Crop Estimation

Crop Estimation

Crop Estimation. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Craig Hornblow a horticulture consultant with AgFirst spent some time at the recent Hort Expo talking about crop estimation.

HORNBLOW: One of the things we have to do is we need to define crop estimation. What do we need to know? Is it about pruning, is about volume, is it about size? Everyone in the chain, everyone in the business needs to know something different and they have a different time horizon on when they need to know it.

He says that crop estimation is a broad topic that you sometimes need to get more specific about.

HORNBLOW: My company deals with the New Zealand crop estimate every year. I think we have done it for the last 5 years and 4 weeks out from harvest we do an initial one, about 10 weeks out and we consistently get within 3 to 5% of the national estimate as it was shipped later in that year.

Hornblow says that is of reasonable value but not the maximum value.

HORNBLOW: What I think we need to do, we need to get right down to the micro level. We need to get our estimates right down to the block and a peck level. We need to be estimating down to a size, color, variation, fruit per tree, numbers of bins out of each sub block within their business. We need to be thinking about homogenous sub-blocks within our business.

AgFirst Consultants is a nationwide network of independent Consultants specializing in the primary industry. We chat more tomorrow about crop estimation.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.

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