Why would you go through the trouble of growing pears on a complex tree with branches? Especially when a simple branchless tree structure allows you to adopt a systemised approach to tree management, has a greater production capability, is more labour efficient and more adaptable to technological advances.
It's easy to do what you have always done, but things around you change—things you often don’t have any control over.
You can successfully adapt, innovate and change to meet different sets of circumstances —and survive—or you can do nothing and eventually disappear.
Adjust to changing demands
The international fruit world is in a stage of fast change, and while the laws of supply and demand will certainly continue to rule, a number of traditionalist views on tree training and tree management are no longer valid.
Developing ways of increasing productivity, lowering production costs and staying competitive on the domestic and international markets continues to place great demands on orchardists.
Understand & control tree growth
Managing light, and canopy management are always areas of hot exploration and include improvements in tree architecture.
It is important to reach early production as cheaply as possible. It is up to you to change what you can control.
All this points towards orchardists having to concentrate on understanding and controlling tree growth, and on ensuring that all aspects of production and harvesting are undertaken with precision and timeliness.
New management options
Growing a uniform, consistent fruiting wall of multi-leader branchless pear trees, offers orchardists new management options for their future pear orchards as they seek to respond to the ever changing economic and market pressures, fast changing consumer trends, continued concentration of retail power and domination of electronic technology.
To achieve that, it is important to build the tree’s canopy as quickly as possible with high quality fruiting wood, so that the main focus can be on using horticultural tools to grow high quality target fruit, rather than focussing on growing vegetative wood and trying to get the trees to fill their spaces with branches.
Pear orchards with simple tree structures help orchardists attract labour because the orchards will be more desirable to work in than orchards with complex tree structures.
New orchard manual
Our new orchard manual, The Branchless Multi-Leader Pear Tree, has step-by-step easy to follow instructions, and is illustrated with numerous photos and drawings.
You will be amazed how newly-planted pear trees can actually grow and be highly productive without branches and limbs.
The Branchless Multi-Leader Pear Tree, together with Pear on Open Tatura, are the most comprehensive orchard manuals on modern high density planting of pear trees.
Manuals are written by Bas van den Ende and produced by Fruit Tree Media. They are available as PDF files and ready to download from the Tree Fruit website:
www.treefruit.com.au/orchard-manuals
See this article in Tree Fruit June 2017
