Advanced network for chestnut growing, activating innovative strategies in Tuscany
To provide an answer to the chestnut supply chain technological and process issues and guarantee a healthy and high-quality product. The FORECAST project targets two complementary areas aiming at: (a) reducing the recurrence and the formation of rot on the chestnut fruit, whether in the field or during the storage and (b) increasing the chestnut fruit selection process, both in terms of accuracy and safety, before packaging.
The activities will consist of:
- development of protocols for the treatment of trees in the open field with zero impact methods;
- introduction of "good practices" for the management of the fruit throughout the production process: from harvesting, to preservation and pre-commercialization storage;
- innovation of the fruit selection and reject process through the integration of near infrared spectrophotometric analysis (NIR) into a prototype of an automatic sorting system;
- dissemination of results and training
The chestnut chain, despite being one of the Italian agri-food excellence sectors and a territorial quality brand that contributes to the image of our country, is characterized by a historically modest technological level, which has hindered and effective response to the collapse of production (about 90% in 2017) and to the increase in the defective product caused by the proliferation of damaging agents and fruit diseases associated with changing climatic conditions.
Compared to the current problems - i.e. (i) contamination of micro-toxin-producing fungi (Aspergillus, Penicillum), (ii) high incidence of rot damage on the fruit, (iii) poor ability to identify and separate the defective product - which result in reduced productivity and, even more seriously, in an amplification of the damage caused by rotting due to post-selection cross-contamination, the traditionally adopted methods not only show little efficacy, but can also become risk-amplifying factors.
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