The R&D team at Dr. Schär, a leading manufacturer of food and beverage products for people with special dietary needs, has always implemented a wide range of projects to evaluate and implement sustainable practices in their fields in order to optimise the use of water, fertilisers and crop protection in a way that is tailored to the specific needs of the cultivated areas. Particularly this year, due to the drought, the efficient use of water in agriculture is absolutely essential. This is why in recent months our Centre has collaborated on a pilot project to determine how alternative and innovative water-saving practices can improve the irrigation of cultivated land. The results generated were presented at the end of July directly on the corn field used for the pilot project in Este, in the province of Padua during the Irrigation Field Day, which was attended by various guests. Thanks to the use of advanced technologies, agriculture can benefit from important data to obtain useful real-time information on plant stress, yield forecasts and fertiliser use efficiency to reduce agricultural inputs (pesticides, fungicides, fertilisers). The work also continues after the harvest: even at this stage, data are crucial and show the measure to which actions implemented in advance (e.g. fertiliser or water management) were successful and positively affected crop yields.

[https://www.drschaer.com/uk/n/researchanddevelopment]