Our Cultivation Practices
ALSAGRO is a grain farming company. We are ambassadors of responsible agriculture adapted to local climatic and environmental conditions. Indeed, our daily challenge is to produce more with an ever-changing climate and rainfall. However, our production techniques guarantee us flexibility and profitability thanks to modern farming techniques that preserve as much soil moisture as possible, which today exceeds the country’s average yield. Romania has one of the richest soils in Europe, also called “cernoziom”, this black soil is easy to work and guarantees a good yield.
For example, ploughing, which is a costly practice in terms of energy, often synonymous with erosion, drying out the soil and excessive disturbance of soil life, is not practised on the farm.
We use simplified tillage techniques that allow us to optimise our productivity while preserving the soil. We therefore try to limit the number of operations between sowing and harvesting as much as possible; we present below the different techniques used on the farm:
- cultivating stubble at a shallow depth of between 5 and 12 cm;
- deeper cultivation of stubble, often carried out before winter, at a depth of around 20 cm;
- direct seeding of new crops on uncultivated land;
Romanian soils are very suitable for this type of cultivation practice; thanks to these techniques, the surface horizon, which is characterised by a black colour, is preserved. It is rich in humus and favours the decomposition of organic residues from previous crops. In general, a stubble cultivator passage allows cereals to establish under optimum conditions.
At the same time, lucerne (a green crop par excellence) has an important place in the crop rotation, it is a perennial crop that has many agronomic, economic and ecological advantages: it’s long roots restructure the soil and fix nitrogen in the soil. In order to limit overpasses and establish lucerne a year before its first harvest, it is sown at the same time as sunflower. We use micro-seeders to place alfalfa seed on the sunflower row. This allows the lucerne to establish properly during the development of the sunflower crop.
