Managing orchards is a bit like marriage: It’s a long-term relationship. A mistake today could stay with you for a while, but care and attention to detail can pay benefits year after year.
That’s the message Sebastian Saa, associate director of Agricultural Research at the Almond Board of California (ABC), wants to share with growers.
“Everybody wants to have a good yield this year, and that’s important,” Saa said. “But understanding how to read the tree, how to interact with the tree, is what leads to sustainable yields year after year.”
That means paying attention to what the tree is telling you at each stage of growth, understanding what certain changes or circumstances mean and reacting appropriately. Reading your trees’ signals is particularly important under challenging conditions, as signals can help a grower determine if they need to adjust certain practices. Missing a signal from the trees — or misinterpreting it — could lead to the wrong decision when it comes to fertilization, irrigation or foliar sprays, Saa said.
Misinterpreting your trees’ signals could also mean you’ll miss an opportunity for quality yields — not only this year but next year — as the tree is producing this year’s crop, it’s also getting ready for next year.
In each tree, branches carry fruit-bearing spurs (compacted shoots no longer than 2 inches) that harbor most of the tree’s almonds. These spurs are constantly changing — new ones being born, others bearing fruit, still others dying off. Identifying the different population of spurs in your tree, and what other key parts of the tree are up to, provides a wealth of important information to the grower, Saa said.
And in that regard, understanding and calculating your yield is a simple equation: the number of flowers by the percentage of fruit set multiplied by kernel weight:
Yield potential = No. of flowers × % of fruit set × kernel weight
But don’t let the simplicity of this formula fool you — the importance of your final count is hardly trivial.
“The formula may be straight forward, but it’s implications are significant, especially if you can figure out how to manipulate the variables,” Saa said.
Understanding how these variables are shaping up — and how to influence them — is the subject of this short “Optimal Yield Series” on how to achieve optimal yields. In this series, growers will take a deep dive in the three factors impacting yield to better understand why optimizing yield is essential not only for their bottom line but for the environment, as well. Saa will discuss:
- factors that influence the number of flowers a tree produces and the steps growers should consider for influencing production of good quality and quantity of flowers,
- factors that influence a high rate of pollination and fruit set, and
- steps growers should take to maximize kernel size (weight) year over year.
Together, these articles will help growers understand how to achieve optimal yield potential, leading to high year-end crop value and more sustainable almond production.
