. The base temperature for the appearance of consecutive fruits at the harvest point in the strawberry is 11ºC. Carpochron increases with the delay of the transplanting season and the values ranged from 81.97ºC fruit day to 144.93ºC fruit day for cultivars Merced and Fronteras.

RESEARCH ON THE RESPONSE MECHANISM OF CLAMPING POINT POSITION TO THE VIBRATION PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTICS OF WOODEN MATERIALS

Vibratory harvesting is to dislodge fruits by applying excitation force to fruit trees, so the vibration response characteristics of fruit trees are of great significance for vibratory forest and fruit harvesting machinery to realize efficient harvesting. The effects of different clamping points and vibration frequencies on vibration responsiveness and energy transfer in Broussonetia papyrifera branches are investigated in this study. The results show that the effects of different clamping point positions and vibration frequencies on the branch vibration response are mutual. The ideal distance between the clamping point position and the base of the main branch should be between 48% and 73% of the branch length, and the distance between the clamping point position and the base of the main branch increased with the increase of vibration frequency. This is because, when the clamping point is close to the base of the main branch, a higher excitation frequency increases the energy consumption at the base of the main branch, and the amount of ineffective vibration energy transferred to the base of the main branch also increases. Therefore, when the location of the clamping point is close to the base of the main branch, the suppression of high-frequency vibration at the base of the main branch is stronger than the suppression of low-frequency vibration. When the clamping point is located in the center of the branch, the overall response of the branch to vibration is better.

Mitigate the Impact of Various Abiotic Stress by Using Grafting in Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) and Other Vegetables: A Comprehensive Review

Grafting technology has developed as a promising alternative to slow traditional breeding methods for boosting abiotic stressor resistance, soil pathogen tolerance, and fruit vegetable output and quality. Tomato, cucumbers, watermelons, eggplants, muskmelon and sweet papers have been grafted commercially to increase plant tolerance to factors such as salt, drought, waterlogging, the heavy metal toxicity, extreme temperatures, and variations in vegetable crop yield and quality. The goal of this study was to evaluate the research on the effect of grafting in reducing abiotic stressors and increasing vegetable crop production and quality. At different phases of culture, abiotic and biotic stressors harm tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.), a significant vegetable crop globally. Drought, salt, floods, severe temperatures, and heavy metals may alter plant morphology, physiology, and biochemistry, affecting crop development, production, and quality. Grafting technology is an excellent alternative to delayed breeding operations to reduce biotic and abiotic stressors. Grafted tomatoes have higher osmolytes, antioxidant enzymes, photosynthesis, which improves plant growth and fruit harvests and makes them more tolerant to abiotic challenges. Additionally, tomato grafting on proper rootstocks enhances fruit nutritional value, including lycopene, β-carotene, ascorbic acid, and proteins. This information may help researchers and producers improve vegetable quality, especially under abiotic stress.

Detection of Gannan Navel Orange Ripeness in Natural Environment Based on YOLOv5-NMM

In order to achieve fast and accurate detection of Gannan navel orange fruits with different ripeness levels in a natural environment under all-weather scenarios and then to realise automated harvesting of Gannan navel oranges, this paper proposes a YOLOv5-NMM (YOLOv5 with Navel orange Measure Model) object detection model based on the improvement in the original YOLOv5 model. Based on the changes in the phenotypic characteristics of navel oranges and the Chinese national standard GB/T 21488-2008, the maturity of Gannan navel oranges is tested. And it addresses and improves the problems of occlusion, dense distribution, small target size, rainy days, and light changes in the detection of navel orange fruits. Firstly, a new detection head of 160 × 160 feature maps is constructed in the detection layer to improve the multi-scale target detection layer of YOLOv5 and to increase the detection accuracy of the different maturity levels of Gannan navel oranges of small sizes. Secondly, a convolutional block attention module is incorporated in its backbone layer to capture the correlations between features in different dimensions to improve the perceptual ability of the model. Then, the weighted bidirectional feature pyramid network structure is integrated into the Neck layer to improve the fusion efficiency of the network on the feature maps and reduce the amount of computation. Lastly, in order to reduce the loss of the target of the Gannan Navel Orange due to occlusion and overlapping, the detection frame is used to remove redundancy using the Soft-NMS algorithm to remove redundant candidate frames. The results show that the accuracy rate, recall rate, and average accuracy of the improved YOLOv5-NMM model are 93.2%, 89.6%, and 94.2%, respectively, and the number of parameters is only 7.2 M. Compared with the mainstream network models, such as Faster R-CNN, YOLOv3, the original model of YOLOv5, and YOLOv7-tiny, it is superior in terms of the accuracy rate, recall rate, and average accuracy mean, and also performs well in terms of the detection rate and memory occupation. This study shows that the YOLOv5-NMM model can effectively identify and detect the ripeness of Gannan navel oranges in natural environments, which provides an effective exploration of the automated harvesting of Gannan navel orange fruits.

