Orchards of the Future

This years Hort convention kicked off with a fascinating look at the orchard of the future during the Batjer Address with Cornell University pomologist, Dr. Terence Robinson. He said that now is an exciting time to be an orchardist and he listed 5 things.

ROBINSON: First, new root stocks. Second, the expectation of having a lot of yield in the first few years. I can remember when I was a student at Washington State University one of my best experiences being out in the orchard doing pruning and we hacked the heck out of those trees and we didn't expect any yield for about 5 or 6 years. That's changed.

He says is a very real scenario now to be able to pay off your initial investment in 5 years.

ROBINSON: We're expecting much higher yields than what we used to. In New York State we used to call a thousand bushels to the acre a really good yield but many, many of the new orchards are way above that at 14 - 15-hundred bushels routinely and 2000 bushels in other cases. Fifth is the possibility with several new technologies that are coming down the road to vastly improve fruit quality and the uniformity of quality. So that when a consumer bites an apple he doesn't get a good one and then five bad ones. And that challenge for us as an industry is what we really ought to focus on to try to move consumption up and to try to sell the kinds of crops that will be coming along.

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