Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/450509
42 FEBRUARY 1, 2015 Good Fruit Grower www.goodfruit.com Italian nursery GRIBA developed a quality grading scale, and prices trees accordingly. by Richard Lehnert T he apple growers on the bus were baffled by it. After negotiating a tough backup turn on a driveway over a deep ditch, we drove past large deteriorating buildings that once housed chickens and livestock, then came to a stop in an abandoned bunker silo. From there, it was a half-mile walk to what we came to see. (Of course, we're in Europe, so we did our walking in meters, not miles.) We were on a farm in the Po River Valley south of Verona in Italy. As we found later, this was ground that Paulweber Benno had rented for the year to grow apple tree stock for GRIBA Baumschule, the nursery of South Tyrol. The nursery wants to avoid disease, especially fire blight but also replant diseases, so each year its crop is grown on virgin ground by its contract growers. A fire blight outbreak would lead to destruction of all the cur- rent year's production on the site. Fumigation is not used in Italy, another rea- son for annual movement. It cost Benno $1,800 an acre to rent the land. All that was explained to us by Gunther Mahlknecht, who oversees tree production for GRIBA, the cooperative that produces two million trees a year. The Verona area is wet, flat, cash crop and livestock land, with much of it in all-year vegetable production under hoop houses. About half of the 2.2 million trees produced each year—especially the best ones—will go a hundred miles north to the Alpine apple growing area of South Tyrol. GRIBA is owned by 14 producer-owned cooperatives there. The rest go across Europe and into export. Grading system Cornell University pomologist Dr. Terence Robinson, who acted as guide on the International Fruit Tree Association tour in November, used the occasion on the bus ride after the visit to comment on the quality grading system Mahlknecht had described. "I kind of beat up on nursery people," Robinson said. "I think they need to produce better trees. But growers need to demand higher quality trees, and be willing to pay for them. You saw the GRIBA system. We need to do that in the United States." Given the demand for trees, and the short sup- ply, growers may want to go easy on that for now, but Robinson has been hammering the point for some time: You can't afford to use your expensive orchard system to grow trees an extra year before they produce. The GRIBA grading system sorts trees into four classes: 3+, 5+, 7+, and 7+ Extra, with knip boom trees in the top class. Consider for your next planting: • BRUCE PONDER • SUSAN WILKINSON • ADAM WEIL • DAVE WEIL 503-538-2131 • FAX: 503-538-7616 info@treeconnect.com www.treeconnect.com BENEFITS: • Disease tolerant • Cold hardy • Adapts well to all cherry-growing districts • Forms flower buds and comes into bearing quicker than Mazzard with a better distribution of flower buds Roots available for SPRING DELIVERY Call Tree Connection: 800-421-4001 Dwarfing Cherry Rootstock Krymsk ® 5 Krymsk ® 6 [cv. VSL-2, USPP 15,723] [cv. LC-52, USPP 16,114] "Krymsk ® 5 and Krymsk ® 6 cherry rootstocks have proven to be the best rootstock for our orchards. They are yield efficient, grow and adapt well, and are cold hardy." —John Morton The Dalles, Oregon Quality TREES GRIBA's Gunther Mahlknecht explains the processes the nursery uses to produce tall, large- caliper trees with more than seven well-developed branches. These first-year trees are ready to dig in November.