A Crop Modelling Strategy to Improve Cacao Quality and Productivity

Abstract

Cacao production systems in Colombia are of high importance due to their direct impact in the social and economic development of smallholder farmers. Although Colombian cacao has the potential to be in the high value markets for fine flavour, the lack of expert support as well as the use of traditional, and often times sub-optimal technologies makes cacao production negligible. Traditionally, cacao harvest takes place at exactly the same time regardless of the geographic and climatic region where it is grown, the problem with this strategy is that cacao beans are often unripe or over matured and a combination of both will negatively affect the quality of the final cacao product. Since cacao fruit development can be considered as the result of a number of physiological and morphological processes that can be described by mathematical relationships even under uncontrolled environments. Environmental parameters that have more association with pod maturation speed should be taken into account to decide the appropriate time to harvest. In this context, crop models are useful tools to simulate and predict crop development over time and under multiple environmental conditions. Since harvesting at the right time can yield high quality cacao, we parameterised a crop model to predict the best time for harvest cacao fruits in Colombia. The cacao model uses weather variables such as temperature and solar radiation to simulate the growth rate of cocoa fruits from flowering to maturity. The model uses thermal time as an indicator of optimal maturity. This model can be used as a practical tool that supports cacao farmers in the production of high quality cacao which is usually paid at a higher price. When comparing simulated and observed data, our results showed an RRMSE of 7.2% for the yield prediction, while the simulated harvest date varied between +/−2 to 20 days depending on the temperature variations of the year between regions. This crop model contributed to understanding and predicting the phenology of cacao fruits for two key cultivars ICS95 y CCN51.

Turion: A Physiological Crop Model for Yield Prediction of Asparagus Using Sentinel-1 Data

“…Although, the previous and the only one asparagus crop model (ASPIRE) (Wilson et al, 1999) presented a RMSE of 0.39 cm there was not a direct comparison among TURION and ASPIRE to predict asparagus yield using the Peruvian data as there was not a ASPIRE code available. However, TURION rRMSE 16.72% was similar to STICS model 16.89 % and AquaCrop 17.84 %, higher than SIMPLE-cacao 7.2 % (Romero Vergel et al, 2022) and lower than those presented in others CSM such as SIMPLE 24.4 % (Zhao et al, 2019), SUBSTOR-potato 21.4 % (Raymundo et al, 2017), DSSAT 29.29 %, CropSyst 19.27 % andWOFOST 25.85 % (Confalonieri et al, 2016). Simulation results presented in this research are coincident with the number of spears produced by plant in field.…”

Genomic decoding ofTheobroma grandiflorum(cupuassu) at chromosomal scale: Evolutionary insights for horticultural innovation

“…Cupuassu and cacao are notably different for fruit abscission. Cupuassu fruits fall naturally when ripe, whereas cacao fruits need to be harvested from the tree [67,68]. We speculate that the multiple copies of the cacao GEX1 gene, including the two truncated ones, in conjunction with the proximity of TE at the CH4 loci, could either affect GEX1 expression or produce non-functional GEX1 proteins.…”

Genomic decoding of Theobroma grandiflorum (cupuassu) at chromosomal scale: evolutionary insights for horticultural innovation

“…Cupuassu and cacao notably differ for fruit abscission. Cupuassu fruits naturally abscise when ripe, whereas cacao fruits need to be harvested from the tree [ 93 , 94 ]. We speculate that the multiple copies of the cacao GEX1 gene, including the 2 truncated ones, together with the proximity of TE at the CH4 loci, could either affect GEX1 expression or produce nonfunctional GEX1 proteins.…”