The advantages of outsourcing your R&D department

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[:is]Surely you have ever thought about creating an R&D department, but what about the costs that this entails, will it be profitable? With Ideagro today it is possible to maintain its commitment to innovation but outsourcing that department.

The development of R+D+i projects is today a necessity in the berry sector, and it is that the new consumer trends and the growing demands on the part of all the links in the chain, make these projects the only possible tools to achieve the long-awaited competitiveness. However, testing the feasibility of these improvements or innovations is in many cases expensive, especially if we focus on some agricultural inputs.

In this context, the company arises Ideagro, specialized in the outsourcing of R&D projects, providing the sector with all the resources it needs to develop said projects.

“We have our own laboratories and test fields, as well as agreements with producers, where we carry out tests for our clients, mainly phytofortifiers, biofungicides and biostimulants. We speed up the work, we adapt to the client's needs and times, we minimize investments, we manage aid to finance investments, companies can obtain tax benefits..." Pedro Palazón, Ideagro's technical director, tells us, adding that another reason to opt for this outsourcing is that, once the trial is finished, reports are issued with the results obtained, a very useful tool that will provide confidence to the end customer, as it is an independent guarantee that gives the project more reliability.

Berry projects

Present in the citrus, stone fruit, horticultural and berry sectors, we visited with Palazón some of the trial fields in Cartaya where companies such as Solbiosur, through Ideagro, are studying the efficacy of two products, Moler K and Madurmax, focused on accelerating ripening and increasing productivity in strawberries, without reducing the commercial life of the fruit. “We have control plots, and others where we have applied these products separately and in combination. In the case of maturation, we have achieved a constant increase of between 10-15% more than Brix degrees, and in productivity, an increase of between 8-10%. These are really positive data for Solbiosur, and we hope that farmers will soon begin to use these tools in order to increase their profitability”, explains Pedro Palazón.

The work being done on blackberries also stands out. "We are working with Alltech's Procrop ISR, an inducer of resistance to fungal diseases, with which we aim to control diseases using the plants' own resistance mechanisms and avoid the use of chemical products for their control," adds Palazón.

It is about implementing real projects to solve current problems that concern the sector, and that without companies like Ideagro, many of them would be forced into oblivion due to lack of time, of specialized personnel to determine their effectiveness, and also, with very high costs for companies, in many cases almost unaffordable.[:]

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