Jorge Duarte will be one of the speakers at the International Blueberry Days Symposium to be held on May 3, 2023 in Rimini during Macfrut.
In the Blueberry School field day, Duarte will give an overview of the different pruning techniques for blueberry of the Southern Highbush type that are suitable for the Mediterranean climates of Spain, Portugal and southern Italy. During the Symposium, Duarte will explain the different approaches to nutrition, pruning and post-harvest with the goal of bringing an optimal blueberry from the field to the consumer.
Duarte is a senior agronomist, trained at the University of Algarve, Portugal, with a degree in Agronomy on Horticulture completed in 2011 and has been in consulting developed in Portugal since 2012. In 2015 he created Hortitool Consulting to expand the consulting business and today Hortitool Consulting is a leading consulting services company for strawberry, raspberry, blackberries and blueberries production in Portugal.
Internationally, he has been working since 2015 mainly in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and the Caucasus. It has been present in countries such as the United States, Australia, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Romania, Austria, Turkey, Georgia, and Egypt, advising leading berry companies and projects, reaching 1000 hectares of recommended area in 2022, where blueberries becomes the main recommended crop from its business portfolio.
In addition to his consulting work, Jorge Duarte is an advocate of knowledge transfer and has been involved in organizing and participating in several berry-related conferences and events in his country and internationally since 2019.
