The Apple Orchard: The Story of Our Most English Fruit by Pete Brown

Author:Pete Brown [Brown, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846148842
Google: 1SwXDAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1846148839
Published: 2016-09-29T06:30:49.702000+00:00

My mind goes back to East Malling. While I was there I also met Dr Mark Else, who specializes in resource efficiency in crop production. He calls it ‘precision horticulture’. ‘There’s a huge amount of variability within an orchard, with different trees cropping different yields,’ he told me, ‘So we’re developing imaging systems to map the variability within an orchard, bringing together different disciplines. These imaging techniques can recognize and count the fruit on a tree – which is extremely difficult to do by eye – and can use that to forecast the yield and variability across the orchard. It will be able to quantify the difference the size of the tree canopy makes, inform and improve pruning techniques, and map terroir characteristics. It’ll massively increase the efficiency of orchard planning and harvesting.’

This made me think of Harry Taylor throwing his hat through the branches at Dragon Orchard to check his pruning technique, now immortalized in the name of Once Upon A Tree’s newest cider. I told Mark the story. He smiled and said, ‘That’s great! But our research would have been able to tell him whether he needed to use the same hat size for each variety, and why he was using a hat in the first place.’

I’m not sure what Harry Taylor would make of that. But I think Michael Bentley will be throwing his hat in the air when he hears about it.

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