I have been organizing knowledge exchange visits for almost 30 years and I was not surprised by how quickly nine fruit and vegetable growers from Uzbekistan began implementing what they had seen during our recent visit to Moldova. After seeing that their peers in Moldova can do it, they did not prepare lengthy action plans or wait for new government programmes but started making changes immediately after returning home.
“After returning from the trip, I immediately started implementing what I had seen. First, I replaced the nozzles on my sprayer with more efficient ones. Water consumption has already fallen by half,” said Rustam Yakubov, one of the participants.
People often say that change is hard. My experience tells me something slightly different: change can happen remarkably quickly when people are curious, motivated and able to see a better solution working with their own eyes.
From 15 to 19 June, I was fortunate to lead and organise this knowledge exchange visit under an FAO/EBRD initiative, together with an amazing team of consultants from Moldova, Uzbekistan and Ukraine. What we saw in Moldova was impressive. What happened after the growers returned to Uzbekistan was even more impressive.
Rustam was not the only one who immediately began putting the lessons into practice. The other participants also started exploring or implementing improvements they had seen in Moldova. These changes can help Uzbekistan save precious water, increase yields, improve the quality of fresh produce and reduce negative impact on the environment while widening export opportunities.
My experience of organising knowledge exchange visits has repeatedly confirmed one simple truth: it is better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times. Importantly, everything we showed the participants in Moldova was already being used by real commercial farms, not demonstrated in laboratories or research institutes. The Uzbek growers could see the results, speak directly with the farmers using these technologies and ask the questions that matter to any business owner: How much does it cost? How difficult is it to operate? What can go wrong? How quickly will the investment pay for itself?
I believe that much of what we saw would be useful to almost anyone interested in improving the efficiency of fruit and vegetable production and trade. In fact, I think farmers from the European Union could already learn quite a few things from Moldova’s growers.
I have been bullish on subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) for many years. Moldova was one of the countries where this technology began expanding after our earlier FAO/EBRD project demonstrated its potential benefits for horticulture.
Unlike conventional drip irrigation, SDI places irrigation lines below the soil surface and delivers water and nutrients directly to the root zone. When it is properly designed and managed, it can reduce evaporation, water consumption and weed pressure. It can also lower use on fertilisers, herbicides, fuel and labour while helping farmers increase yields and improve product quality. In other words, this is one of those technologies where the economic and environmental benefits reinforce each other.
Most importantly, SDI in Moldova is no longer an interesting theory or an experiment. Commercial systems have now been operating for seven years and more, allowing farmers to measure their actual impact, understand their maintenance requirements and calculate the real return on investment. Every year, more Moldovan growers are moving from conventional drip irrigation to SDI. For me, this is the strongest possible confirmation of the technology’s commercial viability: farmers are prepared to invest their own money in it.
Although our visit focused primarily on horticulture, SDI’s potential extends much further. In Ukraine, for example, much of the land equipped with SDI is used to grow maize, soybeans and other field crops. In my opinion SDI could help the Uzbekistan address not only its worsening water scarcity but also its protein deficit by making domestic production of soybeans and other protein crops more viable leading to profitable production of meat and dairy. I wrote about this possibility more than three years ago in this blog. Today, I believe the argument is even stronger because the technology has become more affordable, has been tested more widely and is better understood by commercial growers.
It was terefore not surprising that most participants identified SDI as the technology most relevant to their businesses, especially considering Uzbekistan’s growing water deficit. Nearly all of them expressed an intention to test it. Even I was surprised by many unexpected additional benefits of SDI, which were visible only after many years of commercial use – one of these was improved soil quality and higher organic matter content. This could be particularly important for Uzbekistan.
The second “low-hanging fruit, and, for some participants, a genuine revelation, was the proper use of weather stations. Several Uzbek growers already own weather stations but use them primarily as rather expensive thermometers. In Moldova, they discovered that a weather station can be much more than that and it is not that hard to use it. Data on temperature, precipitation, humidity, leaf wetness and other conditions can help farmers schedule irrigation more accurately and predict when crops face an elevated risk of particular diseases and also ideal spraying times. This allows them to apply water and crop-protection products when they are actually needed instead of simply following a fixed calendar, saving a lot of time, labor and money. The potential results are lower water and chemical use, more effective crop protection, lower costs and better quality of fresh produce.
