A Vision for Apple Orchard Systems of the Future

“Orchards of the future will likely be 10-11 feet tall and with very narrow canopies that can be maintained by mechanical side-wall shearing to reduce labor costs and to improve fruit quality and harvested and pruned with harvest assist platforms. We expect such orchards to have very high yields (1500 bu/acre) with uniformly high fruit quality. We propose that such future orchards can be managed with significantly less total annual labor hours.” There has been a steady increase in tree planting density over the last 50 years from 40 trees/acre to in some cases more than 3,000 trees/acre. Since the beginning of this planting system revolution growers in NY State have progressively moved from multiple leader trees on seedling rootstocks at 40 trees/ acre to the central leader system on semi-dwar f ing rootstocks at 200 trees/acre, to the slender spindle system on fully dwarfing roots to ck s a t 6 0 0 t re e s / a c re , to small central leader trees on M.9/MM.111 interstem root systems at 400 trees/acre to the vertical axis system on dwarfing rootstocks at 500 trees/acre, to the super spindle system on dwarfing rootstocks at 2,200 trees/acre to the tall spindle system at 1,000 trees/acre. In this article we would like to present a vision for the orchards of the next 20 years.