Report on orchards being made ready for new Cosmic Crisp variety- the opening shot is astounding, and it put me in mind of Clark’s thread about what might happen to your trees after your time with them:
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$50K/acre for a new orchard, wow…!! I don’t know how it could be that high even if you included land cost but whatever it’s not cheap.
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Preservation orchards are really important. I encourage everyone to consider supporting their local preservation orchards with money, scions. labor, whatever.
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Does the title of this post refer to Herman’s Hermits lyrics?
Yup. Showing our age, I guess …
:-)M
If those are the red delicious apples that make it to Kansas grocery stores good riddens I would have drove that bulldozer for free After eating a bag or 2! I would have top worked the trees. I assume they planted the g. Series rootstocks to avoid replant problems. I do hate to see an orchard of any kind go there is a lot of history there.
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apple wood is great for smoking and barbecue…hopefully they did something useful with the old trees.
I have to agree, Clark. But those are apricots coming out, and I think people are switching over to tall spindle- they’re planting, I’d guess, a lot more tree in there then they had before- and in three years time they will all be coming into production at the same time. They need to get a good price to recoup.
Replanting can cost more than $50,000 per acre. Farmers say that they’ll need premium prices for these apples in order to recoup that investment. If Cosmic Crisp apples sell only for the same price as, say, Gala apples, “it’ll be a wreck,” says farmer Jan Luebber. So these new plantings are a big gamble for apple growers.<<
Stay tuned …
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In British Columbia, our latest variety to become the new “gold standard” for fresh eating apples is the Ambrosia apple. We LOVE Ambrosias. I now have 3 Ambrosia trees in my UrbanOrchard and will hopefully have lots of fruit this year cause they all have blossomed out well and my Mason bees (native pollinating bee) are doing a great job whenever the sun comes out. And yeah, $50,000 per acre is a huge investment for any orchardist/farmer.
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I saw the same 50K/acre number in Good Fruit Grower magazine a while back for a new orchard in Washington state. Its a big number and I’m not sure how a huge investment like that pays off . The orchard in Good Fruit Grower had trees spaced 1.5 X12 feet (about 2400 trees/acre) with permanent overhead irrigation for cooling plus drip and they were pumping the water several miles. The yield mentioned was 80 bins/acre on Gala or more than 60,000 pounds/acre in year 3.
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Here is the fact sheet on it. Interesting that the known Enterprise trait of greasy-ness after storage was passed on and considered acceptable prior to its release.
People can be fickle, one years hot item can be next years dud.
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