With rising costs and growers finding it harder and harder to find skilled workers to do the job, to do it efficiently, and to do it correctly—we believed that mechanisation was a strategy to stay competitive.
Fruit trees and all plants grown in Australia’s tough agricultural environment are at risk of becoming stressed.
Drought, pests and diseases, poor nutrition and other harsh weather conditions can all play havoc with a plant’s productivity and production, negatively affecting your crop.
As we approach the coming season and bud break, we need to ensure that we give our tree crops the best chance to maximise yield and quality in the coming season.
Graeme Hardwick, AgNova Technologies’ area manager for South Australia, Sunraysia and Western Australia, is seeing tree crop growers switching back to residual herbicides to save time and money and avoid problems with resistance to glyphosate.
It has been well documented that effective pollination is a limiting factor in lifting yields in tree crops.
Not only does poor pollination limit fruit set but also fruit size and uniformity is compromised.
Because of the dense nature of modern orchards, natural air flow of pollen is much reduced and due to the sheer number of flowers that need to be visited by pollinators there is a significant reliance on other methods of pollination.
Three years ago, Mick and Kylie Carr purchased a persimmon orchard next to their grazing property Bunya Grove Produce near Gympie. They were looking for more land to run their cattle.
The mature orchard had 11,000 trees on 16 hectares, a packing shed and a local workforce for harvest time. It looked like a promising operation that would complement their grazing activities.
Thiosulfates (S2O3) fertilisers are clear liquid fertilisers that provide sulfur (S), nitrogen (N) as ammonium thiosulfate (ThioSul), potassium as potassium thiosulfate (KTS), calcium as calcium thiosulfate (CaTs), or magnesium as magnesium thiosulfate (MagThio).
Organic Crop Protectants is thrilled to reveal their very latest innovation in plant protection, an organically certified solution for a range of fungal problems.
Ecocarb PLUS is a new dual action fungicide combining the curative powers of potassium bicarbonate with the protective and systemic barrier properties of potassium silicate.
Soil structure: Soft stable porous soil was considered very important for high yields in a high-density irrigated orchard.
Wet conditions in late winter to early spring can activate shot hole spores that have remained dormant in bud scales and twig lesions during the previous season.
