Cyprus Hydroponic and soilless cultures

In the beginning of April, I had the pleasure of visiting Cyprus in order to inspect the market and focus on hydroponics and soilless cultures.

Cyprus is an agriculture oriented island, with traditional cropping practices in orchards and open field vegetables, and in parallel there is a growing interest in greenhouse cultivation with an emphasis on soilless cultures.

The reason for the increased soilless cultures is a poor soil performance due to continuous intensive mono-cultivation and in some cases – inadequate fertilization usage.

So, soilless substrates was the main issue of this trip. Reviewing the Cyprian greenhouse agriculture, focusing on the varies substrates, I have noticed few acute problems:

- Lack of fertilizers basic knowledge
- Serious shortage of guiding institute or personal
- Exclusive dependence on off-shore laboratories for drainage, substrate extraction and dripper solutions (crucial for soilless growers)
- Lack of measuring and monitoring equipment

Previously, Haifa created tools for greenhouse growers for several crops – tomato, cucumber and strawberry (other crops are under process), and these were distributed for Cyprian farmers (see picture) and demonstrated.

Hope that this tool will be in handy, major activity was dedicated to train the agronomical staff of the distributor in order to have an effective conveyers of knowledge and practice.

The main idea was to infiltrate the idea of 'Poly-Feed easy-to-use' in different formula, combining the Haifa-Cal and the Magnisal for comprehensive solution to the inexperienced growers.

This training seminar highlighted the main issues of substrates agriculture, and included substrates review, practical tools for varies measurements, and of course – fertilizers formula for the different crops and cultures.