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Advanced Cultivation
Since the origins of agriculture, the progressive domestication of food crops has been related to a series of innovations in plant propagation and cultivation. Improvements in agricultural are constantly needed in order to successfully feed the worlds ever growing population particularly as we face dwindling arable land. Although business profitability is a key driver of improvement it is a desire of the scientific and agricultural community to produce more as well.
We here at AGRI Developments seek to apply and expand on existing agricultural practices. By 2050 Earth will need to produce 60% more food to feed an additional 2.5 billion people, whilst arable land decreases. AGRI Developments, in support of the world’s needs, always aims to do more with less. By creating more value with less risk, by producing more crops from less land and generating more business with less of an ecological footprint. Some key advances we seek to improve and implement throughout our developments include grafting & budding, plant tissue culture and high density planting.
Grafting & Budding
Advanced horticultural techniques such as grafting and budding are increasingly being applied in agricultural production. Their adoption is being driven by their ability to provide improvements over traditional seed based growth. Trees grown in this manner are essentially cloned to provide superior productivity and other notable benefits. AGRI Developments is a strong proponent of these techniques. It believes that when effectively applied, they can produce significant improvements in yield, quality and disease resistance, all in a natural manner.
In terms of application, grafting and budding are techniques in which two or more plants are joined so that they appear to grow as a single plant. Budding is the placing of a bud of one plant into another related plant while grafting is the placing of a part of the stem into another related plant. Although budding is considered a modern technique, grafting is not new. The practice of grafting can be traced back 4,000 years to ancient China and Mesopotamia. Grafting is now a well-developed practice that has had a wide impact on agricultural production and continues to be a force with implications for current technology.
Plant Tissue Culture
Tissue culture is a new technique to plant propagation in which the growth of tissues or cells occurs in an artificial medium separate from the organism. Under the right conditions, an entire plant can be regenerated from a single cell. Tissue culture application provides key advantages over traditional methods generally practiced in agriculture. In recent years, tissue culture has found wide practical application, particularly for rapid clonal propagation or in-vitro propagation of many economically important plant species. These include rice, palm oil, rubber trees, sugarcane, bananas, sweet potato and tomato.
AGRI Developments believes the successful development and application of plan tissue culture provides an ideal solution to food security. This is particularly true for developing countries that have poor food accessibility due to lack of capital, knowledge, infrastructure and imports. The main advantage of tissue culture technology lies in the rapid production of high quality, disease-free and uniform plants. However, the technology is capital, research, labor and energy intensive. AGRI Developments works alongside leading researchers and scientists in an effort to find new practical applications and advances.
High Density Planting
High density planting also known as HDP is defined as planting at a density in excess of that which gives maximum crop yield at maturity if the individual plants had been grown to their full natural size. Planting density can be identified by the number of plants within a given area. In basic terms, the optimal application of HDP can result in larger productivity yields per land area. AGRI Developments is a strong advocate of HDP and believes it plays a vital role in nourishing the world in the midst of dwindling arable land and rising food demand.
Successful implementation of HDP relies on restricting vegetative growth by applying dwarfing, bio regulators, pruning and other advanced cultivation techniques. Although HDP has the ability to provide significant productivity improvements, it is an extremely research, capital and labor intensive technique. A limited amount of specific plant cultivars or varieties are capable of being utilized effectively in an HDP setting. It requires advanced professional and scientific approaches to management that are not readily available globally. AGRI Developments is currently pioneering the application of HDP at its development in the Philippines after years of intensive research and development.
