Serbia: Soft fruits in the focus

A delegation of seven Dutch companies from the soft fruit sector visited Serbia for a three day visit last week. During the first two days of the visit, several Serbian raspberry, strawberry and blueberry growers received their Dutch counterparts to walk through through their production process and discuss potential improvements with their colleagues from the Netherlands The visit also highlighted some of the recent developments in Serbian berry production.

Apart from visiting Serbian soft fruit orchards, the Dutch companies attended the second Berry Business Forum where several of them took an active role in the program by giving presentations and participating in panel discussion on [VGB B.V., BVB Substrates B.V., Fall Creek B.V., see program] and all were actively engaged in the business matchmaking activities taking place throughout the day. As a follow-up to this visit, some of the Serbian counterparts will be visiting the Netherlands from [insert dates] to see the latest the Netherlands has to offer in the soft fruit sector. 

The conference part tackled topics of interest for berry producers: from planting materials, modern cultivation techniques and irrigation to production standards, cooperative business models and product branding. will also address the issue of labor in the agriculture, evermore important topic, especially in this manually intensive sub-sector.

The spinoff of the Dutch trade visit and today’s conference will be a visit of Serbian soft fruit growers to the Netherlands in the first week of October organized by the PIB soft fruit project in Serbia (www.smallfruitserbia.com)