Characterization of the baby banana (Musa acuminata AA) crop in Santo Domingo using multivariate techniques

Abstract

With the objective of characterizing the baby banana crop (Musa acuminata AA) through multivariate analysis techniques, in the canton of Santo Domingo, baby banana (Orito) producing farms were evaluated; the time in which it was carried out was from April 2022 to March 2023, in 12 months; which used multivariate statistics (Multiple Correspondence Analysis) that allowed the analysis of the data obtained from the surveys applied to the baby banana producers. The results were: in terms of the sociodemographic axis, most of the producers are male (85.10%), and their farm size is small (93.6%) (less than 5 hectares). In the productive axis, they have varied yields, the highest being 1927 boxes per year (39.10%), with a cultivation age of more than 6 years (48.90%). In the environmental axis, it is noted that 93.6% of the baby banana producers have knowledge of biodiversity, referring to this as all living organisms in a given place (85.1%). The cluster technique and k-means, grouped the producers in 4 clusters, highlighting the largest number of them, in cluster 1, which highlights the cultural work they perform as: weeding, defoliation, grazing, weeding, fertilization, sheathing, thinning, demane, but do not have irrigation, weeding, deflowering, corm removal, biological and chemical trapping, propping and other activities.