A novel Adaptive Zone-fusion network for precise waxberry semantic segmentation to improve automated-harvesting in a complex orchard environment

In China, waxberries are a specialty fruit that require large harvesting efforts each season. To ameliorate these issues, automated fruit-picking equipment has been widely developed within the last decade. However, most image analysis research used for waxberry segmentation contains issues such as incomplete datasets, insufficient segmentation accuracy, and susceptibility to interference. Here, we developed the Adaptive Zone-fusion Network (AZNet) that enables automated fruit harvesting and is designed to precisely segmentate waxberries in an orchard environment. Initially, we collected a diverse range of images to train and evaluate a better model, and found that AZNet demonstrated exceptional performance and achieved a mean Accuracy (mAcc) of 99.83%, mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 96.57%, and mean Dice coefficient (mDice) of 98.20%. To further validate AZNet’s effectiveness, we compared several state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, including DeepLab V3, SegNet, PSPNet, U-Net, RefineNet, FCN, DANet, and FastSCNN. Along with these comparisons, we also performed an ablation study to substantiate the individual impact of each module within AZNet. Through these experiments, we found that AZNet exhibits the capability to achieve accurate semantic segmentation of waxberries in complex orchard environments, and is suitable for automated fruit harvesting devices. Ultimately, AZNet improves upon previous models by constructing information fusion modules through spatial attention, channel attention, Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP), and graph convolutional methods, which can be utilized in the future to enhance other fruit-picking software to reduce fruit loss and the investment of human resources.

An image segmentation and point cloud registration combined scheme for sensing of obscured tree branches

Automated robots are emerging as a solution for labor-intensive fruit orchard management. Three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of tree branches is a fundamental requirement for robots to perform tasks like pruning and fruit harvesting. Current branch sensing methods often rely on planar segmentation with limited 3D information or computationally expensive point cloud segmentation, which may not be suitable for natural orchards with obscured tree branches. This study proposes a novel scheme that reconstructs occluded branches from RGB-D (Red-Green-Blue-Depth) images by integrating the point clouds converted from planar segmentation masks and depth images. The proposed approach extends the existing 2D branch sensing techniques to 3D, leveraging multi-view information. The deep learning models DeeplabV3+ and Pix2pix are employed to generate the segmentation masks, separately. And the Fast Global Registration (FGR) is used to register the multi-view point clouds. The results demonstrate that the output point clouds have at least a 24 % increase in the number of corresponding points after FGR. Furthermore, the time cost per hundred corresponding points is reduced by 85 % and 69 % when using the DeepLabV3 + and Pix2pix-based schemes, respectively, compared to the PointNet++ approach. These findings indicate that the proposed scheme significantly improves the sensing of occluded branches in terms of output richness and computational efficiency, making it applicable to natural orchard working spaces.

A novel jujube tree trunk and branch salient object detection method for catch-and-shake robotic visual perception

Visual perception has become a prerequisite for automated jujube harvesting robot operations under complex orchard conditions. Catch-and-Shake harvesting, as the most efficient and common harvesting method, has widely been applied on various manually operated harvesters to complete large-area jujube fruit harvesting. However, the main factors restricting the development of existing harvesters are labor shortage, high labor cost, and low operating efficiency. To address the issues, we designed a catch-and-shake harvesting robot for jujube tree trunks and branches visual perception that can provide a barrier-free catch-and-shake operation area and guide the manipulator to reach the area to complete the harvesting operation. Meanwhile, a visual perception system including tree trunks and branches detection, skeleton extraction, catch-and-shake area confirmation was presented to guide robot intelligent operations. In the visual perception system, a novel salientobjectdetectionmodel called feature intersection and fusion Transformer (FIT-Transformer) network was proposed to split branches and background to provide reference for determining safe catch-and-shake areas. Moreover, we designed a diverse feature aggregation (DFA) and an attention feature fusion module (AFFM) to strengthen feature learning capabilities and obtain robust perception models. Comparative experimental results showed that our proposed FIT-Transformer model outperformed 12 state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms including C2FNet, RAS, BASNet, U2Net, SCRNet, PiCANet, EDRNet, EGNet, ICONR, VST, TransSOD and ABiU_Net. Specifically, the segmentation accuracy of jujube tree trunks and branches using our method showed the satisfactory result on five evaluation indexes under natural environment (the EM, SM, WF, FM and MAE reached 0.9713, 0.8991, 0.8854, 0.8905, and 0.0302, respectively). Field experiments also proved that our method could meet the requirements of operational accuracy and real-time operations.

