BAKU, Azerbaijan, Sept.22
By Tamilla Mammadova – Trend:
About 200 tons of apples are planned to be harvested by the Georgian company AgroKartli this year in its 10-hectare apple orchard located in the Gori municipality (Shida Kartli region, Eastern Georgia), Trend reports via the EastFruit portal.
The company began harvesting apples in early September and plans to complete the harvest in about 2 weeks.
The intensive apple orchard was founded by AgroKartli LLC in 2017 with the support of the state program "Plant the Future", under which state funding in the amount of 100,000 lari ($31,200) was allocated for the purchase of seedlings and the arrangement of the drip irrigation system.
According to the director and co-founder of AgroKartli, Georgi Simonishvili, this year the company received its first commercial harvest in its apple orchard. It is expected that after the garden reaches full fruiting, the harvest will increase to 500 tons.
As he noted, the company sells part of the harvested crop to buyers, and stores another part in its own refrigeration facilities. There are no problems with the sale of apples at the moment, the demand for them is quite active.
The average purchase price for AgroKartli apples is now 1.5 lari ($0.47) per kg. There are also exporters among buyers.
The State Program "Plant the Future" has been implemented by the Rural Development Agency (RDA) since 2015. Within the framework of this program, about 10,000 hectares of new orchards were laid in Georgia, including 1,128 hectares of intensive and semi-intensive apple orchards.
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