Heavy rainfall in the period between the change of colour and ripening can cause fruit to split (also called “cracking”), certainly the most serious threat to cherry trees. Most of the systems available on the market today are based on different technological solutions, which all have the same drawback: opening and closing them requires heavy and expensive manual labour, limiting use to the most critical phase (during the ripening period until harvest). The “Cap Solution” project was born to address this issue, which aims to create an innovative system capable of fully protecting cherry tree plants, both existing and new, with covers that open and close automatically.
The project was launched around two years ago, also thanks to the economic contribution of the Emilia-Romagna Region as part of 2014-2020 RDP Measure 16.1.01, and is primarily carried out by the company Magif in Vignola (MO) with the scientific collaboration of the Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences (Distal) of the University of Bologna and the technical and organizational coordination of the Plant Production Research Center.
