Estratégias de manejo do cafeeiro com foco na mitigação dos impactos das mudanças climáticas

Abstract

Over the years, coffee farming has been failing to achieve higher productivity levels, mainly due to the occurrence of extreme climatic factors. In the face of challenges such as these, studies aimed at ensuring greater climatic resilience of plants have become increasingly necessary. In this context, the objective of this study was to evaluate the responses of coffee plants under different management strategies designed to mitigate the effects of climatic adversities. The research was conducted under field conditions at the Federal University of Lavras (UFLA), in Lavras, Minas Gerais, Brazil, from November 2020 to August 2024. The experiment was carried out using the cultivar Mundo Novo IAC 376-4. The treatments were arranged in a 3 × 5 factorial scheme in strips, within a randomized complete block design, with three replications, totaling 45 experimental plots. Three types of soil cover (polyethylene film, Brachiaria grass, and spontaneous vegetation) and five agronomic techniques (coffee husk, organic compost/biochar, agricultural gypsum, chitosan, and a control treatment) were evaluated. In the first study, anatomical, biochemical, and physiological characteristics of the plants were evaluated during the establishment phase of the crop. In the second study, the same characteristics were assessed during the productive phase of the crop. In the third study, production components, fruit maturation, bean size (sieve classification), yield, income, processing yield, and beverage quality were evaluated. In the first and third studies, k-means analysis was performed to understand the overall dispersion and grouping of treatments. In the second study, canonical discriminant analysis was applied in order to express the behavior of the studied factors as a function of the analyzed characteristics. According to the results obtained, anatomical, biochemical, and physiological responses varied according to soil cover types and agronomic techniques. In addition, management strategies were shown to help reduce stress under different climatic conditions. Regarding production, soil cover use influenced the productive responses of coffee plants, especially the fruit maturation process.