Building a Better Fruit Tree

Researchers at the USDA’s Appalachian Fruit Research Lab working with what they call tree architecture and how to build the best fruit tree.

One of those researchers Doug Raines said there are some basic steps to build a better tree.

“Isolating the different genes that cause different branch angles and trees, numbers of branches where the branches are located on the trees.”

That could lead to a fruit tree that takes up less space and need less pruning.

Raines does say that pruning still would need to be done by hand.

“Labor’s expensive, labor is getting to be in shorter supply because it’s just hard to find people that want to do that kind of work anymore and if they can find trees that pretty much trim themselves or come close to trimming themselves that would limit the amount of labor that would go into them.”

Raines said they are working on developing a robot that could do the pruning but there’s still a lot of work to do on that.