Uzbek growers do not even need to make another major investment – the necessary equipment is already sitting on their farms. Our task was to provide them with as much practical information as possible so that they could turn these “thermometers” from pieces of farm furniture into tools that make them money.
How about weather station helping with exports? Sounds crazy but it is a reality. A weather station will not open a new export market by itself, of course but better crop protection decisions and lower pesticide residues can make it considerably easier for growers to comply with the requirements of demanding buyers in higher end markets such as the EU.
There is probably nothing that excites farmers quite as much as a flying sprayer, so agricultural drones naturally attracted a great deal of attention. Their wider use in Uzbekistan, however, will depend partly on whether the government removes or modifies the restrictions currently in place. Drones do not necessarily have to fly, which was also a surprise for many. In tall orchards, autonomous ground sprayers and other robotic platforms may sometimes be more practical and they are drones or robots or cobots. My Uzbek farmers, especially these growing vegetables, said that as soon as the government will allow it, they will be the fist to buy these agro-drones!
I remain convinced that drones and other agricultural robots are part of the future of farming. In fact the are the present in Ukraine! Five years ago, in 2021 Ukraine had around 2mn ha of agricultural crops already sprayed by drones and it is even a much more common technology now. Drones can spray during the most critical periods, e.g. after the rain when heavy sprayers can’t enter the field, which is a game changer for vegetables as well as field crops. They also improve application precision, reduce chemical losses, greatly reduce the use of fossil fields and carbon footprint, reduce workers’ exposure to pesticides and help farms address growing labour shortages. They can also contribute to better product quality and lower production losses.
I was also impressed by the participants’ enthusiasm for biological crop protection, although it is always the case. Farmers are generally interested in this subject, but several participants told us that this was the first time they had seen biological protection being used scientifically, professionally and on a true commercial scale. For Moldovan farmers, market access creates a very practical motivation. If they want to supply demanding European supermarket chains, they must comply with strict pesticide-residue requirements. Some buyers and production programmes impose requirements that go considerably further than the legal minimum. We saw several examples in which biological methods, applied as part of a professional integrated pest-management system, provided effective protection while reducing the use of chemical crop protection while also lowering the costs.
Again, this creates a combination that I particularly like: greater economic efficiency, lower environmental impact and better access to higher-value markets.
I have focused mainly on broad technological areas, but the participants also learned many smaller practical tricks, such as Rustam’s more efficient sprayer nozzles that can produce immediate results. Sometimes we become so fascinated by expensive technologies that we underestimate the cumulative impact of small improvements. A better nozzle, a more precisely timed treatment may not sound revolutionary but when such improvements are multiplied across hundreds or thousands of farms, their effect on water consumption, production costs, yields and product quality can be enormous.
Most importantly, this knowledge will not remain with only nine farmers. Our team will soon publish videos and other materials from the visit. We will also organise events in Uzbekistan where the participants of the knowledge exchange visit will share directly with other growers what they saw, what they intend to test and, eventually, what worked and what did not.
This is how a five-day visit by nine people can eventually influence an entire sector: one practical improvement, one successful test and one farmer convincing another at a time. It will help individual growers improve their businesses and livelihoods. At the same time, it can help Uzbekistan save water, reduce the environmental footprint of agriculture, improve its export competitiveness and move closer to achieving its NDC 3.0 targets.
The visit was organised within the framework of the FAO/EBRD Agri-food Climate and Environmental Sustainability Initiative, under Subcomponent 2.2.3, “Greening the Horticultural Value Chain in Uzbekistan”.
Andriy Yarmak
Project Leader and CFIC Economist
The use of the site materials is free if there is a direct and open for search engines hyperlink to a specific publication of the East-Fruit.com website.
