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By now the pruning should be well underway. It is the foundation for next year's and future crops, so it is important that it is well done and enough resources are put into it to ensure a good job. When all the costs involved in producing apples are considered, the cost of pruning is very small so even if you double the cost, the impact on the overall production cost will be less than 50 cents per carton.
With small-fruited varieties such as Royal Gala, pruning is the first cut of the thinning programme. Care taken in pruning to cut out shaded fruiting wood and weak fruitful one year wood will have a huge impact on both the size of next year's fruit and your hand thinning costs.
The weather pundits are forecasting a return to strong El Nino conditions. For us, this means that there is a high probability of strong winds, summer drought and heat. This translates into more reject fruit from wind rub and sunburn; two defects which were largely absent last season. Pruning practices need to take these factors into account.
Fruit needs to be grown in relatively stiff fruiting laterals and spurs which do not flail around in the wind. There also needs to be sufficient leaf cover to manage the sunburn problem without compromising colour development too much.
For good colour, apples need to be exposed to at least 50% of the available light. This means that canopies have to be relatively open with passing dappled light. I have observed that the best technique for managing sunburn is to stack the middle and upper tree with a series of relatively narrow fruiting arms with sufficient lateral separation to allow some sunlight to penetrate the lower tree, then, as the sun moves around, their passing shadows give short periods of shade to allow the exposed fruit in the lower tree to cool off before it cooks.
In some older orchards, large upper branch structures often exist. Well managed, these can be structured to allow "pockets" of light to get past them by making sure that holes for light are developed so that they don't end up as a solid mass of leaves. Fuji is a good example of a variety where this technique is useful.
Access for picking is another important aspect of the winter pruning programme. In recent years, there has been a tendency to allow very large spreading lower branches to develop. Many of these have become rather impenetrable to ladders and pickers. With a picking bag on, a picker needs a gap of about 50 cm to get through and as they only comfortably reach about 75 cm from where they are standing, all of your lower tree needs to be within 75 cm of a ladder or picking bay. It is not easy to get pickers these days, so if you don't give them trees that are easy to work with they will quickly go off to somewhere where the trees are better.
Market conditions will also be much tougher for next year. We are facing bigger northern hemisphere fruit crops, especially in North America. Southern hemisphere producers, particularly Chile, are heading into an "on" crop. The economic problems in Argentina and the civil unrest in Columbia are limiting the size of the South American fruit market, so we can expect to see a greater proportion of the Chilean export crop appearing on our markets.
Added to this is the higher value New Zealand dollar, which will reduce the export prices we get in New Zealand dollar terms. This means that it is going to be difficult to obtain profitable returns for low margin grades and fruit sizes next year. Taking fruit size in Royal Gala for example, it appears that there will be a New Zealand $10 spread between large and small sizes this year. Because of the favorable selling season, small sizes appear to be returning prices at a level which will be profitable this year. It is probable that next year the lower value fruit will not achieve sufficient return to be profitable.
This being so, you had better be focusing on the production of medium and large frit which pays premium prices. The job of producing big fruit starts with pruning.
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