AdAgrA 2019: True Success

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Intensive: Organic Blueberry Production

Eric Pond

Organic Blueberry Production - Part 1

Okay, well I was going to give you a short little background on global production because if you are planning on growing and selling in Your region it does matter.

What's in the store, and where are they getting those berries from that might be in stores near you?

As consumer trends have changed so has you know we used to can 150 quarts of peaches to support our family over the winter, and that hasn't happened in 20 years or 30 years, you know.

So are you in an area where Your customers would be coming out to you pick is that even popular anymore are you close enough to people?

Farmers market stands where are you going to market your berries is the first question?

I ask about any crop before you grow the crop farmers are really great at growing things And they really don't do well at selling things or tracking how much it costs you to grow it and how much you made off of selling it so just That's 1 of the key places.

I started is what why where am I going to sell these things or am I going to consume?

Them myself I guess that that from that perspective How many pounds of berries do I want to eat for the year?

Generally Blueberry Blueberry bush in full production should produce 30 pounds per plant.

So just to give you an idea how many pounds you might have.

Okay, so this is production, 2012, 2014, 2016 by region.

And I just wanna point out the growth that we've seen since 2012, and this is in metric tons.

We're getting close to that billion pound mark as a global industry.

North America is growing, South America is growing, and then the Asia, you can see Asia-Pacific region is also growing in their production.

So just to give you an idea, South America is counter season to us, so when you see fresh blueberries in the store now, they're coming in from Chile, Peru, and Mexico, sometimes Southern California.

So to give you some perspective, an acre of blueberries can produce, we expected to produce 20, 000 pounds the acre.

Blackberries are only going to produce 10 thousand pounds the acre and Raspberries are in the 12, 000 pound to the acre range and strawberries are like 40, 000 But that's a high density high intensive planting situation Also in California that runs like 8, I think it's like 18 months before they stop.

So they don't, they're not a seasonal down there.

So they continue producing and they rip them out.

So to give you a perspective, I guess blackberries would be half of that But then blackberries are planted 4 feet apart So a lot farther apart so a cane on a blackberry Really spreads out just to show you the increases some of this is probably You probably may not care about this at all.

United States production has gone up by 40, was it 40 million metric tons?

Oregon and Washington now lead the country in production.

Interestingly enough also Oregon is the highest yield per acre anywhere in the world.

We have naturally acidic soils in the mid-5 range.

We have temperate climate in the wintertime.

So the East Coast used to be the big production.

New Jersey and Michigan used to be the big production in the country.

They're slowly dying out and attrition is happening there and the west coast is increasing although.

We're slowing Plantings so in the west coast in Washington.

They're mainly grown Up north of Seattle on the west side and they're growing in the tri-cities area Yakima The eastern side there They're spreading out a little bit to Walla Walla, and then there's some in Hermiston.

And in Oregon, it's all pretty much well Hermiston, but it's all the Willamette Valley.

So there's about 12, 000 acres of production in the Willamette Valley, maybe 14.

Process, so this is what's being produced.

Fresh frozen in the United States is about half and half.

Chile, you can see, is mainly fresh production.

They have 0 tariffs going into most countries, and we have like a we when I first opened up, South Korea to fresh blueberry imports it was a 45% tariff, so It's difficult Mexico is all fresh 1 of the things to be aware of is the strawberry, we used to have 25, 000 acres of strawberries in Oregon, and when fresh strawberries became production in California, started ramping up, the frozen strawberry market out of Oregon moved as a secondary market for the off or seconds out of the fresh market.

So watch countries like this if you are planning on investing or building up some frozen production in, say, the US.

It becomes a secondary market out of these other countries who are shipping globally that frozen market So you might have organic fresh coming out of there and then pretty soon a few years later as they build production Not all of your production can go fresh So you always have like 25% of it be sorted out and that'll go frozen and then they're starting to sell that into other countries as frozen products.

Nothing wrong with that, it just happens.

So in a matter of like 2 or 3 years our Oregon strawberry frozen production industry went from 25, 000 to 2, 500 and it's never recovered.

