Diagnóstico das experiências de agricultores agroecológicos na produção de sementes de hortaliças.

Abstract

According to the agroecological principles, one of the steps for the sustainability of production to occur is by reducing farmers' dependence to the external inputs. A production carried out from seeds produced by family farmers will reduce the dependence of these technological packages. Thus, the objective of this study was to diagnose the experiences of agroecological farmers in the city of Sumé-PB, in the production of vegetable seeds and to evaluate the physiological quality of lettuce seeds (Lactuca sativa L.) produced by farmers in comparison to the seeds produced in the system conventional. For the diagnosis, visits were made to the properties of the farmers who are linked to the Association of Agroecological Family Producers of Sumé - APFA'S. During the visits, ten farmers were interviewed and semi-structured questionnaires were applied to identify the techniques used during seed production. To perform the physiological quality analysis, lettuce seeds from three farmers and conventional seeds were used where were submitted to sanity tests; emergency; IVE; length of seedling and dry matter. Through this diagnosis it was possible to identify that farmers produce a big diversity of vegetables, however, there are still few crops that they use to obtain seeds, and these do not follow technical criteria such as temperature, isolation, harvesting and storage location. As for the physiological analysis, the seeds produced by the farmer (T1) presented higher physiological quality, followed by the conventional seeds (T4). The seeds produced by the farmers (T3) and (T2) presented the lowest results regarding the physiological quality. It is possible that this occurred as a result of a late harvest of the seeds, contributing to the advance of deterioration of the seeds still in the field.