News from California
Have bees, will travel…
One of the world’s largest managed pollination events has just got underway in California, as the state’s almond orchards burst into flower.
If you’re an almond aficionado – partial to the odd macaroon, a lover of marzipan, or prefer almond milk to the dairy mainstay – it’s almost certain that your pastry, snack or drink was made with Californian almonds.
The world relies on California for its almonds: 80% of global production is concentrated in the Golden State. Stretching from north to south, the 1.3 million acres of almond orchards provide nearly $6 bn for the state’s economy every year.
All that acreage needs reliable pollination: two hives for every acre of orchard, to be precise. Too valuable to leave to chance from wild bee and insect populations, every February beekeepers from across the United States descend on California, bringing with them hives for hire and utilising more than half of the US’s total commercial honeybee population.
Nor do they stay in California. Once they completed pollination of the almond orchards, the same bees begin a pollination circuit that includes the apples of Washington state, Floridian tangerines, and the famed blueberries of North Carolina.
It’s this fanatical focus on getting the most from every almond acre – the surety of pollination, precision irrigation, and more and more effective harvesting, to reduce mechanical losses – that has helped contribute to an incredible growth in productivity since the first orchards were planted in the early 20th century.
Back then, a grower would be happy to see a little over 200 lbs/acre (225 kg/ha). Today, any one of California’s 7,600 almond growers can expect at least ten times the yield, and as much as twenty times more – 4,000 lbs/acre (4.5 t/ha).
Nevertheless, despite this huge increase in output and land-use efficiency – without the improvement in yield, today’s crop would require 13 million acres of orchard, 13 per cent of the state’s land area – almond cultivation still has its detractors.
That’s why FertiGlobal was delighted to take part in the Almond Board of California’s annual conference. Held in Sacramento in December, Rooted Together looked at how the state’s almond industry is adapting to meet growers’ needs and consumers’ expectations.
From a grower perspective, a stewardship program seeks to encourage them to think longer term when growing trees, while continued investment in research and outreach is designed to further improve productivity while reducing the ‘production footprint’. Meanwhile consumer campaigns seek to increase awareness of almonds’ health benefits while setting the record straight on issues such as water use, on-farm biodiversity, and carbon sequestration.
At FertiGlobal, we’re especially interested in supporting growers to make more informed choices about their approach to key agronomic issues such as nutrient management and pest and disease control. Our ‘bread and butter’ is helping farmers to improve their productivity through increases in yield, better quality crops, and more efficient use of resources. At the same time, we strive to develop unique solutions that observe regulatory parameters and ever more stringent environmental obligations.
It’s this attitude, comprising grower resilience and sustainability with our own use of sound science, that underpins our Total Crop Management philosophy. And it’s one that’s meets the needs of California’s almond growers head-on: using an understanding of plant biochemistry, physiology and nutrition to develop solutions built on a wide-ranging holistic platform.
Not for us the siloed route of looking to solve each individual problem with an individual solution. Instead, we have Technologies like EnNuVi, with its unique bioactivating mechanism that can help trigger and control crops’ defence and stress mitigation mechanisms – helping the plant to help itself, rather than allowing it to reach the stage where chemical intervention becomes necessary.
For FertiGlobal, that’s the real crux of the matter: we’re not advocating for a world without any conventional, chemical crop protection products. Instead, we’re looking to create early, nutrition- and biochemical-based interventions that can reduce, or remove, the NEED for chemical use.
Perhaps it really is as simple as Less is More: less chemical, more sustainable.