Apple Farming Step-by-Step Guide🍎🍏

Hey, welcome to Tamu Tamu, Tanzania. The first commercial apple farm and apple tree nursery in East Africa. This is our apple farming management video. Enjoy it. We are producing and selling well adapted apple trees for African countries around the equator. Karibu, welcome. We are coming to apple production, investing in agriculture, investing in apple farming. The first step is considering your location and it has several factors, your altitude. We have published enough about that when it comes to choosing the right varieties, when it comes to should it be hilly, it should not be waterlogged, that's bad. And something that we encourage farmers from the beginning to consider is the sales. Many farmers are struggling with sales. So which means if you plan your farm, consider already where will I sell? How far am I away from the market? What will be the gross margin that I'm making? Can I transport it to the market myself or is a trader involved? All everything else will now follow in this management video where we try to keep it not too scientific, more really hands on. How do I plant? How do I take care of my soil? The basics of management of apple farming. Please enjoy it. Okay, the next step is planting and soil preparation. For conventional apple farming the spacing is 3 by 3 which equals to about 450 trees per acre, 1100 per hectare. For conventional farming, for all corporate players and industrialized apple farming it's up to 3500 trees per hectare. So what is in the first step important is know your soil. We here in the southern highlands of Tanzania, we have quite an acidic soil which is on our farm before we came was 5.55, even sometimes 4.5 and as a rule of thumb, we are giving farmers, you can always do it better when knowing your soil, but as a rule of thumb we are adding 3 buckets of manure and 3 kg of lime. But yeah, as a general advice as a farmer, it is worth to do a soil testing and know your pH. There is enough information online actually how to raise your pH with lime because apples like quite neutral between 6.5 to 7. The hole that we have digged is 1 meter times 1 meter times 1 meter deep and we will add now the mixtures together and then we plant the tree. So now as we are done with the soil preparation, we will now dig a small hole where we then plant the tree and it is important that the point of grafting is above the soil and it is important that the label is above the soil as well. You want to see actually what kind of tree variety you have later at some point and we will lose it a bit so that the tree will not struggle when it is growing. And another point which we want to mention is that every of our trees has a label with a QR code, grafting date, rootstock and so on for traceability. You want to be able to see later at some point which tree you have planted and we recommend anyway to make yourself a map where you write down which variety you have planted where, but you can always mix up things. So yeah, good to make a map and leave the label above. Now we are adding mulch, hay around the tree for several reasons. It helps to maintain the moisture content, irrigation is very expensive. Then secondly, it can compost, additional nutrients and thirdly, when you experience very heavy rain, you do not want to experience a heavy nutrient out washing. So it already helps to maintain the nutrients. So now you can see how we take it piece by piece and distribute it like that. We have one square meter placed around the tree. In most scenarios, many apple trees in the tropics may not give you the branches. So you need to actually force the branches to come out. And how do you do that? You do that by the process called notching. And what is notching? Notching is just cutting above the bud in order the food that comes from the root system to concentrate in this bud. At the end, it forces it to sprout. Of course, there comes a branch. So these are the buds. As you can see, these buds are already opening. So that means we can do the notching. These buds are already opening, we can do the notching. That is what we call notching. You just need to cut above the bud, the cambium. You don't cut the wood, cut the cambium only. Cut the cambium only, no wood. Don't cut the wood. So when you are doing notching, what do you want? What should you know? What you should know is one, we only allow our branches to start from 60 centimeters and above. Anything below the 60 centimeters, we do the pruning, we remove them. So as you see, my 60 centimeters would be here. That is the 60 centimeters. That means our branches should start from here. And it is very important also to consider when your buds are not dormant, when your tree, don't do notching when your tree is dormant. Do notching when your tree is just getting out of dormancy so that the food concentrates in forcing this bud to sprout the branch. Step number five in apple production, so in management of your trees, it's about training of your branches. This is a very important aspect in apple culture. So training of branches is by you training your branches in a manner of a 90 degrees angle or even lower than that. And all your branches should come in a central leader system whereby it helps the tree to get the balance, proper balance, because you have branches in different ways. So when you are training your branches, don't do what I did. I made a mistake here and the branch actually it's off, it's already broken. So when you find that the branch is hard, please do the massage. So how do you do the massage? You hold your tree, you massage it. This is a good care for your tree. The tree also feels love. Now it's soft. So what next? You bend it. So don't do what I did here. Also what is the importance of training these branches? You are actually reducing what we call apico dormancy in apples. That can be broken by the cold temperatures of at least seven degrees Celsius for more than 600 hours, 400 hours. So in the tropics, we actually need to do the training of our branches. But also it makes the tree to be well balanced in a manner that all the branches, there is no overload of branches in your tree. So this is how we do it. An important management step in apple farming is thinning. And it's probably one of the management steps which is the most hardest for a farmer to follow because you're reducing the number of trees, the number of apples on your tree in each cluster. But you rather have 200 really nice big apples than 350 or 400 small ones. In terms of economics and marketability and the price you get for your product per tree or per acre, it makes far more sense. So we really encourage farmers to do thinning. If there's a cluster with five apples and they're very tiny, remove three. You just want to have maximum two in each cluster. The step number seven is about pruning. Pruning is very important in apple production. One, it helps you to balance your tree. Two, it helps the tree to get enough sunlight. It is very important that the tree gets enough sunlight because when the time of fruit set, you need the coloring. And the sunlight is the one that helps the fruit to obtain its color. Otherwise, you can have your fruit and they remain green because of the bushy tree. And also pruning is also important in a manner that you get more fruits than branches, more than branches. You leave your tree unpruned, you'll have several branches but lesser fruits. So this is very important in pruning. This is very important in apple production. Now we are doing something which is called defoliation, removing the leaves from the tree, which is one of the management steps, which is the hardest for us to actually train farmers on. Because from this tree, we will remove now all the leaves, yeah, which is foreign for many farmers, if it is Nigeria, DRC, Tanzania, Kenya. You have to remember that these trees come originally from a climatic area where it is at least once a year very cold, winter-like. So the tree would automatically lose all its leaves in the winter time. If we are here in Tanzania, if we are in an area which is above 2,000 meters and you experience real cold, then the tree will lose its leaves automatically. In our area here, where we are at about 1,800 meters altitude, we are removing the leaves by hand, yeah. Sounds a bit funny for many farmers, but it will double your production. I repeat, it will double your production. So if you are in an area where the tree is not losing its leaves automatically, you remove them by hand. Here in Tanzania, we are doing it mostly around the last week of May. But in general, if you are planting now in DRC, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda, so in hot areas, after about one month, after the harvest, you dictate the tree. Now you go into dormancy, now you are sleeping, and then you remove by hand all the leaves. So in general, apples need far lesser water, 30 to 40 percent, than other tree crops, which have to be constantly irrigated because they are going into dormancy. But it is to be said, for the first two years, it's a young plant, you need to constantly water. In Tanzania, we do in May, June, July, do not irrigate the early maturing varieties. And with them, we start irrigation then in August, September, October, November, till the rain starts. And the late maturing varieties, we start irrigating in September, which is a lot like a big cost saver for farmers, so actually, you do not have to run irrigation generators and so on constantly. We have installed a drip line, which we are quite satisfied with.