The Risk of Planting New Tree Crops
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
When tree farmers implement a new planting, they know a profitable harvest likely won’t come for several years. Novel crops, like pongamia trees, have even more risk. Naveen Sikka says when his team at Terviva started planting pongamia, they had to really trust their genetics, data, and technology.
Sikka… “You have obviously like high-value horticultural crops like, you know, almonds and, you know, stone fruit and cherries and things like that. But this is a different proposition, right? This is something that's going to make oil and protein, not exactly your everyday high-margin products. So it's real tough when you are making all that one go for that crop to get in the ground and demonstrate results. I think we were confident that we had good starting genetics and that pongamia was tough enough so that if it wasn't like optimized on day one, it would show some promise. And you know, you plant trees 2012 and about 3.5 years in, you get a really good flowering, you get good indicative yield and it's not like you're off to the races after that because it's still a permanent crop. But then what we did was we just built generations of plantings after that, right? And so we're starting our fifth generation now of tree plantings. We've been able to revise the tree planting technology platform every two years based on new data, make changes on cultivar mix, density, pruning techniques, pollination, things like that.”
Sikka says pongamia trees are especially good at growing in low-quality soils and using little fertilizer.
