Happy Farm Friday! 🍎☀️ This week, Rockit™ apple grower Byron Borton gives us a look into the hands-on process of thinning apple trees and shows us that even the removed apples are valuable, providing a natural nutrient-dense compost to the orchard soil.

Video Transcript:

“Hey guys, Byron Borton here. Welcome to another Farm Friday. Today we are doing some late season thinning so we are in August which is about the latest we would go through a block to thin the block. Basically if you look at this tree there are too many pieces of fruit on the tree. So what we do is we come in and we hand thin. On apple trees if you don’t thin appropriately and you have too much of a crop on one tree the apples don’t finish they may not get the right color, they may not get the size, and basically they’re not a great piece of fruit. Look at a limb like this. Way too many apples. We’re going to take some off. These apples drop right on the ground for now. It’s kind of a natural compost. They’re mainly starch and water and they just go back into the soil, help the trees in the long run. And it’s a complicated very hands-on task. There is no automation for this task that we are aware of at this point. So the good thinners can come in here, we give them instructions, and they thin these things out something like that. But they’re coming through on each limb and making a determination what needs to come, what needs to go.”