—by Kate Prengaman
Would you rather hire an experienced pruner or a rookie?
It may seem counterintuitive, but growers on the “Sharpening Skills” panel at the Southern Interior Horticultural Conference in Penticton, British Columbia, in February spoke about training pruners, and they agreed that experience isn’t always an asset.
“I’d rather train somebody brand new than train someone who has been doing it for 20 years and break them of bad habits,” said Neal Vander Helm, orchard manager for Laughing Coyote Orchards, which farms about 50 acres of apples and 20 acres of cherries in Summerland. “Lots of guys have been pruning for 20 years, but they’ve been pruning old Macs.”
His fellow panelists, Andre Scheepers of KSD Farms in Summerland, Ravi Dhaliwal of Orchard Hill Farms in Osoyoos, and moderator Madeleine van Roechoudt of Dorenberg Orchards in Lake Country, agreed that success comes from workers who understand specifically how you want your blocks pruned. Through the course of the discussion, they shared their varied approaches to training pruners to fit the needs of their orchards.
Scheepers, who in a past career trained military pilots, said the first step in successful training is to establish a common language for the task ahead.
“I used to teach guys to fly helicopters. … We don’t speak English in aviation, we speak aviation,” he said. “Do they know what a weak leader is, or a strong leader? Do they know what you are talking about? If not, you might as well be speaking gibberish.”
He scoured the internet for pruning videos that align with his approach and built a collection that shows the different techniques he wants employed in different blocks. Then, as a refresher, he’ll text the right video — the approach he wants in tall spindle Ambrosia or the very different task of taming old trees — to workers ahead of each block.
That attention to detail matters. “Sixty percent of my expenses is labor, and 80 percent of my labor is pruning,” Scheepers said.
Dealing with communication barriers can be a challenge, Vander Helm agreed. Last year, he used big sheets of cardboard and markers to draw the tree structures and mark out desired cuts. “It cut through the communication barriers for the new people and enables people to hand the marker around and ask questions,” he said.
While he has been accused of trying to explain too much of the science underlying pruning, he prioritizes ensuring all his workers understand what a fruiting bud looks like and the space each tree has for apples.
“We lease a lot of properties with all kinds of tree spacings,” he said. “I try to get them to think about how far the trees are apart; and if they are 3 feet apart, they need more apples.”
Dhaliwal said that he likes to start as simple as possible.
“I want them to think about efficiency,” he said. “I tell them they are only allowed five cuts. That’s when they start to think.”
The five-cut rule forces pruners to start with big cuts before they get bogged down by detail pruning.
“By the second or third day, they stop counting (cuts) because they have a feel for it,” he said. “After I start them simple, I come back and analyze if the technique is working; do we need more cuts or less cuts?”
He doesn’t teach workers to count buds — that will slow them down too much — but he uses bud counts himself to see if the simple rules he gave his workers actually deliver the result he wants or if he needs to adjust.
“The last thing you want to see is a worker doing 10 trees an hour,” he said. “If you follow some basic rules, you can get good quality fruit without perfect pruning.”
Similarly, van Roechoudt said she always prunes a few trees first, following the rules she intends to give her crew, to see if she needs to adjust anything. She also assigns a crew leader who is experienced on her farm’s approach and can check everyone else’s work.
Having rules works well enough until you hit a vigorous spot in a block and need to adjust. Dhaliwal and Scheepers both teach workers to skip and flag any “problem trees” so they can come back and prune it together as a learning experience. Dhaliwal added he’d like to see more resources available that train workers on efficiently pruning problematic trees, rather than focusing on perfection.
It’s important to teach the concept that it takes several years to prune a problem tree into a productive one, van Roechoudt said.
“You can’t make it perfect in one year, or you won’t have a crop,” she said.
She also encouraged growers to be consistent with workers and have the same person who gave pruning instructions also evaluate their work. An audience member from the Jamaican consulate said that’s often a concern he hears from guest workers — that the crew leader says one thing and the grower says another, and then the grower’s wife says to prune a different way.
That’s the crux of the issue and why grower-led training is so important, Vander Helm said.
“We’ve got 50 people in here, and we could all take the same tree, and we’d prune it differently,” he said. •
Leave A Comment