Rainbow Orchards

Rainbow Orchards – Organic Apple and Squash Farm

Interview with Fred Ford

I spoke with two people who worked for the farm at the Saratoga Farmer’s Market on Saturday 1/15/11.  The owner was not available, but I did get some interesting feedback from them.  They own approximately 80 acres of apple trees and 20 acres of squash.  They don’t weed the orchards, just mow.   They manually weed the squash once or twice during the growing season, but it is difficult due to the sprawling nature of the plant.  Also the squash is quite prodigious and seems to grow fine with minimal weeding.  When asked about the value of an automatic weeding machine, they thought it would help some, but not enough to justify the cost.  Their main labor concern is thinning the fruit trees – in fact they throw out approximately 75% of the fruit early in the growing season so the remaining fruit grow large and sweet.

One person had an interesting take:  she said “people have been farming for 1000s of years and we’ve never needed machines before…”  She went on, but in effect, her point was that there is a spiritual side to manually working the fields that would be lost with a machine – it is good for both the people and the food.

Another worker was also skeptical about how well the machine would perform, having been burned in the past with “new technology” that actually ended up harming more than helping and reducing productivity.

Hypothesis test:  Are farmers interested in an autonomous weeding system?

Result:  Not likely for small farmers/orchards.

It may be obvious, but tree farms do not weed their fields.  Squash also seems to thrive with minimal weeding. As found with Paloutzian Farms, it could be a harder sell to the small farmer due to the lack of resources, and the performance of the system would need to be proven before they decide to invest.  Also, preference for human involvement in the farming process could be another barrier to market to the small farmer.