Advancements in Soft Robotics: A Comprehensive Review on Actuation Methods, Materials, and Applications.

The flexibility and adaptability of soft robots enable them to perform various tasks in changing environments, such as flower picking, fruit harvesting, in vivo targeted treatment, and information feedback. However, these fulfilled functions are discrepant, based on the varied working environments, driving methods, and materials. To further understand the working principle and research emphasis of soft robots, this paper summarized the current research status of soft robots from the aspects of actuating methods (e.g., humidity, temperature, PH, electricity, pressure, magnetic field, light, biological, and hybrid drive), materials (like hydrogels, shape-memory materials, and other flexible materials) and application areas (camouflage, medical devices, electrical equipment, and grippers, etc.). Finally, we provided some opinions on the technical difficulties and challenges of soft robots to comprehensively comprehend soft robots, lucubrate their applications, and improve the quality of our lives.

Coconut Waste: Discovering Sustainable Approaches to Advance a Circular Economy

The coconut tree (Cocos nucifera) stands as a pivotal resource in tropical regions, playing a crucial role in both subsistence and economic activities across Asia, the Pacific Islands, and South America. While the harvesting of coconut fruit is essential for producing globally utilized edible products, such as coconut oil, by small owners and large producers around the world in the food, cosmetics, and pharmaceutical industries, concerns have arisen due to the substantial amount of agro-industrial residue generated in this process, posing environmental risks if they are not properly managed. Recognizing the environmental challenges, this paper emphasizes the transformative potential inherent in coconut waste, characterized by its lignocellulosic composition rich in lignin and multifunctional groups. By delving into the historical context of coconut economic exploration and its chemical composition, this review explores the diverse applications of coconut products, focusing on the utilization and processing of residues to generate sustainable products and byproducts. Ultimately, this comprehensive review underscores the significance of repurposing coconut waste, not only to mitigate the environmental impact but also as a valuable contributor to a circular economy, promoting the use of the lignocellulosic biomass in research and bolstering its role as a raw material in the chemical and energy sectors.

Supporting tactical harvest planning decisions of major fruits through a multi-objective modeling approach by using exact methods

An important stage of the agri-food supply chain is production (agricultural practices and harvesting), where relevant decisions are made in a short period of intensive activity. Regarding the major fruit supply chain, the complexity of these decisions increases because most fruit export companies manage several orchards with different fruit species and varieties. Moreover, the amount of labor and resources must be estimated at least two months in advance of the harvest so that they can be relied upon during the harvest season. In this study, a multi-objective modeling approach for supporting tactical harvest planning decisions of major fruits is developed, aiming to evidence its adequacy and to identify different harvest plans according to the prioritized objectives. Therefore, a multi-objective linear programming (MOLP) model, which considers three conflicting objectives, is proposed. The three objectives correspond to minimizing harvest costs, fruit loss and harvest days. For solving the MOLP model, five a posteriori multi-objective exact methods are compared using a synthetic instance based on a real case. The Pareto frontiers obtained by these methods are analyzed using three metrics related to accuracy, cardinality, and diversity criteria, so that the most suitable method can be selected. Thus, the selected method is applied to an actual case study of a Chilean fruit export company. In addition, the ε-constraint method is used in this case study to compare the obtention of non-dominated solutions in the convex and non-convex regions of the Pareto frontier. The results show that harvest plans vary significantly according to the prioritization of the objective functions. Thus, the percentage difference between each objective function’s worst and best values is around 497% when the harvest costs are minimized, around 1,448% when the fruit loss is minimized, and around 18% when the number of harvest days is minimized. In addition, the adequacy of the multi-objective approach rather than the mono-objective approach to support tactical harvest planning decisions is demonstrated. Furthermore, a scenario analysis for considering changes in the harvest periods is carried out by considering three possible scenarios. This analysis is required because these periods can change every year due to different factors, such as weather conditions and agricultural practices, among others. The results show that the harvest costs and fruit loss increase, on average, 87% and 100%, respectively, when the harvest period is short, that is, one day. Finally, managerial insights about the information obtained by the MOLP model are discussed.

