Employees of Bayer CropScience Vegetable Seeds have taken Dutch cucumber growers on a trip to visit a number of Spanish growers and sales organisations that focus on growing and processing cucumbers, with the goal of the trip to show what cucumber cultivation is like in the Almería region.
Over the course of a few days in Almería, the Dutch growers visited large and small growing companies, the auction, and the region's largest cooperative.
Almería has seen its horticulture sector make massive strides in professionalism over the past decades. And those developments are still going on: The land area is increasing and the infrastructure is constantly improving. But Spanish growers could still work more efficiently. There are also significant differences from one grower to the next.
'No two fields looked the same - one grower had an old crop, while the next had young plants,' says Dutch cucumber grower Jeroen Geven.
The growers who were visited as part of the trip were dealing with a lot of downy mildew this season, but the companies visited were just a random sample. 'Almería is a massive region, measuring approximately 27,000ha,' notes Ties Verbaarschot. 'We visited a lot of companies, but we probably saw less than 1 per cent of the total area cultivated.'
