Improving labour productivity in orchards

24 May 2015 | Future Orchards® / AgFirst | Australian Fruitgrower article

This article uses harvest as a natural point to review how well an orchard block has performed. It encourages growers to record results while the evidence is still visible, including yield, average fruit size, maturity, colour, pest and disease status, tree growth and tree condition.

These measures are linked to labour productivity because poor crop balance or difficult canopy structure can make fruit slower and more expensive to harvest. A heavily cropped tree, for example, can be harder to colour and size and may require more selective picking.

The article supports a management approach where labour efficiency is measured block by block and then connected back to pruning, crop-load, canopy and redevelopment decisions. This makes harvest performance a source of information for the following season, not just an end-of-year result.