Geha Foods Evaluation of Irrigation for Processed Tomatoes

The Assignment
Introduction
This volunteer consultancy was undertaken at the request of Geha Foods to evaluate
alternatives for irrigating processing tomatoes. Geha Foods is a private individual effort by
Irena and Helmut Haninger, a couple from Europe, outside Dushanbe, Tajikistan (Fig. 1).
While Geha Foods is strictly in the business of processing tomatoes with the potential of
processing other foods, they are concerned with the production of the tomatoes and other
foods entering the plant to make certain they have a continuous supply of produce to process.
It is thus the intentions of Geha Foods to provide some production assistance to the contract
producers. At the time of this writing the envisioned assistance is hybrid seed of preferred
tomato varieties, as well as irrigation technology including the possible capital costs of
renovating the existing on-farm irrigation system, and/or funding the installation of center
pivot sprinkler or drip irrigation, if feasible, as well as providing contract mechanization
services such as mechanical transplanters for transplanting tomatoes, etc. The organization of
these support services in relation to the processing facility has not been fully formulated, and
probably can wait until the intended services are more fully developed.
Fig. 1. Geha Foods Tomato Processing Facility under
Construction
As the initial part of the agriculture support effort, Geha Foods is currently undertaking
variety evaluations of tomato lines from across the globe including local, Indian, European
and USA varieties with the expectation of major production beginning next summer.
Considering the location and conditions it is really an interesting and diverse set of germ
plasma to evaluate. The material from Europe was provided with assistance of SIDA, while
the material from the USA was provide via an earlier ACDI/VOCA – Winrock Volunteer.
These variety evaluations are laid out more as single replication on-farm demonstrations
rather then the more traditional multi-replication field trials normally done for formal variety
evaluations. The non-replicated random layout is consistent with previous visits to the CIS
and Central Asia evaluating the rice research program in CIS member countries. However,
under the circumstances the results should be accurate enough for in-house production
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