17 June 2020
 Categories: Business, Blog

A well-run orchard can be quite a profitable enterprise. If you're interested in buying and running an orchard of your own, you may find it useful to read this advice.

Use irrigation equipment

One of the smartest decisions you can make when you start running an orchard is to use irrigation equipment to water your fruit trees. The reason for this is as follows: if for example, you have a very large orchard that contains several different types of fruit trees, and each variety of tree requires a different amount of watering, then it will be hard for you to manually hydrate all of these trees. If you try to do this, you might forget to water one or more of the trees or accidentally overwater a variety that does not require much hydration. In either case, the trees might die.

The loss of trees in your orchard could result in you missing out on the profits you would have earned, had you been able to harvest and sell the fruit from those trees. Furthermore, it could result in you having to pay for the trees' removal and then having to buy and plant new trees. The expense of this could leave you in debt, or with far less profit than you anticipated.

Conversely, if you use irrigation equipment which delivers precise amounts of water to each tree at the correct intervals, there will be no risk of you over or under-watering the trees and enduring the financial fallout associated with making these mistakes. Furthermore, this equipment will take all of the mental and physical effort out of hydrating your trees and allow you to direct your energy towards other important parts of your orchard business. Talk to a local irrigation service to get started.

Treat the harvesting period with the seriousness it deserves

It is important to thoroughly prepare for the harvesting period, during which you will pluck the fruit from your orchard's trees, gather it into sacks and then proceed to prepare it for sale. You must, for example, hire helpers; even if your orchard is small, it could still take you a long time to pick all of the fruit by yourself. Doing this would likely result in much of the ripe fruit falling to the ground before you have a chance to pick it, in which case a lot of it may end up so bruised that you cannot sell it.

Additionally, harvesting fruit from trees is physically demanding work which, if you do too much of it, could result in you straining some muscles or simply tiring yourself out to the point where you cannot perform your other business-related duties. By hiring people to help you, you can protect your physical wellbeing and ensure that you succeed in harvesting (and then hopefully selling) every last piece of fruit that grows in your orchard.

If you decide to hire helpers, you must also ensure that they have safe orchard ladders to stand on (as these specially-designed items can make fruit-picking safer) and that they have fruit-picking tools to allow them to pluck fruit from the uppermost branches without having to get off the ladder and climb the tree (which would be very risky).