Despite Pear cultivation seeing a growth in Poland over the last few years, when looking at the last decade the acreage and production has actually dropped significantly, FreshPlaza informs. According to Emilia Lewandowska, office manager for Polish top fruit exporter Fruit-Group, more apple producers are diversifying and choosing pears as the alternative crop:
“According to the data we have available, the Poland pears are currently cultivated on 7500 hectares of land. Over the past three years, that acreage has grown by 11 per cent. When we dive further into the past, the acreage for pears was actually quite a lot bigger about ten years ago, about 40 per cent more than the current acreage. Pears are very demanding in production and producers were not exactly encouraged to keep producing them. Right now, the situation has changed. The apple production is in a poor state, which is why producers have started diversification of production, and choose pears for this. In our group of producers, we’ve noticed 30 per cent of growth when it comes to the area destined for pear cultivation in the past two years.”
Demand for both apples and pears is pretty good, especially on the local market, Lewandowska states. “The 2023/2024 season has high demand for both pears and apples, right from the start of the season. When it comes to out group, 95 per cent of the pear production goes to the domestic market. Since September, we’ve had a lot of work in the pear area. When it comes to our production, we’ve noticed that the quality gets better every year. We mostly grow Conference pears, with the second variety being Lucas, then Paten, Clapp’s Favourite.”
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Not everyone can simply switch to pear cultivation, Lewandowska emphasizes. The challenges that come with this product are completely different from apple production: “Pears need good soil and localisation of land is important. That is why it’s not so simple to change the production towards more pears. Regarding diseases, the biggest problem is the Pseudomonas Syringae bacteria. Low temperatures and high humidity are beneficial for it. This all makes the cultivation of pears difficult for those that aren’t familiar with it. For us, we hope that our sales for pears will see a growth compared to last season. An increase of 7 per cent would satisfy us as a company,” she concludes.
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