BAKU, Azerbaijan, Dec.3
By Tamilla Mammadova – Trend:
More and more Georgian farmers are growing pomegranates, Trend reports via the EastFruit portal.
Georgia annually consumes imported pomegranate worth more than $1 million per season. This fruit is mainly imported from Turkey and Azerbaijan.
As a wild crop, pomegranate is widespread in Georgia, but the optimal climatic conditions for growing pomegranate are in Kakheti (Eastern Georgia) in Dedoplistskaro and Signagi municipalities. Harvesting of local pomegranates, like importing imported ones, begins at the end of September.
Hornabuji company owns a total of 35 hectares of pomegranate orchard, of which 15 hectares were planted 4 years ago, the rest 2 years ago.
The company, taking into account the acquired experience, when laying a new garden, paid more attention to the selection of the variety. And when it laid out a new garden 2 years ago, it had already planted the seedlings of the Turkish Hicaz pomegranate.
According to the director of the company Avtandil Dzhibladze, the new variety has a better presentation and is better preserved.
The pomegranate harvest in 2020 began at the end of September and lasted for a month. The four-year-old garden has harvested 60 tons of crops, most of which have already been sold.
The Hornabuji pomegranate was sold both directly from the garden and through supermarket chains (Agrohab, Goodwill), while some of the products were sent for processing. The delivery cost for processing was 0.5 lari (15 cents), the price of a pomegranate on the market ranged from 1.5 to 2.5 lari (45 cents-76 cents).
In 2019-2020 marketing year (from September 2019 to September 2020), the largest amount of pomegranates came to Georgia from Azerbaijan ($668,900), followed by Turkey ($545,300).
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