The best news that could come with the cool March has arrived: 100 % of the agricultural areas of cold season were planted, which is usually the most fertile stage and the largest extensions in the territory.

They sowed exactly 18,946 hectares (ha), and the percentage of compliance reached 104; an extra that seems minimal, but that exceeds the agreed amount by 740. That is not a minor fact. The potato of the entire province, for example, does not occupy 600 ha.

However, the news is encouraging for two other reasons: first, because it manages to keep up with the previous campaign (September 2020-February 2021), which ended with 17,876 ha, which then represented 100 percent compliance. In other words, this time we planted 1,000 more hectares. We grew up!

Second: we came from a contest in which we had fallen very low before fulfilling and growing. Invasor said it bluntly. "With the shortest month of the year, a long chain of setbacks concluded that strangled the forecasts until leaving the 21,600 hectares of this season at 50 %." It was March 2020 and we were talking about “Withered Agriculture”. The fuel delivery pretty much explained it by itself; there were months when they barely received 19 % of what was agreed upon.

"The plans were made," any farmer would say, two years later, who now has better forecasts, even though the allocation of resources does not register growth; not even compliances, in most crops. In fact, the balance report of the Provincial Delegation puts the tagline first. He says, "average yields are obtained, according to the limitations due to the lack of inputs." That is 7 tons per hectare (t/ha) for tubers, 8 for vegetables, 0.99 for grains and 8 for fruit trees.

They have fallen about half. Therefore, more land is not synonymous with more tons; although it will be the harvest that offers the accurate and comparable data.

For now, some signs even associate the lack of resources with non-compliance “inside” some products. An excel table of the sub-delegation of Various Crops shows it. Winter planting was not uniform for all crops. "In general, we met 104 %, but the lack of fertilizers, above all, prevented further progress in taro, banana fruit and tomato, for example," Humberto Ortega González, a specialist in Various Crops in that sub-delegation, says.