Regenerative Cherry Success in Oregon

Hey, everybody. We're here at Orchard View Farms. My name is Kevin Tully and I'm the agronomy program manager at aea. This is Jim Dunlop and Mike Omeg. Maybe you guys could introduce yourselves.

My name is Jim. I'm an agronomist here at aea. I've been working for AEA for about eight years and prior to that I was working with Mike at his orchards for about five years.

And this is Mike and. Hi everybody. I'm Mike and I farm this orchard here, Orchard View Farms. I'm in charge of all the orchard operations here. We farm about 3,600 acres of cherries here in north central Oregon. And excited to talk to you today about how we're using AEA and the approach that we take to grow beautiful cherries like these you see right here.

Yeah. So, Mike, we're in a absolutely incredible block of cherries here. Can you tell us a little bit about how you would quantify and qualify, you know, the yield and quality of this particular block of cherries?

Yeah. This is a young orchard. These are, these are what I still consider baby and immature trees. They aren't mature at all. This is their fifth year and you can see around us here that they have a, they have a really large crop of fruit of really beautiful, really beautiful cherries here. So one thing that I would say is when we saw how many cherries were on these trees during the spring after bloom and we had crop set, I think we were all excited about the opportunity we had with having a really huge crop here. But it also brings a lot of challenges, especially on young trees like this, to get, get them to be able to still grow. The canopy like you see here with these new shoot extensions and set branches of cherries like what we're looking at here, that's really impressive and it takes a lot of management to be able to do that. And I'm really pleased with the success that, that we had here. Let's, let's take a quick look by May. Kevin.

Yeah.

You know a branch like a branch like this where it has really beautiful cherries, you know, like this piece of fruit right here, that's a big, really gorgeous cherry that is going to do well in the marketplace. And every single cherry along here is, is on par with that, so that's hard for us to do.

Yeah. Can you speak a little more to, you know, this, this size and quality, how that's affected your ability to sell these into the marketplace?

Well, people want to buy big, beautiful cherries like this right like nobody wants to buy junk cherries.

Yeah.

You know, they're small and don't taste good. And so our, our goal here at Orchard View is we want to have, we want to grow delicious cherries. And we want people, when they see our cherries in the store to be just instantly attracted to them where their fruit are shiny and big. And it's not until they get home when they're going to have the opportunity to taste and say, wow, that was delicious, and then come back and buy fruit again here. And so our, our, our mission here in the orchard side of our business is we want to grow delicious cherries that people can enjoy every day.

Yeah, for sure. You have to see yourself in them in order to want to buy.

That's right. When we look here, you know, we see our reflection. But.

So you talked a little bit about, when you have a crop this big, there's a lot of management considerations that go into filling it. And that's obviously a factor. If you see this many cherries out here, a big concern actually. You know, how are you going to size them and fill them and can you speak to any specifics around how you were able to accomplish that?

Well, we do a few different management activities that help us to give the trees what they need to size cherries like this. I'm very impressed with the tree's ability. If you give the tree what it needs to be able to size fruit like this.

Yeah.

And you know, we. This is a, this is a good cherry growing ground. This is nice deep soil, good soil. So this isn't some rocky outcropping somewhere. This, this has soil that can really carry a crop like this. So there's some things that we can't control, like our soil type that are going in our favor here. But I think the biggest thing we did is we identified early that these trees were going to need to have additional, additional monitoring through SAP analysis that we do here. So we specifically monitor this block. And then we went on right from the get go when we saw how many fruit were set on these trees. When they're little tiny peas.

Right.

We went right on the get go with an intensive foliar program following SAP analysis using AEA products and others. And then we also followed that and have continued with an intensive fertigation program where we inject nutrients in through the irrigation system. And those have been the primary ways that we've been able to get this crop to size and look like what it does today.

Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. One of the things we've been doing with you as we've been doing custom blends. So we've been taking AEA products based on your SAP analysis in particular, and making a blend of products specifically for your farm. And just want to hear a little bit about how that's been, how that might have affected this crop and how that process has been for you.

Yeah, we started working with blending a couple years ago, and I can say that the process has been really good successful thanks to all the work that's been done on the AEA agronomy side, but then also on the warehouse side where they're actually making these blends. I mean, that's a. That's a tough deal. And one of the things I like most about blending is, you know, we used to have, when we did SAP analysis, and we say, hey, what do these trees need? We used to have a pretty long list of products that we'd have to put on. And so that's a lot of logistics of getting those products here. It's a. A lot of logistics on the spray team that's applying these products either foliarly or on our injection team that's applying them through the irrigation system. Either way, the longer the list, the more chances there are to make mistakes, the more product it is to handle and that sort of thing. So what I really like about the blending is we can get our SAP analysis, have the AEA team look at it, have myself look at it. Then we have a short conversation and we say, this is what we want to do to our blend. We want to change it this way or that or keep it the same. Then we know how much we need for this, for this block and others. We just order that product in and it arrives. And I don't have to worry about the mixing. I don't have to worry about the order. It just comes ready to rock and roll. And I can say now that we have a few years under our belt that in my opinion, the impact of the blend, the blended products, is greater than if we were to put them into these, into our mix individually. I really think that it has some kind of synergistic impact. I don't know the, you know, chemical science or the agronomic way to explain that scientifically, but my eyes out here looking and touching the trees, we definitely see something more than just if we were to slot those in as individual products.

Yeah, that's very cool. Real quick to bring Jim in. Jim, you've been working in cherries for a long time with Mike. For a long time. You've seen a lot of crops. What does this crop seem like to you?

Oh, my gosh. So I've seen Mike do something like this on a smaller scale on a trial block, but now he's done over hundreds of acres. The same kind of thing where there's huge fruit with really big firmness, like 400 firmness, which is really great, high brix numbers and really quality fruit. And I think the other thing, too, Mike, is you've been able to hang it longer, haven't you, and pick it when you're ready to pick it?

Yeah, yeah. Fruit in the. In the cherry business, we say it has legs, which means that the window to harvest is lengthened. It can. It can be there, hang there longer. And that's invaluable when you have as complex a harvest process as what we have, where we, you know, have almost a thousand people out there working to harvest these crops. Sometimes the plan doesn't work out like it does on paper, that you get to it in time. So that helps a lot.

One, one last question, a light question for the consumers out there. When you go to the grocery store and you're picking cherries, what do you. What do you look for? What do you. What should you look for in your cherries when you're picking cherries out at the grocery store?

So you want to have a piece of fruit that looks shiny and fresh, that doesn't look dull, it doesn't look tired. You want it to look almost like it's wet, reflecting back at you.

Gotcha.

And then look for a big, beautiful stem. Look for a big, nice, beautiful stem on that cherry. Cherries. Cherries that are of high quality and that have a lot of nutrition, that are going to nourish you as a person when you're buying cherries and not just taste good, but actually provide your body with the nourishment you're looking for. Those cherries have the ability to last longer in the shelf than cherries that may not have as much nutritional value. So then the other thing is, I really believe this. Taste those cherries. If they taste good, go back and buy that cherries from the same company again and show your support. And then the nutrition you get out of that is going to be a win, too.

You can also just look on the box for Orchard View Farms.

Thank you.

Awesome.

Yeah, that's a good win, too.

Thanks, Mike.

Thank you.

Thanks, everybody.