Here's where people eat fruit North America eat blueberries Specifically North America Europe and Asia Pacific not really that surprising This is The way people are going a lot of new plantings are they're not even in the soil.

They're in substrate production This is organic blueberries out of Mexico.

You can be organic with substrate production, you can be organic from day 1 because your soil is what matters on that.

So you can start out organic pretty much from day 1 whereas in the?

Soil out in the field we have to go through a three-year calendar year certification process to reach organic certification You're in production faster You can also get higher yields per acre faster with this because you can cram bushes together And when they're young and then expand as they grow as that bush grows you would you could space things out, so it's quite interesting It's actually Something I would try if you're in a climate that is not a natural Climate for blueberries.

I would really think about this it's not that expensive and especially especially you could put this in greenhouses like this and Actually grow them without a greenhouse Part of the year you could move it Sometimes people are moving these crops in and out of here, too And there's now specialized containers for doing this so it's something to think about in the home garden space if you don't have great soil for blueberry production Another big key thing is the harvesting labor is costly too especially here in the u.s.

So this is a mechanic mechanized assistant, and I'll show you actually machine harvesting later And how I'm thinking about it But this is you basically stand on this platform and beat the bushes with a little rod and they fall off on the trays that are down here you pull them out put them here and then this thing drives through the field so it's assisting smaller growers with hand harvesting.

So this is Us and Canada kind of some strengths and weaknesses You can see genetics volume leader domestic market proximity mechanized Harvesting and packing our weaknesses are Variable in quality so we have weather events that happen on the east coast or west coast There's a gap in if people are looking for opportunities for careers.

There's a huge gap in agriculture right now of skilled Agriculture professionals that are that have still have a decent lifespan, so it's a great opportunity across the board Old plantings a lot of old varieties so you 2 of You mentioned you have 25 year old plants those are older genetics, so that's that's what's happening here in the u.s.

But people are taking out older plantings and reviving them with newer varieties Okay so the next section we'll talk about development and how we how I have gone about it.

Again this is a little larger scale but we'll we'll pull it out the relevant parts.

This is a development budget for blueberries on a per acre basis.

This is what it costs to plant an acre of blueberries.

Land preparation, we like to prepare the land the year before if at all possible.

So in the fall, we like to do some deep subsoiling.

By deep, I mean just breaking down through the hard pan to get below that with a rip, usually a subsoiler, a large 1.

We like to put the minerals on the year before so that the soils have a time to intake those and adjust, help that process get started.

A lot of times you are having to acidify the soil, so you'd be using something like a sulfur to do that.

And I'm not making any recommendations today, You would need to work with your local extension agent to kind of get those details.

Bed forming, making a bed, we can talk about ways to do that.

So this is basically the budget, what it costs to put in the full acre.

There are other expenses which we'll get to, but it's about $17, 000.

So 1 of the things you got to realize when you're making a commitment to growing blueberries or most of these berries is that They're long life Crops so We've got blueberries in the Northwest that are 75 years old and as long as you're pruning them and maintaining them they will last pretty much forever blackberries are more of about a 15 year lifespan and raspberries are more in the neighborhood of a 5 to 7 year lifespan And strawberries are about 3 years depending on how you manage those I've taken them to 4 years, but production significantly drops off Okay, this is what the Yields and revenue look like and the cost of goods for harvesting and then the operational costs look like.

And so you can see the yields on the top here climbing up.

And I'm sorry, I don't have a, I apologize, I don't have a pointer here.

But yields increase, it takes about, Your first yield comes in year 3 We get steady state production or we Kind of level out here in year 9, and this is an actual budget of a farm project I'm working on right now, so we're actually going to be developing for my current client about a hundred acres next This fall so this is a budget for a farm that we're working on purchasing right now About 85% of your berries will actually make grade So we drop down to what's actually packed and sold here, and then these are frozen commercial Prices at the scale we're at we start these conventional And then we transition right here in in the third year so or the second year we start transition to organic We don't start them Organic from the very beginning you can and I've done it, but it's a much slower start the big difference is the Iroquois mycorrhizae is what blueberries require it it surrounds the root and feeds nutrients and water into the plant.

