Articles
INAUGURAL LECTURE – ECONOMY OF ENERGY IN THE ORCHARD
I hope that they will find much to interest them in British research, development and practice in our orchards.
I also welcome the opportunity to discuss orchards again, after an interval of 3 years in which I have been engaged with research problems in the wider field of agriculture, fisheries and food, although I can assure you that horticulture is a very lively part of this field.
We are now in a period of maximum change in the practice and indeed the philosophy of orchard culture.
World economic forces have rather suddenly brought strong pressure to bear on traditional orchard design and management.
For a century or more in Britain, our traditional orchards have been grossly wasteful of energy in two forms; labour and sunlight, while with the advent of mechanisation, in an effort to minimise labour use, we have greatly increased our orchard consumption of the third form of energy as fuel oil.
As a physicist who has become engaged in biology, I find the logic of the recent changes in orchard design and management to be very satisfying.
I grew up, as most of my generation did, to accept without question that fruit trees were large spherical masses of foliage borne aloft on tall masts and from which the fruit was gathered from long ladders.
Indeed, we still have some examples of cherry trees at East Malling for which this is true.
We also have, at East Malling, some historic trials, now half a century old, of the first scientific attempt to reduce the energy wastage by the use of dwarfing rootstocks.
This had the simple objective of shortening the ladders.
All who have any connection with the station are proud of its contribution to the developing of dwarfing apple rootstocks for orchards in many countries round the world, and more recently by achieving dwarfing rootstocks for both plums and cherries.
In so traditional a subject, with the long time-lag imposed by the growth of trees, it has indeed been exciting to see how rapidly the orchard industry has put science into practice.
Admittedly, growers have been encouraged in this modernisation by the pickers, who have increasingly voted with their feet against harvesting work which involved strenuous gymnastics in large trees.