Sugar Transfer assay in strawberries

22 July, 2024/in Assays/by arvensisagro

From Arvensis we seek to make the most of what plants give us to increase the final quality of the harvest. In this SUGAR TRANSFER trial we are going to see how to increase the organoleptic characteristics of your crop.

This is a strawberry trial, but it is also a very popular product for grapes, as the increase of brix degrees and colour is highly valued, in order to obtain a high quality product.

How can Sugar Transfer help you?

SUGAR TRANSFER is a product that translocates sugars through the photosynthesis process from the production centres (leaves) to the fruit during the development and ripening phase.

SUGAR TRANSFER increases the sugar content of the fruits, without modifying the physiology of the plants, and being a product of natural origin and catalogued as ecological, it does not alter the evolution of the plants, but rather provides benefits by extending their life.

The main characteristics of SUGAR TRANSFER:

a) Ideal for crops that need to increase sugar content.

b) Advancement in ripening, due to the fact that the fruit acquires the necessary sugar content earlier.

c) Improves the natural colouring of the fruit.

(d) Unification in ripening.

(e) Improvement of size.

Assay data

Crop	Strawberry variety “Ventana”
Location	In a so-called ‘big-tube’ greenhouse, Huelva (España)
Date	25th November
Surface	The effective area was 2.4 m2 and the total trial area was 86.4 m2 . The total crop density is 55 000 plants/ha.
Dose	Foliar treatment of SUGAR TRANSFER at the dose of 2.5 L/Ha

In this test, Brix degrees were measured using the Refractometric system, which is the most suitable method for measuring the sugar and soluble solids content in fruit. It is based on the degrees of inclination of a beam of light when it passes through a liquid, the more sugar and soluble solids it contains, the greater the inclination, and vice versa, the less inclination the lower the sugar and soluble solids content.

Samples were taken from each of the plants (both treated and untreated), and the ºBrix of the juice obtained by squeezing several strawberries from each of the plants was determined, so that from each plant we had a measurement; then the average of the measurements of each row of plants was calculated and finally the final average was calculated for each of the applications.

Results and analysis

To check the effectiveness of the product, a control was established by comparing the results obtained after applying the product with those obtained in a test using only water. A single sampling was carried out on 21 January.

	CONTROL	SUGAR TRANSFER
Sugars (ºBrix)	5,1	8,98
	5,22	9,14
	5,2	9,1
	5,11	8,99
	5,12	9,02
Average	5,16	9,06

Graph 1 shows the graph showing the increase in sugars (ºBrix) of the strawberries treated with SUGAR TRANSFER, compared to the controls.

Conclusions

In the data obtained from the test, a significant increase in the sugar content of all the samples of fruit treated with SUGAR TRANSFER was observed with respect to the controls, which, as can be seen in the graph, reached a difference of almost 75%.

The fact of observing an increase in the sugar content of the fruit treated with SUGAR TRANSFER is the cause of early ripening, which makes it possible to bring forward the harvest, reaching earlier the optimum concentration of sugars that the fruit needs to be marketed.