You go test your farm before planting blueberries, you won't have any.

You go test your farm after planting blueberries, you'll have some, and then several years later, you'll have more.

In the early growth period of just planting the blueberry, it's really hard for that plant to take up organic fertilizer It takes quite a bit of time for organic fertilizer to work through the soil Biological systems and then become available to that blueberry plant so we start them conventional with conventional fertilizer that being said we we use a lot of like humic acid and stuff and organic stuff with the conventional fertilizer, but we just get a much better start.

So the difference is We can actually hit this first harvest sometimes We're hitting 8, 000 pounds the acre by starting that way if we do it organically sometimes We're only at 3, 000 pounds so the big key is looking at a return on investment which Most of you probably don't care about so if you're starting from Scratch we'll get into that from the home garden.

We'll talk about how to do that as well, and then just Pay attention to what you're spending every year Just to operate those blueberries you're you're planting something that has to it's a high input high output if you're not putting into it a lot You're not going to get anything out of it this blueberries are really There's a real correlation between how much you take care of them and how much you get how much they produce You can't really get you can't get commercial organic plants.

You're buying a conventional plant anyway You're also wanting to buy virus free and we'll get into that in a little bit, but it's really important not to go by your neighbor's cutting.

Blackberries naturally tip root, and it's a great way to get new starts from blackberries, although they're not virus-free.

Blueberries don't recover from a lot of early mistakes.

There's a field, we bought a farm, and there's a 20, 25 acre field on this farm that they overcropped in year 2 or year 3, year 2 and 3, they overcropped it, and it has never gone above 10, 000 pounds a acre.

So if you go through the development you go through the farming cost you look you can look at this You're going to be negative cash flow all the way to year 6 So you're 6 is when you start to make some money on this And then you haven't repaid back your investment without this isn't without like the cost of money or anything like that So you haven't repaid your investment until year 11 100 acres does have an income a net income per year of 815, 000 roughly So if you were to go do that, now the 1 thing this hasn't factored into it is the equipment.

There's about another half million dollars worth of equipment that's needed to run this 100 acre farm.

So when we start looking at a farm that budget you just saw is actually for this farm.

So first we try to get the farm boundaries.

There's a really great website It's called per acre value by granular and you can look at the soil types on there So here's a soil map for this same farm.

I don't know soils all over the Country so you would really have to take this kind of figure out what the soils are like in your area.

At a high level you're looking for sandy or light loamy soils.

Now we do have some soils in the hills here and the foothills that are red clay soil and they're weird.

There are very few places that I've seen this happen, but they will drain, they will rain hard, and the next day they're dry enough to go out and do work on them.

Organic Blueberry Production - Part 2

Really like to see a really balanced mineral platform for the blueberries and really high calcium, but not calcium That's increasing soil ph.

So we are putting down gypsum gypsum is also 1 of the probably 1 of the key components to combating root diseases in berry crops organically.

So ink disease is what they call, oh, what's, Phytophthora root rot in chestnuts.

And there was a guy that applied huge amounts of gypsum, we're talking like several tons a year, and really, and cured his trees, well cured is a, I guess, relative term, but the effects of the phytophthora root rot went away after several years of these heavy gypsum applications.

So I do recommend using gypsum, it works really well.

You really need to, all of these things need to really be in With a soil sample and working with an extension person or an agronomist.

That's the this large farming operation we had 3 full-time agronomists on our team in-house.

So we were doing things and building ways of managing things that we wanted to keep to ourselves.

And rather than having a chemical company push, even though it's organic, They're still pushing this bugs in the jug idea and I Just be aware.

It's kind of like your own body health You can eat the latest you know special whatever or you can eat a wide variety of close to natural and as close to unprocessed.

So I don't usually go after fancy, we got pitched all kinds of stuff because we were at this kind of a scale, so you're getting pitched all kinds of things.

