Orchard growers can reduce their spray costs while maintaining efficacy by tweaking their application rates based on the size and shape of their trees.
Terence Bradshaw, an assistant professor of specialty crops production at the University of Vermont, argues that pesticide labels have not kept pace with the shift to high-density orchards with small trees.
âThese labels were made up for legacy materials and when trees were big and there was a lot of volume to fill,â Bradshaw said in a March 23 webinar as part of the New England Winter Fruit Meetings.
Instead of applying pesticides on a per-acre basis, it often makes more sense nowadays to use a rate per volume of tree canopy.
Two of Honeycrispâs signature problems can be reduced by holding apples at the proper cold storage temperature.
Renae Moran, a University of Maine pomologist, spoke on bitter pit and soft scald March 17 during the New England Winter Fruit Meetings.
In an attempt to predict bitter pit, Moran harvested apples three weeks before their predicted maturity, held them at 70 degrees for three weeks and counted the number with bitter pit.
âThis helped me identify some high-risk orchards,â she said.
She experimented with conditioning apples and not conditioning before storing them at 34 and 37 degrees for three months.
Conditioning is holding the apples at 50 to 70 degrees for five to seven days before putting them in cold storage.