Aug 30, 2007

Apple growers want trees grown in two seasons

There’s a horse race of sorts going on in Washington apple orchards, and the two top horses are Allan Brothers and Auvil Fruit Company.

The horses deny there’s a race, but the fans know better. Over the last several years, growers have visited these innovative orchards so often there seems to be a tour itinerary and the speakers clearly know the script. What they need is a grandstand. During the International Fruit Tree Association summer “short tour” to the Yakima area in June, another hundred people joined the list of those who’ve heard the story, although many had been there before.

The two large orchard companies have rich traditions and respected positions as fruit industry leaders. For the IFTA crew a big area of interest is orchard design – tree shape, size, rootstocks, spacing and orchard densities.

While the two farms disagree on some aspects of orchard design – like whether trees should be vertical or at a V slant – they both experiment a lot and agree on high density, trellises and the need to design for labor-enhancing aids like propelled worker platforms. They work to standardize tasks such as fruit thinning and pruning, taking away the need for complicated decision-making.

They want orchards to come into production fast. Goals are to have trees reach full height in two years, virtually racing for the top trellis wire that is the seventh or eighth up and 14 feet high. They want fruit produced in narrow, tall fruiting walls and have developed numeric goals for how many apples should be produced where. They hand thin, starting at blossom time, to achieve large apple size.

Auvil Fruit Company has 1,350 acres of fruit, mostly apples but also sweet cherries, at three locations. It grows, packs and markets its own fruit plus some from other growers. Sales are nearly $28 million annually. The company was founded in 1928 by Grady Auvil, who was a fruit industry innovator until his death in 1999. In 1995, the company invested $5 million in a packing plant in Orondo where Auvil’s Gee Whiz label fruit is packed.

Auvil Fruit has three ranches along the Columbia River in central Washington. Two are located near Orondo -– one a 250-acre orchard where Granny Smith, Fuji and Gala apples are grown, along with 35 acres of Rainier and Bing cherries. The other is a 100-acre orchard that produces Granny Smith and Fuji apples.

Ranch No. 2, the largest, is located just below the Wanapum Dam on the west side of the Columbia River, south of Vantage. This orchard has 1,000 acres of Granny Smith, Fuji, Gala and Cripps Pink apples and a 25-acre sweet cherry orchard totally covered and enclosed with bird-excluding netting.

Del Feigal manages the Vantage operation. He described the various blocks to the IFTA visitors.

While there are many variations, in general the trees are planted in rows 12 feet apart, with every other tree slanted the opposite direction from its neighbors, in a V formation to meet at row center. Trees may be in two distinct rows a couple of feet apart.

Trees are planted from 1.5 feet to 2 feet apart in the newer plantings, so tree densities range from about 1,900 to 2,420 trees per acre. Sometimes trees are bench grafts, sometimes fall budded in place on rootstocks planted earlier, but much of the nursery production work is done on the farm.

Rootstocks include Nic-29, Mark, M-9 337 and M-26 (on older plantings). Many trees are on Mark, even though the rootstock is becoming hard to get because it’s falling out of favor with most growers, Feigal said.

Mark doesn’t appreciate the shock of transplanting, so these are budded in place, he said.

Irrigation on the younger plantings is by computer-controlled drip lines delivering about 15 gallons per acre per minute. These lines lie on top of the ground along the tree trunks, running between them or close beside them. Irrigation is most effective if water is applied in pulses, Feigal said, so they are usually run four or five times a day in half-hour pulses. In the desert conditions, irrigation is the total water source.

Above this drip line, at about 3 feet high, is a second water line with micro-sprinklers capable of running 30 gallons per minute. That is used for summer evaporative cooling and frost control. In some blocks, there are propane-powered wind machines for frost protection as well.

Manchurian crab apple trees poke up between the slanted rows, providing the pollen source. These have largely replaced Red Delicious, which are effective pollinators even though the variety is losing favor. The crabs take very little space and the fruit can be abandoned.

“The majority of Auvil’s trees are planted on a trellis system,” according to the company’s Web site. “This permits us to plant more trees per acre while improving the fruit quality by being able to maintain the trees more efficiently. The trellis system is designed so that by training the trees to the trellis, we have better control of the sunlight into the trees, along with providing a more secure environment during windy times. This allows us to encourage earlier production and increase the tonnage produced per acre without sacrificing quality.”

Wind is a significant factor, and Auvil Fruit was a leader years ago in developing tall poplar windbreaks, which tower prominently across the farm.

A trellis failure would be a disaster for the orchard, he said. Trellises are built of 8-gauge wire held up by large posts and anchored at row ends to hooks attached to deadmen made of car wheels buried 6 feet deep.

