Research station supports Belgian fruit growers

In the middle of Belgium’s prime fruit-growing region sits PC Fruit, a research station with the sole aim of aiding the country’s fruit industry.

Members of the International Fruit Tree Association visited PC Fruit last July, during IFTA’s summer tour. Station personnel gave the group an overview of their research activities – and shared some facts about the Belgian fruit industry.

PC Fruit is based in Sint-Truiden, in the northeastern part of Belgium – a region that contains about 80 percent of the country’s 2,000 fruit growers. The main location at Sint-Truiden studies apples, pears and cherries, while a secondary location about 20 kilometers away studies strawberries and other small fruit. By 2013, all the station’s fruit research will be conducted at the main location, said General Manager Rene Ginckels.

Ginckels stressed PC Fruit’s primary mission: To help Belgian fruit growers do their jobs.

“That’s the only reason we exist,” he said.

The station has about 60 hectares (roughly 144 acres) of research fields, but is looking for more land, Ginckels said. There are roughly 100 employees divided among four research departments: zoology, mycology, pomology and ecology.

PC Fruit is a nonprofit organization, funded mainly by federal government projects and earnings from its consulting and other services (though most of its services to growers are free), Ginckels said.

Tim Belien, a professor and head of the zoology department, described PC Fruit’s pest monitoring network for the IFTA visitors. Several monitoring posts are spread throughout the region’s orchards. If a pest, such as codling moth, is detected, growers who are members of the program are warned and, among other things, told when and what to spray and which beneficial insects are active, he said.

Jef Vercammen, director of PC’s pome and stone fruit experiments, took the IFTA group through some of the experimental pear orchards. It was late July, and the Conference pears still had about six weeks to grow until they would be ready for harvest in September, he said.

Vercammen studies all aspects of apples, pears and sweet cherries, including growth controls, planting systems, fruit set, pruning, thinning, fertilization, varieties and replant problems.
Belgium is one of the few countries that grows more pears than apples, Vercammen told the visitors.

Ginckels said scab is the most important apple and pear disease in the small European country.

Fire blight is another problem. To control it, secondary flowers should be removed before they’re infected. If a tree is found to have fire blight, it’s taken away and burned, said Tom Deckers, head of PC Fruit’s pomology department.

Conference pear trees don’t have many secondary blossoms, so fire blight isn’t as bad in Conference as it is in later-blooming varieties, Deckers said. He speculated that climate change would lead to earlier bloom, which would mean less fire blight but greater risk from frost.

Belgian fruit has been exported to China recently, but the Chinese have strict protocols against fire blight. Other prominent export markets include Germany and Russia, Deckers said.

Before they visited PC Fruit, Deckers lead the IFTA group through the orchard of Jan Van der Velpen in nearby Bierbeek. He wanted to show them the orchard’s V system. Deckers made a few points about the V system: It’s stable and holds up well against the wind; it requires well-feathered trees; it’s vigorous, and needs to be controlled.

Van der Velpen uses the V system on pears – mostly Quince C rootstock. It’s an intensive system, with about 3,000 trees per hectare, the grower said.

Van der Velpen grows a total of 30 hectares of pears and apples, including 4 hectares of organic apples. He hires mostly Polish workers. They like to work – which you can’t always say for Belgians, he said.

By Matt Milkovich, Managing Editor