Mazzoni’s Bibaum system has won over the main pip fruit producing areas.
The development of this technique for producing plants in nurseries using dual-axis is already present in the largest European productions due to its many advantages.
The system’s most important feature may be summarised in the time factor, since the new tree is planted in the usual way, but it is already ready for production. This fast entry into business and its evolution towards two-dimensional systems make the different growing operations easier: pruning, thinning or harvesting, as well as the total or partial mechanisation of these tasks.
Another of the improvements lies in the efficiency of the plant protection treatments to avoid drifting as much as possible, which allows producers to move forward towards a more exact fruit growing process, which is, therefore, more economically and environmentally sustainable.
This procedure allows an obvious saving in labour costs, since it is a system that is easily adapted to mechanisation.
The system, which is quite widespread all over Europe, is very highly valued by the Catalonian producers from Gerona and Lerida. On this point, Ignasi Iglesias, a scientist from IRTA, comments that “one of the main advantages lies in the fact that the plants have a more two-dimensional crown and improved occupation of the assigned space, which allows a more uniform lighting of the fruit, a reduction in shady areas and less impact on varieties that are sensitive to sunlight or ‘sun blow’.”
The specialist from IRTA explains how the system conveys other added advantages, such as the forming of young wood on the tree. “All of this is due to a greater interception of the light, keeping the fruit closer to the axis and minimising the woody structure of the tree, which in turn provides an increase in the size, colour of the fruit and quality of the harvest.”
And along the same lines, sources from one of the Catalonian cooperatives state that “this volume of the crown is translated into a larger number of leaves and fruit, which means a larger percentage of top quality fruit.”
After several decades of practise work, the method has been validated and acknowledged by scientists all over Europe and it has been fully confirmed that the investment recovery period is less than for the traditional Spindel system.
