Happy Farm Friday! ☀️🍎
Today, grower Byron Borton is here to share how we use a hydro-cooling system with recycled water to protect fruit from Central Washington’s harsh sun and hot summer afternoons.
Our growers are constantly evolving and looking for the most sustainable ways to bring you the healthy, sweet, juicy Joyfully Grown™ fruit you know and love!
Video Transcript:
“Hey guys, Byron Borton here. Welcome to another Farm Friday! Happy to have you guys on the farm today. So another part of the trellis, why we go so high, we’re never going to grow the tree up to the full 17 feet. But we hang our hydro-cooling system up there so when the weather hits 90 degrees we turn on a system called hydro-cooling that basically lowers the ambient temperature throughout the farm and it’s supposed to help with sunburn. Sunburn is the number one cullage in all of apples. It’s not birds, it’s not other pests, it is literally just sunburn. And so one of the things we do to mitigate that is we turn on hydro-cooling which creates a mist and kind of a microclimate to mitigate that intense sun, particularly on the apples at the top of the tree. People don’t know this but most of your good fruit is at the top of the tree. Strong fruit, big fruit, good color but a lot of it gets wrecked from sunburn. So that’s another point to think about when we’re out here.”
