New varieties and crop changes. It is a recipe for local measures by scientists to deal with climate change in the face of a historic drought. The researcher of the program for the efficient use of water in agriculture of the Institut de Recerca i Tecnologia Agroalimentàries (IRTA), Joan Girona, a supporter of irrigation canals, and Narcís Prat, emeritus professor of Ecology at the University of Barcelona, critical of large infrastructures and agricultural overexploitation, agree on the need to change species and replace maize or alfalfa with early cereal and sunflower and open a profound debate on new crops.
Prat maintains that without questioning what is grown, the problem will not be solved. He insists that when the Segarra Garrigues canal was built, it was already known that there was no water. “We have reached something that we already knew, for many years no one has paid attention to scientific reports, to everything that has been said. Many scientists have been told that we were all things, terrorists”, affirms Prats, for whom now the solution is a sum of small solutions, such as reclaimed water, more desalination, improvement of aquifers and savings.
In its report The Water Book for the then Ministry of the Environment and Habitatge, it already pointed out in 2009 that future warmer and drier conditions could compromise the crop structure and that the irrigation sector would be the most affected, with increases in demand of water due to greater evapotranspiration and the increase in irrigable hectares.
With a large part of the cereal harvest lost, Agroseguro estimates that 110,000 hectares will be compensated in Catalonia, the highest figure in its 40 years of activity. "Right now we have to save what we have, when this summer passes I hope we will learn lessons and more resistant varieties and infrastructure improvements will be planted," says Girona. He is one of the researchers in the trial of irrigated almond trees that the Lleida Provincial Council and IRTA planted on the corporation's experimental farm in Maials with a minimum allocation of 2,000 cubic meters per hectare per year in 2003.
Now, with two guaranteed irrigations in the d'Urgell canal and compromised survival, the IRTA recommendation in that area is to remove as many or all of the fruits as possible so that they do not consume water and, if necessary, prune them. Also advance the uprooting of the farms in which the farmers had planned to do so in the next two or three years to renew varieties. "Many farmers are going to remove all the fruits to save the trees," Girona advances.
In the case of fruit trees, Girona recommends planting smaller trees. not so much because of its resistance to drought but because of the lower demand for water. This is the trend shared by Ignasi Iglesias, technical director of the Agromillora company, with self-rooted almond trees, in dry conditions, with longer roots that may go deeper into the soil.
The group for the genetic improvement of fruit trees from Cebas-CSIC, from Murcia, in which Federico Dicenta participates, has created an almond rootstock for rainfed land, DryStock One, based on the traditional knowledge of adaptation to dry land, with genetic guarantee and sanitary.
The change of varieties with less water needs is also the alternative of the professor of Applied Physics at the University of Alcalá de Henares Antonio Ruiz de Elvira, an expert in climate change who frequently participates in forums for fruit growers. He says that fruit companies have not fully entered into this conversion of crops and, from his point of view, "there is no interest" that the situation requires.
