North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[claude sweet <sweetent@home.com>]

Jim wrote:

> I recall reading, years ago, that some studies of this type of planting
> wasn't cost-effective over the long term for a number of reasons.  One of
> the things that I recall was that the owner/orchardist/gardner usually left
> the "interim" crop in too long (not wanting to "weed out" a cash producing
> crop), and that it therefore gave the "main" crop unnecessary competition,
> so that in the long run, an orchard without the between-the-rows
> shorter-lived crop started producing sooner, and had better overall
> production.
> I think this may have been mentioned in "The Owner Built Homestead", by Ken
> Kern.  Will try to remember to look tonight.
> 
> Jim Erdman (Menomonie, WI)

I know of a newbie kiwifruit grower who interplant with row crops. The 
inability to use mechanical equipment to perform cultural care for both 
the permanent and annual crops produced much higher costs.

When combined with this individuals lack of experience in farming, 
especially in marketing, the result was an economic disaster.

In another case an individual planted asparagus as temporary cash crop. 
When it became necessary to remove the interplanting, the task proved to 
be much more difficult and expensive than has been projected.

A more practical concept might be to plant the permanent tree crops in 
stages with the unplanted tree blocks used for cash annual crops until 
developed as an orchard.

Claude Sweet
San Diego, CA


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