The outward-slanting trees are wide open to sunlight from the top, but the fruit is borne on the underside, out of direct sunlight and where it’s easy to pick. Fruit coloring is sometimes enhanced by the use of Mylar or Extenday reflective coverings down the alleys.

Extenday is the material of choice now. Laid down the rows in long sheets, it is “hung” off the orchard floor with bungee cords anchored across the rows to trees on either side. The suspended material can be driven on with tractors and sprayers. It presses down, then pops back up, but Feigal cautions against using ladders standing on it. The life? Five years at least, he said.

“We design our system for the platform,” Feigal said. “We saw crews at work in a young orchard, working off a self-propelled, two-level platform with three workers on each side, pruning and training limbs to branches.”

The trellis is built before the trees are planted, Feigal said, with wires in place about 18 inches apart. As the small whips grow, a crew of workers walks the rows spraying Promalin on trucks an inch or two above each wire. The idea is to cause buds to break just above each wire, then to tie the branches down to the wire. Branches that head downward are less vegetative, more reproductive, in nature.

Workers, on platforms as the trees grow taller, come down the tree rows with small hand pruners and tape dispensers. At each wire, two branches are selected and tied securely to the wire with several pieces of tape that are stapled into place. Limbs and wires are not supposed to move unless they move together.

All other laterals are cut back to short lengths of fruiting wood.

The goal, Feigal said, is to have whips tied to the fourth wire by the end of the first year and have them make it to the top wire at the end of the second year. Blossoms are removed in year two, and fruit production begins in the third leaf.

Feigal’s records on a 12-acre Gala block planted on Mark rootstock in 2000 showed yields of 37 bins per acre in 2003, the third leaf, 62 bins the next year and 88 bins last year, the sixth leaf. This year, he estimates the yield will hit 100 bins. Similar yields occurred on a 9-acre Fuji block budded in the fall of 2003 on a spring-planted Mark rootstock, where he expected 83 bins per acre in this, its fifth leaf.

At the Allan Bros. orchards, things are much the same, except the trees stand upright along the trellis wires and the trellises are less elaborate in construction, usually seven wires high. Rows are usually narrower, as close as 8 feet, and trees are spaced wider, about 40 inches apart.

Like Auvil, Allan Bros. traces its farming roots to the 1920s. Since 1951, the company has been integrated in fruit production, packing and marketing. There are third and fourth generation family members in management positions.

Allan Bros. is innovative, having developed, among other things, the first automated pruning platform.

David Allan heads orchard management. He described the Allan approach as “systematic.”

“We and Auvil do things much the same way, except they do V and we do vertical,” he said. “These systems take more labor at the front, but they are more efficient to maintain.”

In other words, the process of tree training is labor-intensive, he said, but once the trees are in place annual pruning is less complicated and time-consuming and harvesting is easier.

While either system is adaptable to use of platforms, the vertical system would better fit an over-the-top harvesting system – a system that’s being worked on.

The training systems used by Allan Bros. and Auvil Fruit thoroughly standardize trees. They all look alike, which makes such processes as pruning and thinning standardized as well – easy to learn and apply by unskilled workers.

Simple math leads to predictable results. Each tree, for example, has a trunk and 14 branches tied to seven wires. If each branch has six apples and the trunk carries another 15 or so, that’s 100 apples per tree. That should turn into 70 to 75 bins per acre of 88-count apples, the most profitable size for varieties like Jazz, Pacific Rose, Pink Lady and some of the other modern or club varieties Allan Bros. grows.

Both Allan Bros. and Auvil Fruit use this math to make hand thinning go fast. Workers know exactly how many apples to leave on each tree and where each apple should be.

A thoughtful and practical man, Allan pondered a question about the future of organics.

“How deep is this organic market?” he asked. “I’m totally baffled by it. We package some organic fruit now, and we’ll probably do 15 percent of our fruit organically.

“When we use organic practices, we can’t use Apogee, and Apogee is a big tool for us. Can we use organic fertility practices and still grow the tree in two years? We’re thinking perhaps we should grow the tree conventionally and then transition them to organics after they are grown.

“We also know we can make good dollars for the next 20 years by growing 88-count Jazz apples. We can get $45 to $50 dollars a box for them, while smaller apples sell in the mid-$20s. So if we produce a small, organic Jazz apple, what will that be worth? We don’t know.”

The two fruit companies know that labor will be “challenging” in the future, as Feigal put it. Allan figures they’ll be paying 60 percent more for it five years from now.

But many of the systems they’re using either produce very high value fruit or are conducive to use of piece rates, which result in high labor productivity for the orchardist and better wages for the workers.

In this race between friendly rivals, they seem in complete agreement about the need for high quality and about many of the practices that deliver it.