Testimonial
Eugenio Navarro
Aconcagua Foods S.A.
Eugenio Navarro, a Field Technical Advisor at Aconcagua Foods S.A., oversees six fields of canned peaches totaling 1,249 acres. Located between the communes of Paine and San Fernando, these fields were planted between 2000 and 2020. The irrigation system uses a double-line drip with a precipitation rate of 0.079 inches. Irrigation is managed by DropControl, which also incorporates climate monitoring and humidity sensors from Consultora Diestre.
Peach
506 hectare
Drip irrigation, weather monitoring and humidity sensors
Because peach cultivation is a low-margin business, we rely on technologies like Dropcontrol to help us achieve better production yields.
By using telemetry, we only need two irrigation workers per field, which means we no longer need the six people that would have been required to cover all the irrigation shifts without the technology.
Having access to precise data lets us understand exactly why our fruit has a higher weight in some fields than in others. We know with certainty how much water we're providing and can see the direct impact of irrigation on the length of the fruit-bearing twigs and the number of fruits they produce.
Given the water deficit, it was really good to have the telemetry system. We only had a limited amount of water, 385,000 gallons/acre, compared to the 695,000 gallons/acre of a normal season. We were able to distribute the water more optimally by phenological state. With this, we achieved our production and quality objectives. In the field without telemetry, we only obtained 26,765 lbs/acre of lower quality, and practically all the production was for pulp. In contrast, with the telemetry, we achieved 31,226 lbs/acre of higher quality, with everything suitable for canning.
