Elgin Orchards shoots the lights out

Their Cripps Red block has surpassed a cumulative yield of 300 tonnes per hectare in its fourth leaf. Written by Anna Mouton. 

A Cripps Red block at Elgin Orchards wowed participants at the Hortgro Technical Symposium pome-fruit field day in 2022 with its first harvest of 54 tonnes per hectare in its second leaf. Now it has attained a cumulative yield of 302 tonnes per hectare in its fourth leaf — a possible world first.

Queries addressed to industry experts in Australia, New Zealand, Washington State, and Italy, as well as to local technical advisors, failed to identify any other orchard reaching the 300-tonne cumulative yield benchmark this early.

The solaxe-trained G.778 trees are spaced 3.5 x 1.2 metres. Farm manager Dirk Meyer and horticultural consultant Dr Nigel Cook attribute much of the orchard’s success to early and aggressive bending. Cook also stresses that they started with healthy trees on tissue-cultured rootstocks.

Achieving high early yields on a medium-potential replant soil is helped by the vigorous G.778, but the long-term productivity of this rootstock is yet to be shown. “We were willing to try our luck with G.778 with a weak scion on a low-vigour site,” says Cook. “But we’re now planting G.890 for low-vigour scenarios and semi-dwarfing G.202 for the rest of the farm.”

Look out for a full follow-up article about this and the other 2022 field-day orchards in an upcoming SAFJ. Meanwhile, growers can join the 2024 Hortgro Technical Symposium pome-fruit field day in Ceres.