Acrena is a Cooperative born in 1982, producer and marketer of cucumbers, peppers, varieties of tomatoes, eggplants, melons and watermelons. There are 350 members who market their products through this SAT. They distribute 40% in the national market and 60% in the European Community.
Industry: Fruit and vegetables
By using the BrioAgro devices at Acrena was achieved to reduce water consumption and therefore energy expenditure in irrigation. The BrioAgro system was connected to existing irrigation system on the farm to save costs on new installations and to be able to compare traditional irrigation with smart irrigation.
SAT ACRENA is certified by AGROCOLOR with extension to UNEGAP (including GLOBAL GAP), GRASP, Field to Folk (F2F), Tesco Nurture (TN) and BRC standards and protocols.
In addition to the cultivated hectares, they have their own seedbed of more than 4 hectares, three of which are wintered, with a multi-tunnel structure and equipped with modern climate control and irrigation technology.
The soil of the farm is clayey.
First of all, BrioAgro carried out a soil characterisation of its cucumber plantations. This data was used to adjust BrioAgro’s calibration algorithm for irrigation optimisation in step 2.
A comparative irrigation test (A/B) was carried out to check whether it improved on what Acrena technicians were already achieving with manual irrigation. To do this, we installed two BrioAgro ViTA7 devices with drip meters to take data from sectors A and B, and a BrioAgro AquaPower in sector A connected to the existing irrigation programmer, carrying out automatic irrigation from 12/12/2022 to 12/01/2023, as shown in the following diagram:
Sector A, using BrioAgro technology, has surpassed the objectives set for sector B, irrigated in the traditional way by Acrena technicians. The following has been achieved:
