Every year the Chelsea Flower Show catapults horticulture into the public sphere with its kaleidoscopic displays of colour and impeccable craftmanship. This year was no exception, and it was poignant that Matthew Butler and Josh Parker’s ‘Garden of the Future’ won a gold medal in the event’s ‘Small Show Gardens’ category. Featuring climate-resilient crops and resilient planting, the ‘Garden of the Future’ was, said the designers, “set in the near future, in a scenario where climate threats are increasing. Countries all over the world, including the UK, are experiencing higher-than-average temperatures, more extreme weather, periods of drought, and sudden, heavy rainfall”.
And it is precisely these scenarios that the UK’s fruit sector is preparing for, as discussed at length during the climate-change-themed annual NextGen conference earlier this spring. Dr Alistair Nesbitt, CEO of Vinescapes, said: “We’ve got to adopt practices that counter climate change or build resilience into production systems, and we’ve got to protect the landscape, regenerate it, and focus very much more than we ever have before on ecosystems”.
The efforts that growers are proactively making to enhance the biodiversity, and lower the carbon footprint of, their farms, shows us that this necessary resilience is already being built into our fruit production systems. And, whilst the diminishing number of crop protection actives continues to put pressure on growers, as does the UK’s uncertain regulatory framework, there finally seem be more viable alternatives available to our sector. In this issue of The Fruit Grower alone, for example, multiple new strategies for controlling codling moth have been discussed. These include: the use of hail nets, that also happen to reduce codling moth populations, as the team at Adrian Scripps discovered; the application of beneficial nematodes; the deployment of pheromone devices, including the new RapidMOTH supplied by Agrii; and the deployment this season of the biocontrol product Madex Top in all 236ha of orchards operated by Adrian Scripps Ltd.
As Russell Graydon, Group Farms Manager for Adrian Scripps Ltd noted, using Madex Top fits well into the image that modern fruit growing wants to project – caring for the environment as well as producing quality fruit. Indeed, fruit growers are already successfully achieving both aims, proactively building resilient cropping systems to create the ‘Fruit Farms of the Future’.
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