Adding value to banana farming: Antibody production in post-harvest leaves

Banana, a globally popular fruit, is widely cultivated in tropical and sub-tropical regions. After fruit harvest, remaining banana plant materials are low-value byproducts, mostly composted or used as fibre or for food packaging. As an aim to potentially increase farmer income, this study explored underutilised banana biomass as a novel plant tissue for production of a high-value product. Protein scFvTG130 used in this study, is an anti-toxoplasma single chain variable fragment antibody that can be used in diagnostics and neutralising the Toxoplasma gondii pathogen. Using detached banana leaves, we investigated the factors influencing the efficacy of a transient expression system using reporter genes and recombinant protein, scFvTG130. Transient expression was optimal at 2 days after detached banana leaves were vacuum infiltrated at 0.08 MPa vacuum pressure for a duration of 3 min with 0.01% (v/v) Tween20 using Agrobacterium strain GV3101 harbouring disarmed virus-based vector pIR-GFPscFvTG130. The highest concentration of anti-toxoplasma scFvTG130 antibody obtained using detached banana leaves was 22.8 µg/g fresh leaf tissue. This first study using detached banana leaf tissue for the transient expression of a recombinant protein, successfully demonstrated anti-toxoplasma scFvTG130 antibody expression, supporting the potential application for other related proteins using an underutilised detached banana leaf tissue.

OFF-SEASON AGRONOMIC PERFORMANCE OF THREE EXOTIC WATERMELON VARIETIES IN THE SOUTH-WESTERN REGION OF BANGLADESH

The watermelon [Citrullus lanatus (Thunb.)] - a herbaceous, annual, and monoecious fruit - belongs to the family Cucurbitaceae and is usually cultivated in Bangladesh during the period from February to April. However, they may be grown year-round, and off-season watermelon cultivation is more profitable than seasonal farming. The research was conducted at the Field Laboratory of Khulna University from August to December, 2021 to evaluate the off-season agronomic performance of the selected three watermelon varieties viz. Kanya, Black Super, and Tripti. The experiment investigated both the vegetative and reproductive growth of watermelon following a Randomized Complete Block Design with five replications. Kanya had the longest vines with the most leaves, and nodes followed by Black Super and Tripti. All the watermelon cultivars were found to be similar in producing male flowers, while Black Super and Kanya produced more female flowers, and Black Super also produced the highest fruit yield (6.37 t ha-1), which was statistically similar to Kanya (5.84 t ha-1) and the lowest yield was obtained from Tripti (3.69 t ha-1). Kanya performed better regarding fruit length (22.47 cm), fruit width (30.89 cm), and fruit weight (1.03 kg). Black Super scored the highest TSS (8.43) (Brix0) value, followed by Kanya (7.63) and Tripti (6.39). The amount of weight loss after the harvesting of fruits was less in Black Super, followed by Kanya and Tripti. Black Super had a longer recorded shelf life (28 days) than the other two varieties. The results of this study suggest that Black Super and Kanya can be grown during the off-season in the south-western region of Bangladesh.

Design and Testing of the Double-Symmetric Eccentric Exciter for Fruit Tree Vibration Harvest

The amplitude of excitation force from exciters used in fruit tree vibration harvesting remains constant at a given frequency, leading to poor fruit detachment ratio and tree damage. A solution has been proposed through the development of a Double-Symmetric Eccentric Exciter (DSEE). This new exciter allows for the adjustment of excitation force amplitude while maintaining a constant frequency by varying the phase angle of the DSEE. To validate the effectiveness of the DSEE, vibration tests were conducted on fruit trees using different parameter exciting forces. Acceleration sensors were employed to measure the vibration accelerations of the tree branches. The experimental results revealed that when a fixed frequency excitation force with a constant phase angle was applied to the trunk, the vibration acceleration of branches exhibited inconsistent variations due to differences in the vibration differential equation parameters of each branch. Furthermore, it was observed that increasing the phase angle of the DSEE at a fixed frequency led to larger vibration accelerations in every branch. This signifies that adjusting the phase angle of the DSEE can effectively increase the amplitude of the exciting force. Consequently, the ability to control both the amplitude and frequency of the excitation force independently can mitigate issues such as low fruit harvest rates and minimize damage to fruit trees.

