Establishing an orchard for small landholders

Technical skills - do you know how to?

Fruit growing for profit is a highly specialised field requiring a wide knowledge base, including skills in:

• plant nutrition
• tree training and pruning
• fruit thinning
• harvesting
• grading and packing
• irrigation
• insect, weed and disease management
• handling and applying chemicals
• fruit varieties and characteristics
• marketing.

In some cases, professional advice from consultants can be sought, but a weakness in knowledge in any area can heavily affect your profit margin.

Consider enrolling in a fruit growing course, working in an orchard for at least one season and reading about fruit production before making a final investment decision.

Orchard management also requires a broad set of practical skills. This includes maintenance and repair of machinery as the cost of calling out a mechanic for minor break downs and repairs is often uneconomical.

Skilled labour for orchard activities is in short supply and in many small orchards the owners are required to do a lot of the work themselves.

Fruit growing is physically demanding and requires a reasonable level of fitness to cope with the hot climate and hard work. In commercial orchards, half of the total on-farm production cost is labour with harvest representing half of the total labour cost.

Unfortunately, some timesaving machinery used in full-time fruit growing is too costly for the small orchardist.

For the purchase and application of some pesticides you will also need a ChemCert certificate.