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Macedonia Produces High Class Table Grapes
 AgBiz is assisting Macedonian agribusiness value chains with good export growth potential to understand market demand and make their products more competitive on export
markets!
"Thanks to utilizing the latest technologies for improving table grape handling Agrolozar has succeeded to positioning itself as a brand recognized as Macedonian table grapes with extra quality, not only on domestic, but also on foreign markets" - Delcho Baltovski, the Owner of Agrolozar
Agrolozar is one of the leading producers and exporters of table
grapes from Macedonia. The company is located in the south-eastern
part of the country, in the village of Hamzali, near Strumica. Agrolozar
is in the business of producing and selling table and wine grapes,
fruits, vegetables and seedlings. The company has 400 hectares of
vineyards, of which 340 under wine grapes and 60 hectares of table
grapes, primarily Victoria variety.
Following the market trends in table grapes production and
postharvest handling, in the past few months Agrolozar, with support
from USAID's AgBiz Program, implemented an activity that included a
series of measures to improve the production of Victoria variety
grapes. The new agro-technical measures that were implemented on
Agrolozar's table grapes including: shoot thinning, bunch reduction,
bunch tipping, berry thinning, defoliation, girdling and conducting
experiments with gibberellins acid, allowed production of high class
table grapes and added much greater value to the final product.
"There is no similar quality of table grapes in the entire Balkan region.
Agrolozar's table grapes production is the model which Macedonian
vine growers should target. These measures make table grapes more
standardized, with almost equal size, shape, quality and color." said
Professor Krum Boshkov from the Viticulture and Enology Department
at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and Food in Skopje,
responsible for implementation of the new agro-technical measures
and present the results to other participants in the Value Chain.
The new measures were chosen because of their positive effects over
the table grapes that were observed during several technical study
tours organized by USAID's AgBiz in Republic of South Africa and in
California.
"Harvesting is more efficient than previous years because the clusters
are now easily accessible and more practical for packaging. We are in
the middle of the harvest season, and thanks to the recommendations
that we applied and the measures which we have implemented as a
result of USAID's AgBiz support, we are now able to produce table
grapes with outstanding quality. By the end of this season we expect
to harvest around 450 tons of high quality table grapes."; said Nikola
Mitev, the agronomist at Agrolozar.
This activity improved Agrolozar's table grapes production as well the
postharvest technologies, improved their competitiveness and make
them able to keep the market share on regional, and increase the
penetration on international markets. Therefore 70% percent of the
table grape production is exported to Russia, Poland, Lithuania and
Moldova, and the remaining 30% to ex- Yugoslav markets, especially
Serbia and Croatia.
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