"Up to a few years ago, most of our customers were only interested in the single branched trees, however, after a lot of recent advances in production technology, there is increasing interest in 'knip tree' apples, two year old trees, and grafted pear varieties which have been grafted to other pear varieties instead of the rootstock," said Jovanovic.
"One example of the aforementioned new technique is to graft a Williams pear onto a Kaludjerka tree, with a Quince MA or BA-29 rootstock. The result is that the grower is able to achieve a 95% success rate of first class fresh pears. When the pear is grafted directly to the rootstock, it produces 50/50 results; with 50% being first class and the remaining 50% being second class."
Apples being grown on big canopy trees is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Although still prevalent, the large trees are being replaced by slender spindles on weak-growing rootstock. With the new format, the number of trees in an orchard can increase from 500 to 3,000-4,000 trees per hectare, which also increases production, from 28 tons to 60-70 tons per hectare.
In a world where labour is becoming more and more difficult to find, the switch to smaller apple trees, despite the increase in production, decreases labour costs by half (ie. from 1000 hours per hectare to 500).
"In our company every year we get EU and Russian phyto and quality inspectors and they are overwhelmed with our quality. In addition, we have started negotiating with new markets such as Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and we continue to see increasing demand from these countries who are currently in agricultural development."
For more information:
Aleksandar Jovanovic
Aleksandar International
Tel: +381628644725
Email: info@aleksandarinternational.com
www.aleksandarinternational.com