High packout recovery levels are the key to growing a profitable pip or summerfruit crop. Most fruit packers set their rates for processing the crop you send them on the gross weight that comes in the shed door. If you include the cost of harvesting as well as the packing cost the rough rule of thumb is that for every 15% reduction in packout, the cost of taking the fruit from the tree to the ship's side increases by a dollar per carton. Making sure that the fruit you send to the packhouse is of highpackout potential is by far the easiest way of reducing your production costs, To put this saving into perspective with other orchard cost centres, it would be necessary to eliminate two-thirds to three-quarters of the spray bill, or do no hand thinningat all, or use no fuel at all and do no pruning either. Clearly, none of these other cost reduction options are possible and it would be foolish to try and reduce any of these because over the last 10 to 15 years they have been slimmed down to the point where there is a strong argument in favour of lifting expenditure in some of these areas to lift fruit value.
展开▼
