The Ministry of Municipality, represented by the Department of Agricultural Research, organised an orientation field day for farmers and farm owners on raising the productivity of leafy and fruit crops throughout the year with minimal water consumption and introducing ongoing research on sustainable productivity of vegetable crops to achieve food security.
Department director Hamad Saket al-Shammari stressed that the field day will be followed by a number of field days and workshops to present research results and recommendations, and gather feedback from farmers and those interested in agriculture, and develop a research system to serve farmers towards food security.
In turn, department consultant Dr Ali El Kharbotly said during his review of ecological and environmental agriculture that a new cultivation method has been developed, which combines several methods of cultivation.
This new method contributes to achieving food security with independence from the global market of fertilisers and agricultural pesticides, relying instead on local resources.
Kharbotly explained that this method also helps to increase the fertility of agricultural soil and increase the production of organic vegetable crops at competitive prices, by reducing the cost of production inputs while preserving natural farm resources and the Qatari environment.
He said that this new method reduces production costs by more than 90%.
Dr al-Sayed al-Azazi, an expert on genetic resources, spoke about the development of the germplasm of tomato varieties to resist the high temperatures in Qatar.
He said that the current research experiments focus on evaluating and selecting a large number of tomato varieties and hybrids to identify the most suitable for the Qatari environment, through a project to spread heat-tolerant and high-quality tomato varieties for production in greenhouses.
Dr al-Azazi added that during the first and second seasons of the project, 239 plant inputs were evaluated to obtain accurate data on the possibility of production during the summer months and resistance to agricultural diseases and pests.
