GAF
Coffee planting began at full speed in the Elpidio Sosa cooperative
The only ones of its kind, in the provincial development program, workers from the Cooperativa de Creditos y Servicios Elpidio Sosa (CCS) of Puerto Padre, since the last hours, sow 25 hectares of coffee in the plain, in order to obtain the grain for territorial supply and reduce imports.
As part of this productive activity, the group carried out adequate soil management with animal traction, complying with technical instructions from the specialists of the Guisa Research Experimental Station, in Granma. To promote the cultivation within the donkey plantain fields, which will guarantee the shade for the postures, they planted canavalia, a plant that fixes nitrogen to the soil, provides seeds and will also be used as green feed for animal food, as it has forage machines. of the Agricultural Intercoooperation Support project, APOCOOP. Likewise, they sow the Robusta variety in semi-shade, for which they have more than 10,000 seedlings transferred from forest nurseries in the municipalities of Las Tunas and Amancio, work that continues this week, to complete the 30,000. The engineer Wilmer Espinosa Vargas, president of the cooperative, said that more than a year ago, when the specialists of the Coffee Institute trained their farmers, they saw it as a distant project, but today, it is a fact, which represents a commitment more because of the significance it has in the country's economy. Espinosa Vargas added that the coffee is planted in a plantation frame of 3 by 3 meters, it has 1,111 plants per hectare and for this work they process a bank loan of about 5 million pesos to be used in the 4 years of promotion and development. of the crop. The manager recognized the efforts of the cooperatives in the transfer of the positions, the opening of 1,111 holes per hectare with specialized equipment and the deposit in each of those holes of 15 kilograms of organic matter, tasks to which they have dedicated long hours. Once this program advances in the CCS, they will work to create areas of drying rooms, mills and other premises that will turn the place into a center for processing the grain in order to obtain a product suitable for consumption. This work, argued engineer Wilmer Espinosa Vargas, is currently being carried out by cooperative members who were trained for this purpose, but next year it will demand a greater workforce, so it will be another source of employment for residents of the community. Today, the planting of 25 hectares of coffee constitutes a challenge for the producers of Elpidio Sosa, since this group is in charge of other sources of production such as the mini-industry of construction materials, that of cassava and the APOCOOP project. In addition, next year they will run the factories of animal feed and that of cassava flour and its derivatives, which includes food for celiac and diabetic children. Together with the coffee project, governed by the Forestry Company, there is another program that has among its objectives to make the CCS Elpidio Sosa the one with the largest cultivation area in the province of Las Tunas and to extend the sowing to other cooperatives in Puerto Padre, which opens up other opportunities for the development of the municipality.