And this guy showed up 1 day, it was a funny side story, and was pitching us things, and he was a real good sales person, as they typically are.

And at the end of it, I said, well, why is it so special?

It's still fish, chicken manure, and something else.

And he's like, it's because I mixed them together depending upon the moon cycles.

And it had this huge long story about when the moon was at this, he dumped this into the vat and the moon was at this stage, it was this vat.

It's like, okay, I'm gonna use the same ingredients and I'm just going to do it when it works out.

But anyway, in our soils in our area, we added 300 pounds of gypsum Every second year to those beds per acre and it's just on that bed So it's actually a much higher rate because we apply 300 to the acre But it's applied on the bed, which is a small portion of that acre so Sorry moving on to irrigation systems So this is a drip irrigation manifold going in here.

Each of these tubes will connect to up comes out of the at the end of the row.

We put on a T valve, A t2 screen filters, and then it goes into the double line drip that's on each side of the plant So at on the like on a small scale you could use 2 inch oval hose and bury that I still would recommend Using solid drip.

I wouldn't use t-tape because it just disintegrates after a while and gophers can eat it pretty easily too, so It was really important for us to treat everyone on the farm The same and We'll get a little talk a little more about this, but as we were developing the cruise Just because you're on a farm doesn't mean you shouldn't have safety equipment, so just FYI Just because it's a farm doesn't mean you should do things that are sketchy so or if you're too cheap don't plant crops that really require the care they need just you need to things need to be done right and well no matter what you do but anyway yeah that's an irrigation line That's that trencher that you saw earlier.

We're now coming along and putting in the irrigation.

That's a gasketed pipe, so each pipe sits in and then is shoved in with a lubricant and there's a gasket that keeps it sealed.

So that was the farm crew, and we bought them all vests and helmets and ran it like a construction site, actually, so everybody was safe.

And we actually never had any injuries on that kind of a thing.

We had a guy crawling between rows that got a seed, weed seed in his ear that went way in, had to get extracted, and we got a guy stung in the eye a few times, like stung in the face, but not big injuries like that.

So here's how your blueberries show up in a gallon pot.

On the left side, you see all the root system here where it's not root-bound, they're not Circling yet, but those roots are are really Entrenched in their little pot there right so on the right side is what I like to see it when it goes in the ground We just do that by hand So this is a process Another thing is do not plant these too deep It's the biggest mistake and so we had when we're planning we had we had 485 people planting this the other this large farm, and We had team leaders we split We Designed our teams to have a crew leader and in a leader of those leaders And people working in groups all around the farm because they were doing different things all around the farm at the same time So some were still doing bed forming some were doing sawdust and compost this was a huge operation that planted 700 acres in 1 year We were planning over 45 acres a day just actually planting the plants in the ground but there's all that process that goes up to that so I Say this because it's the most important job on the farm, and it's the 1 that people Every time wanted to they didn't want to do it they felt like it was unimportant to stand there and watch a crew of 20 people and work with them and because you'll get to plan, you'll get in a rhythm and you're doing this and then pretty soon they're not doing it and pretty soon it looks like that.

And you'll see these things in your field later on and they never come out that it's like it just never Recovers after that so it's 1 of the most important jobs on the farm And it took a lot of education to help people understand it Like that person that's supervising that person the people doing the planting was actually the most important person Not the guy driving the tractor not the guy installing the irrigation We and we paid those people more money, too We pay there was a bonus to be that that kind of that crew supervisor that was on the planting crew so this is laying out this is 2 crews of people laying out the blueberries come in bins like this all stacked in the bin is about 300 plants per bin and you'll go out through the field.

So once the beds are formed, the sawdust and compost and minerals are put down, they're formed again.

We then put the fabric on, it's then, or we actually lay the drip tube.

On that large planting, we had a lady drive 3, 000 miles.

She wore 4 sets of tires off of a quad in the summer, pulling the drip tube out.

Because we put a spreader bar on the back of the four-wheeler, connect the tubing to it, and then You drive down the row 500 feet, turn around and come and do it again.

