—story by Ross Courtney
—graphic by Jared Johnson
Cherry grower Mike Omeg has tried lots of systems over the years. Formal, informal. Tall, pedestrian. Tight, open.
And after recent years of economic struggle, he has spent a lot of time this winter thinking about their pros and cons.
“One good thing about four really tough years is it really makes you focus on what you’re doing,” said Omeg, the manager for Orchard View Farms in The Dalles, Oregon.
So, at the Washington State Tree Fruit Association Annual Meeting in Yakima in December, Omeg ranked each on a low-medium-high scale for attributes such as upfront capital costs, the challenge of training crews and the quality of the fruit.
One thing he did not do at the conference was pick a winner, earning him a few chuckles from the crowd. “I just left you with a bunch of questions, but that’s because I don’t know the answer yet,” he said.
However, during a follow-up interview with Good Fruit Grower, he singled out steep leader as a favorite.
Read on for more on that choice, but his favorite is not really the lesson, Omeg said. After all of his trial, error and calculations, he has come to believe better execution is more important than finding the best blueprint.
“What’s really making us money is some older type of systems that we just farm better now,” he said.
The “snooze boring” tasks of timely pruning, nutrition applications and irrigation are more crucial than choosing an ideal system on a spreadsheet that doesn’t always match reality, he said.
Self-evaluation
Omeg is pointing a finger at himself. When Good Fruit Grower interviewed him for the 2017 Grower of the Year Award, he was all-in on about 40 acres of newly planted, high-density, bi-axis Ebony Pearl and Burgundy Pearl on Krymsk rootstocks, trained formally to trellises so tall and beefy his neighbors joked they could probably be seen from space.
It looked great on paper and in pictures.
But it took two to three times as much labor than he anticipated, with crews making multiple passes to keep the training and pruning consistent. And if his crews only finished two-thirds of the job, it cost way more than one-third for them to finish later in the season.
“That’s where the nice, clean spreadsheet that says you’re going to get rich starts to fall apart,” he said.
Other things his spreadsheet did not tell him:
—Ebony Pearl was not well-suited to the system and produced less consistently, leading to more expensive management.
—Labor costs have gone up by 20 percent or more since then.
—Cherry prices have not risen enough to cover the extra expenses.
—Trellis material, tree costs and interest rates are higher now, making it even more expensive to replicate.
A simpler system doesn’t solve these problems, but it makes them easier to weather financially because they didn’t cost as much in the first place.
About steep leader
In a slide he did not show at the annual meeting, due to time limits, Omeg called steep leader “the best system in an imperfect world.”
In his blocks, steep leader is characterized by multiple leaders trained upright so that the freestanding tree can be pruned into a “Christmas tree” shape to ensure even light distribution to the lower branches. He has a few hundred acres of many varieties planted at 14-by-6 steep leader.
Omeg has found management involves fewer passes with nothing to tie, no tipping and no selecting limbs throughout the growing season. He also noticed it is more tolerant of heat and rain, after comparing side-by-side blocks following windstorms and heat waves.
Winter pruning is more complex, he admitted, hearkening back to the days when the chore involved art and science. But good supervisors can teach it the same way good piano instructors can teach complex music.
He admits this took humility. For one, he had invested a lot of capital in his bi-axis system. Many of his co-workers proved a tough audience when he told them it was struggling financially.
“They remember digging the rocks out of that orchard,” he said.
The block may still pay off. Crews get better at managing it every year, which kind of just proves his point.
“We need to manage at a high level what we already have,” he said.
Practical and logical
Matt Whiting, a cherry physiologist at Washington State University, sees logic in Omeg’s ideas and has noticed other growers following suit, moving toward less labor-intensive arrangements.
“A lot of farmers are sort of handling their operations the way Mike (Omeg) is describing,” he said.
He has not heard of anyone ripping out blocks because of this revelation, nor does he recommend it. He sees growers making smaller tweaks, allowing laterals here and there to choose their own growth direction with less tying.
Some growers still want the stability of the trellises, despite costs. On a brief orchard tour that was part of the same conference session, Dave Allan at Allan Bros. said clinical tying helps prevent wind damage in his Naches, Washington, block of Sweethearts.
Steep leader was the system of choice in Washington for decades, Whiting said. He usually sees it with three leaders, which growers manage by renewing laterals over time, back to each leader, as if it was its own tree. Usually, those laterals naturally bend up toward the sunlight, and growers let them, though they occasionally insert propping wood into a crotch or tie branches to each other to force a wider angle.
It works, as does Omeg’s practical philosophy of better farming what you have, Whiting said. But only to a point. He would never recommend a return to Bing trees with 20-foot spacing and a tangle of interior branches. Few growers would listen if he tried.
Omeg gets that, too.
During his presentation, he showed the audience a 100-year-old photo of a massive, bushy Royal Ann tree in the Willamette Valley. It produced 1 ton of cherries by itself, according to his research.
“You aren’t going to make money doing that,” Omeg said. •
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