Start Year:
2012
Sector:
Agriculture
Position:
Head of Crops
Pedro Diez Repetto
Born in Virasoro, Pedro studied at the Victoria School, at the Agricultural Institute, and later studied Agronomy in Corrientes. There he began to work and “because of one of life’s things” he returned to the town and to work in Las Marías.
He had just received his first job in the field and in production in Las Marías, and since then, he has been learning and accumulating knowledge, which today allows him to supervise the development and evolution of our yerba, tea and trees.
“Las Marías is a leader in the application of technology for agriculture in balance with the ecosystem”
His mother is retired from La Fundación, she started as a teacher, Vice Principal and Director of the Victoria School, while his father was the rector of the Agrotechnical Institute. Pedro began in field work, in the Research and Development area, where he began learning about trials, product testing and testing of production techniques. He then went on to take charge of the production of seedlings in the nursery and of new projects and new investments in yerba mate plantations, as well as task scheduling and soil preparation. Since 2011 he has been in charge of the general supervision of the Las Marías, Virasoro and La Merced fields, which includes pest control, weed control, contractor control, supervision and administration of machines and personnel.
One of Pedro's greatest challenges is to optimize resources to find the appropriate time for each plantation and from an environmentally sustainable point of view. He achieves this through integrated pest management, which involves plant training, plant pruning and harvesting. “We carry out appropriate pruning and feed the plant appropriately so that it is healthy, so that it is strong at the time of normal attacks by pests and weeds. In addition, we maintain the yerbal ecosystem and the tea ecosystem as harmonious as possible, as sustainable as possible,” he tells us.
The success of Pedro’s work is also closely linked to an initiative that began ten years ago: the Las Marías compost. “The composting process consists of transforming and changing the mentality of what is industrial waste. It is an organic amendment that we add to the yerbal plants to boost their production, to feed the soil since the soil is the support for the production of yerba.” Based on the by-products from the yerba mate dryer, the tea dryer, the seeds, the sticks, the leaves and the by-products that remain from the forest area, a homogeneous mixing process is carried out so that through the microorganisms the organic matter is degraded and transformed into compost, which is a much more stable and rich organic matter," he explains.