But yeah, so the drip tube gets laid down, the fabric then gets closed.

We then use a small propane torch to burn the hole in the fabric.

And we just, we cut, I cut like, I think they were eighth inch metal rings with a handle on it.

And then we put a chain on the end of that handle so that the chain fell into this hole When you were at the next hole you needed to burn so that was 3 feet apart, so it automatically you just Burned the hole Burned the hole and that chain was following down and falling into the center of that hole that you just burned.

So that's how we did this on a large scale.

We were trying to design a kind of like a branding iron that would stay hot that you could roll on the back of a tractor, but we just never figured that out.

We also built a mechanical blueberry planter, and it worked pretty well.

But when you think about the cost savings to mechanically plant and the fact that that plant's going to be there for 50 years to 75 years, it's nothing.

So we went back to hand planting because it was was the most accurate way to do it even though the mechanical was pretty good So innovation can you have to balance it oh?

Yeah, we plan in the fall I actually like spring planting the best but The fall planting here in Oregon before it rains too hard is works out the best for us This is so this is just planted you can see that the this tip here is just bending over.

We pre-irrigate prior to 2 days before planting and let it dry out a little bit so there's the bed underneath there is moist and then we irrigate like 8 to 12 hours.

We really soak that bed afterwards because remember you're going from this Soil media in the nursery to soil and they're not the same The porousness is completely different so you can check your soil And your soil is saturated right here just soaking wet and that plant can be dry So you have to look at the plant also when you plant we reach in there as we're planting and pull the tube right up Next to the to the blueberry and in 2 or 3 years later.

It's fine that it's outside in fact that's probably the drip tube right under here, if you see that.

This is how we were leveling the beds in between after planting so we take a leaf blower and blow all the debris off of the actually just mounted on the back of a four-wheeler and the guy just drives along and just does this and blows off each 1 of these beds so it blows off any of the debris on there and then we take this three-in-one cultivator and we made these wings for the side of it this is a rubber piece here that goes right up against the fabric to try to level that out because you when you're doing this you're hope you're only doing this once I guess it just kind of goes, it just speaks to the level of care that we're doing, taking when we're planting these things new.

That's a newly planted field Before the grass cover crop was put in the center, and this is the field the next spring So got grass yeah, that's perennial ryegrass.

We use tall fescue too And Clover works okay, but clover will tend to creep up on the fabric so on a small scale I'd probably I wouldn't I'd be okay using like an alps like clover a low-growing dwarf dwarf.

It's Dutch I guess That works, too Just another photo of a planting This 1 is conventional So there's a herbicide right next to the fabric for the first year and then it was transitioned to organic and then so that grass would grow all the way across there.

We take the blossoms off the first 2 years to allow the plant to build up its root system and its top, the architecture of the structure of the bush and the top so This was just put in here to remind me to take those off to tell you that You can I mean if it's a home garden situation you could leave like 1 little cluster?

That's probably not going to hurt anything.

Okay, so the drip is 95% Efficient too, so you're getting all the water to the to the plant where the overhead is only about 75% so there's a water savings I Didn't like the water on the fruit because it lowers the fruit quality Also, if your water source is surface, and you're spraying it on top of the fruit you have the chance of pathogens so food safety is a huge problem for surface water it just creates this damp wet environment and There's a so with spotted wing drosophila we changed our pruning practices to open up the center of the blueberry to get more airflow in there and to not create this cool, damp environment where they love it.

In fact, when it gets over 90 degrees, we stop spraying because they can't lay eggs.

They're still there flying around, but they'll die, and they don't lay eggs.

It has to be down cooler than that for them to reproduce.

So overhead irrigation creates this damp, moist environment.

Well, and then you can get too hot and boil your blueberries too, but but anyway Those were the main reasons that I didn't want it changes fruit quality You know if it's if you've got a 25 year old planting It's the only thing there you can convert to drip But it that it also requires different pumping system different filtration if you don't have any of that stuff then Try to irrigate first thing in the morning when they'll dry out during the heat of the day don't irrigate at night I know everybody says irrigate at night because you have less evaporation, but on fruit crops.

