Opinion: A Clean Orchard Not Always Best

By David Eddy|September 8, 2009

In preparing a story for this issue on farming almonds organically, I was talking with Roger Duncan, who’s a University of California Cooperative Extension farm adviser in Modesto. Duncan suggests a strategy that I had never heard of, but makes perfect sense. You start out an organic orchard by farming it conventionally, i.e. fumigating the ground and applying herbicides to get rid of all the weeds in the first year so the young trees won’t have any competition and get off to a flying start. Only then do you transition to organic.

The beauty of this tactic is you won’t miss out on much organic crop because the almonds don’t come into full production until after the three-year organic transition period is up. I bet this would work for other crops, too. And yes, I’m aware this may well violate the spirit of organic farming. I’m just trying to help out those of you who have bankers who don’t hear harps playing when you pontificate on the wonders of organic farming.

At any rate, Duncan said he has no idea how many growers employ such a strategy. He sometimes wonders how often they listen, anyway. For example, he is constantly telling growers that they don’t need to spray for spider mites after Aug. 20, but it often doesn’t do any good. Duncan said he’d guarantee me a lot of those growers who have heard his pleadings will be out in late August spraying even though it’s a waste of time and money. “I think almond trees are much more tolerant of mites than almond growers are,” he said.

Duncan’s onto something. A lot of you growers are perfectionists, and that can work against you. For instance, Duncan and many of his colleagues have found that pruning almond trees simply doesn’t increase yields. I think growers who continue to prune do it because they don’t believe the research, or they’ve always done it that way, or, and this is the lion’s share, because their orchards look better.

I’m not joking. How many growers do you know who don’t swell with pride, at least a little, when someone remarks at how nice their orchards look, how “clean” they are? But there are several reasons to break the “clean” habit. First, it costs money. Forego that unnecessary — and I’m strongly emphasizing unnecessary — spray. Don’t bother killing superfluous weeds. Before spraying those weeds or pruning those trees, ask yourself a few questions. Are you increasing yields? Are you improving quality? Or boil it down to one: Is this practice going to benefit my bottom line? If not, it might be just a cosmetic procedure. After all, to use a decidedly California (but Beverly Hills, not Bakersfield) example: There’s a reason most health insurance plans don’t cover Botox.