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The 2001 harvest will be remembered as one of the most disappointing in years and one which most growers would wish to forget as soon as possible. Even after such a difficult season there is a lot of merit in carefully analyzing the results with the objective of identifying opportunities for improvement in the future.
To follow is a checklist which may help:
Yield too Low
- "Off" year of biennial bearing cycle
- Insufficient canopy areas - trees too small for allocated space
- Tree canopy too dense
- Over thinned
- Harvest poorly managed
- Poor pollination
- Frost injury
Fruit too Large
- Thinned too hard
- "Off" year of biennial cycle
- Pruning too hard
- Poor fruit set (pollination, frost)
Fruit too Small
- Fruit numbers too high
- Thinning insufficient
- Poor quality fruiting wood
- Dense canopy - insufficient light penetration
- Excess water shoot growth
- Harvest mismanaged
- Water stress
- Nutrient deficiencies
- Poor foliage quality
Low Calcium
- Light crop
- Excess tree vigor
- Soil potassium or magnesium too high
Low Pack out
- Poor colour
- Excess russet
- Handling damage
- Wind rub and blemish
- Poor fruit shape
- Fruit too small or too large
- Post harvest rots
- High black spot levels
- Sunburn
Poor Colour
- Canopy too dense
- Fruit poorly thinned
- Low colour strain
- Excess nitrogen
- Too much crop
- Water stress
Excess Russet
- Frost Injury
- Spring wind injury
- Wet weather; slow drying over period from bloom to 4 weeks after petal fall
- Over spraying
- Sensitive variety
- Russet ring virus
While the above list appears formidable there is a fairly common theme running through it. That is, that the outcome in any year is very dependent on how well crop husbandry has been managed relative to climatic events, which occurred while the crop, was being grown. If we apply the 80:20 rule its possible to see that sound orchard practices, which you can influence are definitely in the 80 part of this rule while factors such as climate which you have little influence over tend to be the 20 part of the rule.
This year, as in any year, there has been a wide range in crop out turn, which indicates that it is possible to manage the various climatic factors to produce a satisfactory outcome.
The secret to this whole process is careful analysis of crop out turn to identify the areas, which require attention.
In this direction there are two important areas to look at. One is block-by-block physical performance across the orchard to determine yield and quality on a block or variety basis.
The second is careful analysis of packhouse reject analysis to determine where the quality problems in the harvested product were. To put this data into perspective, your analysis needs to express the fault as a proportion of the crop or total line rather than the percentage shown in the reject analysis.
For example, a reject analysis of 30% for russet, which has been quite common this year, is not a very significant problem if the line packed out at say 90% as it only represent 3% of the total line. But if the packout was only 60% then 30% of russet in the rejects is a serious problem because it will represent 12% of the fruit harvested.
Often it is difficult for an individual Orchardist to judge his level of performance relative to the industry. Benchmarking the result against data from a panel of similar orchard businesses will put performance into perspective, and more importantly highlight opportunities for improvement.
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