It's it's just bad They also tried micro Sprinklers which is a variation in the middle kind of between overhead impact and drip and people it Plants actually grew a little better, but the fruit quality is a problem, so Yeah, yeah, and so some areas can't grow grass like California They're they're always they were very envious of our nice grass up here in Oregon because we we grow grass But California it was it they had to use a cultivator because there was nothing would grow, but these really rank broadleaves like nasty weeds and so they would use a Coalivator and then they would do a winter cover crop when they got any moisture, but then California They're also thinking about any moisture that goes in the ground Do you really want that going into a cover crop or do you want that going into the ground that could then come back to your blueberries.

They don't even do bird control because there's no birds out there.

It wasn't a fun place to grow blueberries, but They grow there And you were having to change the natural environment the pH down there is like 8.4 And it's just crazy pH, and it won't adjust and it was just It's not a natural environment for blueberries But you can do it and you can make a lot of money at it because it's not in the main season that the Northwest is in so Anything else I want to plant that birds want to eat I want to eat too well except for mulberries, but yeah Yeah, yeah, raspberry blackberry.

I will say they like blackberry and raspberries more I think than they do blueberries And spotted wing drosophila likes cherries are the worst and then I think it's red raspberry and then blackberry and then blueberry for like attractiveness just a second yes Sulfur Yeah, and it's a very specific like formula to the soil and what the soils out and its buffering capacity we had a farm that 1 farm you were looking at there with the we just saw the picture of that form we didn't realize this but they had just put on 6 ton of Ag lime to plant garlic 2 years prior Yeah, and that soil on that farm helps to be really good soil.

It's like 08:10 feet deep there So there is it's just this really great wealth of buffering capacity on top of that the well in August the wells pH was like 9 There was something volcanic ash or something down in that well.

And of course when I'm testing this thing to buy this farm from this client in the winter time, none of that shows up.

Yeah, and what else didn't show up was the silt, silt particle in that pump.

So you take a well test and no sand shows up, but there's this fine silt particle that was also this volcanic little ash particle that would come up in the water, right?

We turn on the irrigation system and we can't get anything out of the, we start plugging stuff up immediately and we've already got 40 acres in the ground.

So immediately I get 1 of those hot trucks out of California or whatever, and got a sand, a cyclone sand separator on a truck.

Like another farmer was supposed to have it for his thing, they said, we'll ship it to you.

So like overnight, we were getting these trucks showing up.

We had welders in place, we changed the whole configuration of the irrigation system, and we had the sand separator and a sand media filtration system.

And that got us off the ground, but that was about a week's worth, and it rained.

Organic Blueberry Production - Part 3

Some of you wanted to talk about cane berries.

I was assuming that was blackberries and raspberries or was there a preference, okay?

I'm going to start back at the beginning even though and just kind of walk you through a little bit like the differences okay, so Blackberries can grow in a lot heavier soil and don't need necessarily the tiling.

So if I had a place and I couldn't afford tiling or well drained, they can't sit in standing water, but they can handle a whole lot rougher conditions than blueberries or raspberries.

I would say raspberries are the most finicky, then blueberries and then blackberries and then strawberries.

They got their own challenges, but anyway.

So the plants are a lot cheaper because you're buying little rooted plugs.

They might be a couple dollars if you're buying smaller scale, but they're typically cheaper and you can do bare root.

They'll come in rooted plugs from tissue culture or they'll come in bare root sticks.

Raspberries typically, or a lot of those are bare root sticks.

And blackberries, you can get rooted tips.

So the tip of your blackberry, and this is how you can expand your blackberry production in the future, is buy good varieties, start with that, and then let the tip, the runner, touch the ground all winter long.

And in the spring, that thing will root, and you can cut the cane off Tie it up, and that's your fruit, and then you have your new plant down there, and that's how you can expand on Blackberries You don't have the tree guards the staking we we can plant blackberries for about 12, 000 an acre So there's a lot of costs in here that would be a lot less expensive I just moved I just went back to this just to give you some ideas and then we'll talk about the economics of blackberries too.

