Agrauxine Experts – Francesco FARABULLINI

Could you tell us more about your role and daily missions at Agrauxine by Lesaffre?

I take care of all the technical related topics, carrying out field trials, analyzing data, building up marketing argumentations, supporting our clients to be effective on their markets and developing strategies. I work constantly with my local teammates and our central headquarter to grow stronger in the geographical zone around Mediterranean Sea, focusing mainly in South Europe and North Africa.

How is the biocontrol market for viticulture needs evolving in Italy? How Italian winemakers perceive these new tools designed to help them prevent grapevine diseases?

The long tradition of organic viticulture in Italy defines a good scenario to introduce new technologies, environmentally friendly and supportive to the conventional way of farming. The high quality of Italian wines requires always new solutions to support farming without residues, preserving all the organoleptic potentials, managing in the meantime the contemporary presence of important diseases like downy mildew and powdery mildew. The big challenges are always focused on reducing the traditional technical inputs both in organic and in conventional farming.

In some specific areas the disease management is even more challenging, facing interesting pressures of grey mould too, where integration of a high efficacy with a clean approach can be the recipe to have perfect grapes for vinification, preserving all the qualities market requires.

How Romeo ®, Swoosh ® and Esquive ® have been performing in this market? What are the main assets of these biological products that explain their success so far with Italian winemakers?

Our approach is based on increasing the natural plant resistances with Romeo, based on Cerevisane, that today represents a significative support in the crop protection market. Romeo has been launched in 2018, and very soon became a solid reality to reduce the amount of copper to control downy mildew. Beside this we are developing and growing stronger in the powdery mildew market too, perfectly integrating the classical strategies, improving their efficacy and allowing producers to control better a disease that is fastly growing for the recent climatic changes.

To face grey mould we use an integrated approach, leveraging the resistances of bunches with Cerevisane and completing the protection with Swoosh, based on our alive Saccharomyces cerevisiae LAS02, able to build a strong competition vs many pathogens, including Botrytis cinerea. Launched for a first full campaign in 2022 it has faced a complex first year, very hot and dry but with high pressure during beginning of autumn, where many high quality cultivars reach their full potentials of maturation. Many farmers started to try this new technology, with nice results and a safe and clean approach to the harvest.

Our third product, Esquive is fully recognized as a top level technology to control preventively Grapevine Trunk Diseases like Esca, even if in this segment the market is slow to grow for the inherent characteristics of the disease, very subtle and not easy to follow by farmers. We are strongly working to elevate the awareness of the impact this complex of diseases can cause, and to help end users to identify the solutions. In some specific areas, with very high valued grapes, the product is already well established, giving to the farmers the possibility to protect their precious plants.

Do you have in mind a contribution you are particularly proud of since you work at Agrauxine by Lesaffre?

I started to work in Agrauxine after several years of development of Romeo, done from inside one distributor of ours. Contributing to a new perspective in controlling diseases, supporting the plant system and fighting fungi preserving the natural balance of the crop is the topic I’m definitively most proud of. And the challenges are still there, but with our deep knowledge and capacity to innovate we are going to make real new ways to enhance and protect farming in a sustainable way.