The Ministry of Municipality, represented by the Department of Agriculture, introduced new technology in Qatar. The technology is related to automatic grafting machines to produce grafted vegetable seedlings as a part of the execution of the projects to raise the sustainable productivity of vegetable crops to achieve food security.
The step launched by the government as a part of the commitment that they will adopt a social development programme which is going to be funded by the Japanese company, ‘Mitsui Ltd., which is specialised in financing research projects.
In this context, research was funded to raise the tolerable productivity of vegetable crops at an amount of half a million US dollars, knowing that the introduction of this technology is one of the ways to transfer technological means to the farmer community, to conduct experiments and produce grafted seedlings to treat production problems resulting from the Qatari environmental conditions.
The Director of the Agricultural Research Department at the Ministry of Municipality, Hamad Saket Al Shammari, emphasised the productive collaboration between the Ministry represented by the Agricultural Research Department and Mitsui Co., Ltd.
As per the Hamad Saket Al Shammari, the collaboration between these cooperations will contribute to the implementation of a number of research experiments, which will also lead to results and suggestions being presented to farmers and to those who are interested in agriculture.
He further stated the intro of the modern technologies, in which automatic vaccination machine is included, and giving preference to this programme, which comes within the framework of developing vegetable production techniques, and stated that the process of the vaccination was conducted mainly for some foremost vegetable crops for the state food security system, for example, tomatoes, eggplant, and some cucurbit crops.
At some point, Dr Al Sayed Al Azzazi, who is an expert in genetic resources in the Agricultural Research Department and supervisor of research experiments sponsored by the aforementioned company, stated that the automatic grafting machine for vegetable seedlings has a production capacity of 800 seedlings per hour, which would help to complete work faster and without dependent on labours.