Daños causados por avispas sociales (Hymenoptera: Vespidae) a frutos comerciales en la región amazónica brasileña

Social wasps play a crucial role in ecosystems by actively foraging and preying on lepidopterans caterpillars, an important group of insects known to damage various structures of cultivated plants. However, there is a discussion about the potential damage that these wasps can cause to the fruits of some commercial species. In this research, cases of damage caused by Polybia dimidiata (Olivier), Polybia liliacea (Fabricius), Synoeca surinama (Linnaeus), and Synoeca virginea (Fabricius) to fruits of three different fruit species: guava, carambola, and murici, are recorded while they are still attached to the stem. These events occurred in the municipalities of Itacoatiara and Uarini, both located in the state of Amazonas, northern Brazil. These observations were made in the months of January 2013, December 2022, January, and February 2023. Due to their high infestation and vigorous foraging activities, it is speculated we posit that these wasp species could reach pest status, affecting the fruit harvests by stinging workers and damaging the fruits until made for marketing. However, it is crucial to emphasize that more comprehensive studies are needed to determine whether the damage caused by these vespids really represents a threat to small farmers.

Integrated nutrient module: an efficient tool for sustainable farming of cape gooseberry (Physalis peruviana L.)

Cape gooseberry is a nutrient loving crop. But excessive use of inorganic fertilizers may leads to health hazards, ecological vulnerabilities and diminution of soil physico-chemical characteristics. Hence, a trial was conducted for substituting inorganic fertilizers with biofertilizer in cape gooseberry to maintain the yield potential with soil fertility status too. The experimental plants were treated with azotobacter, phosphate and potash solubilizing bacteria (PSB and KSB) at 10 g plant-1 each with reduced dose of recommended fertilizer (RDF) (100- 60%) for two consecutive growing season. Total harvestable fruit plant-1 with highest yield was recorded in 90% RDF + Azotobacter, PSB and KSB treatment with par value in 60% RDF + Azotobacter, PSB and KSB treatment. Quality of ripped fruit with respect to TSS (15.90 °B), total sugar (11.29%), ascorbic acid (60.03 mg 100 g-1) and carotenoid content (49.25 µg 100 g-1) was also improved significantly in 60% RDF + Azotobacter, PSB and KSB treatment. Soil physico-chemical properties of the field was not varied significantly over initial reading. However, microbial population viz. bacteria, fungi and actinomycetes count was improved significantly in all the nutrient modules. Hence, it can be concluded that integrated nutrient module comprising 60% RDF of NPK + Azotobacter, PSB and KSB at 10 g plant-1 is the best treatment module for improving the production system of cape gooseberry in sustainable manner for long run without hampering the soil health and quality. Bangladesh J. Bot. 53(1): 83-90, 2024 (March)

Production of strawberry cultivars in a closed system of growing on substrate with transplants of different origins

The growing of strawberries in substrate has grown because it is a profitable way of production, easy to work, and which reduces the occurrence of diseases. Like closed growing systems they have a low environmental impact. The imported strawberry transplants bare root are considered more productive, however they arrive late in Brazil, shortening their production cycle, so transplants produced under local conditions would be an alternative to increase producers' income. Thus, the objective of this work was to evaluate the productive result of strawberry transplants produced under local conditions and imported bare root, growing in a closed growing system soilless, on a carbonized rice husk substrate and with the addition of organic compost. Three experimental factors were evaluated: 1st) substrate: carbonized rice husk (CRH) and CRH with 20% organic compound (OC) (CRH + OC); 2nd) cultivars: ‘Camarosa’ and ‘San Andreas’; and 3rd) transplants origin: bare root imported, and runners plants produced under local conditions. The local runner's plants outperformed imported bare root in relation to the number of fruits, however, the imported bare root provided greater average fresh weight of fruits. The runner’s plants of the cultivar 'San Andreas' produced 732.9 g plant-1, higher than the production of imported bare root, with 44.9% of the harvest harvested in the months of July and August. The 'Camarosa' cultivar didn't show the difference in yield between local and imported transplants. Transplants of cv. 'San Andreas' shallow rooted directly into the slabs under local natural conditions can guarantee earlier harvest, greater production, and higher fruit yield. As for the substrate, plant growth and commercial productivity were not influenced by the addition of OC to CRH. The results indicate that the addition of OC to the CRH has no influence on plant growth and commercial fruit production.

