Producing high quality fruit

November 2011 | Prepared by Steve Spark, AgFirst | Future Orchards® Orchard Walk notes

Steve Spark reflects on the progress of Future Orchards® since 2006 and argues that the next major productivity shift must be toward consistently higher fruit quality. Earlier work had shown that Australian growers could achieve world-class young-tree performance by investing in tree density, nutrition, irrigation, training, support and orchard-management discipline.

The resource contrasts investment maximisation with simple cost cutting. Spark argues that strong orchard businesses invest where expenditure improves yield, packout or quality, because a lower cost per hectare is not useful if it also reduces the value of the crop.

Examples of changed practice include more intensive planting, improved fertigation and nutrition, earlier removal of non-productive branches, better branch training, increased tree height, vigour control using tools such as root pruning and growth regulators, more aggressive chemical thinning, fruit counting and hail protection.

The central message is that fruit quality requires the same willingness to change that growers previously applied to young orchard development. High performance depends on combining technology, measurement and careful execution rather than treating quality as something that can be sorted out at the packhouse.