ECOPHYSIOLOGICAL LIMITS TO YIELD OF PEACH PRODUCTION SYSTEMS

Over the past thirty years, along with students and colleagues, I have conducted research on numerous aspects of peach trees and peach orchard systems in order to better understand how trees grow and produce a crop.
This understanding has helped identify key ecophysiological limitations to tree growth and crop yield potential in various orchard systems.
While it is clear that one of the primary limitations to increasing yield is photosynthetic capacity, no one has ever succeeded in enhancing constitutive leaf photosynthetic capacity in fruit trees and the only thing that can be practically done to maximize photosynthesis at the orchard level is to optimize light capture and provide adequate water and nutrients.
Therefore it is important to understand how photosynthates are used and the ecophysiological limitations to their optimal utilization in order to identify key limitations to tree growth and cropping potential that can be affected by crop breeding or orchard management.
We have approached these problems by developing a functional-structural peach tree model that has served as a guide to focus research on specific details about tree, fruit and root growth and respiration as well as the dynamics of long term carbo¬hydrates (CHO) storage and mobilization.
Collectively the crop modeling has identified key “bottlenecks” that limit the cropping potential of peach trees.
These “bottlenecks” include factors such as: tree anatomical and architectural characteristics, the dynamics of fruit growth, carbohydrate storage and carbohydrate mobilization and transport; to name a few.
These factors are discussed in the context of identifying opportunities for future research that can reduce the effect of these “bottlenecks” and improve cropping potential.

VIII International Peach Symposium

T.M. DeJong

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2015.1084.69