Agroecology – air, precipitations and soils of the еxperimental fields of Institute of Agriculture, Kyustendil, Bulgaria

The air conditions during last year were environmentally friendly for agriculture; there was no air contamination caused by people. Precipitations were rare but very intensive, sometimes over the limit. This is the reason for the not very rich harvest of various fruits, especially the cherries, apples, and plums typical for the livelihood of the region. The reason is associated with excessive rainfall, infections, and contagious diseases in fruit trees, as well as the salinization of soils resulting from excessive rainfall. The soil in the region is defined as suitable for fruit crops, but excessive rainfall turns them into problematic soils, and it is necessary to take various soil protection measures and measures to increase soil fertility.

Low-cost small-scale irrigation for developing an agroforestry system in the semi-arid zone of Niger: case of the apple of the Sahel (Ziziphus mauritiana L.)

Cultivation of the ‘Apple of the Sahel’ (also known as Indian Jujube) is central to the food security, nutrition, and income of rural communities in developing countries like Niger. However, rainfall variability significantly impacts the development of this plant. This study aims to determine the effects of seasonal water regimes on the growth and productivity of the Apple of the Sahel. The trials were conducted in 2020 and 2021 during the rainy and dry seasons at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) experimental site in Sadore, Niamey, Niger. The experiment was arranged in a factorial design with three irrigation doses (D) and three irrigation systems (G) as main and subplot factors, respectively. The sub-subplot factors were irrigation frequencies (F) and growth boosters (B), each with two levels. In the dry season, irrigation dose application significantly (p = 0.001) increased soil volumetric water content (vwc). A similar increase in soil vwc was achieved under small-scale drip irrigation with an application of the same dose of organic material (p = 0.001). The diameter of the Apple of the Sahel trees significantly increased (p = 0.03) under the small-scale drip irrigation systems with 6.72 mm recorded under the two-drip irrigation system (G2) as compared with the manual system (G0). In the dry season, the total fruit harvest of Apple of the Sahel recorded had increased (p = 0.04) under the irrigated system, varying from 112 to 246% depending on the number of drippers, and compared to the manual system. These results highlight that small-scale drip irrigation should be used in combination with appropriate water and fertilizer management to improve water availability and tree yield in agroforestry systems in arid regions such as Niger.

Подходы к формированию концепции цифровой трансформации садоводства Российской Федерации

Abstract. The need to increase the production of fruits and berries raises the question of increasing productivity, which is possible in modern conditions through the digital transformation of the horticulture industry. The purpose of this study is to develop approaches that will allow us to prepare a concept for the digital transformation of the country's horticulture. Research methods: socio-economic analysis, graphical and SWOT analysis. Scientific novelty of the research: the strengths and weaknesses of the development of digitalization in horticulture in the Russian Federation, the emerging opportunities and threats, have been identified, factors hindering the development of digital technologies in the country's horticulture have been identified, and measures have been proposed to mitigate their impact. Research results. The article examines the provision of fruits and berries of the country's own production by region in relation to actual consumption and consumption standards recommended by the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation in the period 2010-2021. Based on the calculations made, it was concluded that in recent years it has been possible to increase these indicators in the country as a whole to 37.9 % and 27.3 %, respectively, however, the share of imports remains high and the issue of increasing horticultural products is very relevant. The SWOT analysis of the development of digitalization in horticulture in the Russian Federation showed that along with the capabilities of digital technologies, there are also weaknesses, the main of which are significant investment costs for both design organizations and users – specific agricultural producers. Factors hindering the development of digital technologies in Russian horticulture are divided into five groups: industry, economic, government, technical and social. To mitigate the impact of these factors, it is recommended to use additional government support measures, as well as cooperation and the creation of clusters, which is confirmed by the experience of foreign countries. Examples of successful Russian cooperatives in the field of growing and harvesting fruits and berries are given. The proposed approaches can be used when developing at the state level the concept of digital transformation of horticulture both in the Russian Federation as a whole and in individual regions.