So there are about 12, 000 to put them in so a little bit cheaper.

You want higher pH so you want a pH of 6.8.

A lot of calcium in the soil is really good because of the fruit quality They'll actually be firmer fruit which will resist pests and disease a little bit better It's not a cure-all and it's not a reason to not do the Not provide them with you know the all the care, but they really like that you also have tend to have a better Fruit the flavor tends to be better so 6.8.

I mean still they're going to grow really excellent on blueberry sandy loam soil too.

So I, you know, put them on as good a soil as you can get.

We talked earlier about primocane versus fluorocane.

For areas that are extremely cold I would grow the primocane varieties because they won't die, The cane won't desiccate in the wintertime.

They're really sensitive to that You can also mulch them over the winter the the crown and the roots and the around the root balls that So you can bolster those over the winter to keep those from drying out and dying that way Arkansas University of Arkansas is the breed leading breeder on primocane Blackberries and there are some terrible ones and there's some newer ones, and I'm not up to date on the new varieties that taste better But they started out with a series called primark And I got up to primark 45 and that was starting to taste better, but a lot of those were really not Didn't not taste good, and we'll talk about how to grow those there's specific ways you grow those to actually get better production and more fruit So We'll talk about that when we get back to the production side.

This would be the development of cane berries production in the Northwest we would expect 10, 000 pounds of the acre on Blackberries 8 to 10000 pounds on a mature year.

They will start fruiting in their, so their second growing season would be a baby crop or a half crop, and then the third growing season should be a full crop, and that would be every year production.

So there's 2 types of growing blackberry, trailing blackberry, so not primocane varieties, floor cane varieties.

You can grow them in an every year production system where you tie up the canes every year that come up, or you can do an alternate year where you Cut all the canes to the ground the next year they grow canes But no fruit and you tie those up as they grow and it's a lot easier to do And in the second year they would grow so you would you would probably plan half your field To be if you're doing an alternate year bearing you would do half your year fruiting field, half your field would be growing canes for the following season so you would only fruit half of your canes.

I don't necessarily recommend that, the way I recommend doing it is actually a third option which is to they grow up, you fruit, you're just tying the new canes And you're wrapping them as they come up through just wrap them on the canes that are there and you can do that for 2 or 3 years, then you mow the whole thing out and Let them come up and you would take portions of your field out of production, let them get new canes up, you'd mow everything out, get new canes up, it's a lot cheaper on the labor side.

So when we go to this pruning cost on blueberries, see here this in a mature field is $500, pruning cost can cost, Pruning and tying up of the canes can cost as much as $1, 200 in blackberries.

But you don't have the weed control costs.

Your Inputs are probably at least half of that.

You can grow cane berries each year for about, this is about 5, 000, you can do it for about 3, 000.

So it's quite a bit cheaper to grow them.

Yields are gonna be half maturity, and it depends on the market you're selling into commercially organic blackberries right now are between 65 and 80 cents a pound depending upon What well it depends upon what Not turkey, but what Chile does so the frozen organic blackberries are really?

Reliant on what the other countries are doing, like Turkey and Chile and their production, so our pricing can go up and down.

In fact, there's no elasticity in the blackberry market.

It's so bad that if you have 1, 000 pounds more than what the market is buying, the price just goes, there's no price.

Like it all goes down for everything you sold You're better off to dump extra production and blackberries than you are to take it to market or make Vertical integrate or make preserves or do something with it that think I highly recommend that for small operations Fresh production in the summer freeze it sell it all winter frozen and preserved It's a really great revenue stream in the winter time for smaller scale farmer farmers in fact you could have a winter CSA.

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Series

Intensive: Organic Blueberry Production

Organic Blueberry Production - Part 1

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Parts

Organic Blueberry Production - Part 1

47m

Organic Blueberry Production - Part 2

25m

Organic Blueberry Production - Part 3

33m

Organic Blueberry Production - Part 4

47m

Organic Blueberry Production - Part 5

43m

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