Young Slovenian farmer achieves double victory in Europe
Aleš Čadež, a young farmer from Slovenia, has achieved a double victory on the European stage, winning the Best Young Farmer and Best Energy Efficiency Project awards at the European Congress of Young Farmers.
He earned the recognition for developing a simple yet effective planting machine that drastically speeds up the process while promoting sustainability, CE Report quotes The Slovenia Times.
He earned the accolades for developing a field planter that uses the paper pots technology, tiny paper vessels in which seedlings are grown before they are transferred to the field.
"It makes planting much faster and less stressful for seedlings. It uses less soil and water and produces no plastic waste," Čadež has told the financial news portal Finance.
The tech speeds up plant growth by two to three seeks and uses 80% less soil. Čadež employs four people and grows 400 kinds of vegetables on only three hectares of land.
"We knew we had a good project to show at the EU level, but we couldn't even imagine that we would have won two awards," said Čadež.
The planter can be worked manually or connected to a tractor. The manual planter has a maximum capacity of 10,000 seedlings an hour, but the machine can plant between 30,000 and 50,000 seedlings an hour.
At the moment, Čadež's farm is using a prototype made by machinery maker Lavrih, a company not far from Čadež's home west of Škofja Loka. Sales will kick off in January when the machine will make its debut at the Celje farm machinery fair.
"Lavrih will make the planters for us and we'll be selling them," Čadež has told Finance. He said the price would also be revealed in Celje, adding that it would be lower than that of other planters, "because our's is simpler, but still effective".
The accolade comes just weeks after Čadež, a member of a new crop of farmers who are leveraging social media to drive direct sales, won the title of most innovative young farmer in Slovenia for the same invention.
Photo: Daniel Novakovič/STA
